Yes! That's maintenance and repair.
Every day, whenever I have free time (which is quite a lot), I spend it caring for and repairing it.
People often ask me what I do every day.
I guess a lot of people are wondering how I make a living because I'm just hanging out and going to the gym.
To be honest, I feel a little more at ease when people see me that way, so I'm fine with it being the way it is!
And getting back to the point, I still have to do the dishes or mend things almost every day and think, "Ahhh, I wish I hadn't done that."
Today, the silver-handled ivory spoon broke, causing the silver and ivory to separate, so I decided to take the plunge and clean the silver part and try to re-glue it properly.
When cleaning silver, if it is very dirty, I sometimes boil it in water with a little dish soap. I need to polish it at the end, but this method usually allows me to clean the small areas that are hard to reach with a cloth.
So, this time too, I put water and detergent in a pot and brought it to a boil...
Something that looked like poop came out from the place where the spoon was stuck.
It came out soft, but when I cooled it a little it became as hard as a rock.
What the heck is this!!!
The boiling water was dry, so I changed it three times, but the second and third times, a lot of poop came out. From the spoon. Yes, from the spoon.
Poop from inside the spoon.
Every time, I discover materials I've never seen before, and old methods that no longer exist.
Apparently, in the past, there was a kind of glue made by mixing powdered shells with natural resin, which would dissolve when heated.
Hmm, it does look like it. Come to think of it, it looks like some kind of powder paste.
I still don't really understand what natural resin is, but I tried to remove as much as I could.
I'm sure there are many people who own this type of antique spoon, but the silver limb is not hollow, but has something stuck inside. It's best if the ivory part doesn't break and come off, but if it does come off, I recommend cleaning up the opening a bit and gluing it back on without thinking too much about it.
By the way, I have a chair at home that turns into stairs when you turn it over, but this chair is also starting to break, and when I tried to fix it...
Did you know that old wood was incredibly hard? It was almost as hard as iron?
Whenever I repair something like this, I'm always amazed at the materials and construction they use. And they're really intricate.
If you like antiques, repairs and alterations go hand in hand, so even if the end result isn't perfect, these items were originally used in the past and repaired over and over again, so everyone should try to repair them as much as they can.
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