Kintsugi Pot Repair

While I wait for the pot to cure, I figured I'd post some pictures of some other repaired work I've completed. Here is a repaired Sara Rayner piece that had a small chip in it. The gold is very matches the clay very nicely.

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Chips are my all time preferred repairs because they're fully functional.
 
One nice thing about broken pots are, that at raffles, they don't get picked. But I pick them. This chipped pot was repaired with silver. A much larger chip which requires a natural composite of flour, clay, wood dust, and lacquer creates a material that is very dense, very hard and very strong. This is the same pot I showed earlier with a design, but I stripped the design off and regilded it with silver.

I'm going to just leave it as silver.
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Not bonsai related but this is one of my more labor intensive repairs. Lots of missing bits and pieces on this yixing zisha tea pot. It get's renewed life. Quite proud of this one. It's for my sister's boyfriend. This teapot used to belong to his dad and he's no longer with us. This is a nice sentimental piece.

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I was able to fill in the very obvious voids and also had the time to apply the finishing as well. The pot is now ready for refinement polishing to make the surface very smooth to receive the gold powder. Will likely have to go through 2-3 cycles to get this to look flush. But so far so good!
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This may look wet but it is past its tacky phase and is now unreactive to the touch. The foot is very sturdy and the pot feels very solid. Can't want to further refine this pot.
 
The composite and lacquer have now cured to a very hard consistency. I am now testing the gold against the glaze to see how it fits, I haven't applied the silver; yet, I don't think I have to, I like the gold. Here are some of the test areas I applied the gold to.

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The composite and lacquer have now cured to a very hard consistency. I am now testing the gold against the glaze to see how it fits, I haven't applied the silver; yet, I don't think I have to, I like the gold. Here are some of the test areas I applied the gold to.

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So beautiful this art form to me. I don't think I'd like silver though, but I've never seen it used.
 
I have a few pots set aside once I overcome the timidity to begin.
 
This pot is finally complete. Very fortunate this pot broke with the holes still intact with the larger super structure of the overall pot. That way, anchoring the tree down into the pot will still be strong and viable vs having to worry about the structural integrity.

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Makes me want to break a pot and send it to you… I wish I had done a better job on the one I did several years ago. The joinery turned out well but the glue and technique (or lack thereof) made the glue bulge out of the cracks a bit. This is beautiful. I always get excited when I see a new post on this thre…
 
Makes me want to break a pot and send it to you… I wish I had done a better job on the one I did several years ago. The joinery turned out well but the glue and technique (or lack thereof) made the glue bulge out of the cracks a bit. This is beautiful. I always get excited when I see a new post on this thre…
Epoxy is reversible ;). And that made my heart smile, thank you for the kind words!
 
I posted this before, this is a Mike Flannagan pot from Jim Doyle. He quite likes this pot and it broke in such a way that it's easily repairable. I looked this potter up and it seems his signature is these interesting designs. I figured I should probably capture this in some way so I plan to outline the missing design and add them to the gilding as an overpaint. Here's the before shots with the processed fill-in composite.

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To fill in these small dimples, I just applied a very thick coat of finishing lacquer so I won't have to add any additional filling material.

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Note the excessive amount of overflow added to ensure a flush surface transition.
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I sanded this down with a lump of charcoal to ensure a flush transition.
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The entire surface is now primed for gilding.
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The lacquer is now set enough to gild.
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A simple breath of condensation to check it. Condensation means the surface is now dry enough to be tacky vs wet, tacky will take on powder and will provide a very clean and flat surface vs wet which will take on a gritty look.
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Metal of choice for gilding will be silver.

More to come!
 
The lacquer took the silver powder well. Surface is smooth and at this point I would let the lacquer and order cure longer; however, I want to complete the design to tie the repair to the pot.

I'll add in the missing design and gold it shortly after it cures some more.

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I have some tin, metal which I think will go fairly well with this idea. Tin is duller than silver in color, but it is more sparkly. This is what I envision the end product to look like.

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A month later, the lacquer in the pot is now cured to the point I can add the gold dusting finish.

Painted the red urushi on the joined site.
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Other side of the pot with a more dynamic break.
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Applying the gold dust by "pushing" the dust onto the site vs applying it directly.
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Finished product.
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What was learned at the last step? The joinery site could have been buffed a bit more. Apparently if you look close enough the gold looks grainy when it can look smoother. Even though the finger can feel a smooth joint, it's still very rough. I will probably have to build multiple layers of sabi-urushi and sand it back and reapply multiple times and then sand with possible a piece of 600+, probably 1000 grit sand paper. This was a good practice run, going to put this piece away back into the muro for another month before taking it out and displaying it.
My wife does pottery and this is how she repairs her work and my bonsai pots. Nice work.
 
I've come across some repairs that may need a bit more reinforcement. Generally speaking, these repairs are fairly strong but for the everyday wear and tear, it doesn't hurt to help pieces along where they could use the extra help. I've not had to apply this type of reinforcement to a bonsai pot, but that's not to say I won't in the future.

This is a cup I'm repairing for a coworker who dropped one of his favorite cups when working in his workshop. It dropped on hard pavement and dropped in such a way that broke the ear and chipped a piece of the interior part of the cup. So having repaired it and put it back together. I've gotten it to a point where the cup is ready to receive additional reinforcement.

He told me he doesn't hold the ear because the shape of the cup lends itself so well to just holding it on the bottom. However, I figured it's always better to reinforce now that I'm having repairs come back where the handle is weak.
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Note the missing bits where blowout happens and the infill has to come in to bridge those gaps.
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If you look carefully, you'll notice the scratch marks. This cup isn't a really great candidate for kintsugi repair especially the way I polish my work. This cup will scratch just by merely touching it. I've realized this iisn't really a glaze, it's like hydro dipping this design onto the cup.
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To add additionall support, I've whipped up some mugi-urushi (the kind where you adhere things together) so that I can apply string to create a brace of sorts.
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I've tightly wound the string around the site and applied quite a substantial amount of pressure to hold everything together. The tacky-ness of the urushi with the strong creates a lot of resistance allowing me to pull the string quite taught.
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I went back and applied more mugi-urushi to the first site and repeat the same approach to the other site. The bottom will be left alone. There's no way to attach any reinforcement to that. It doesn't matter anyway because the two other parts have more chances of tencil failure as the bottom has a compressive force vs the top. I went over the entire area with mugi-urushi and now it's currently curing in the muro.
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This will eventually cure and be hard. I'll come back through with filling material to fill the missing areas and then come back and sand the areas until it's flat. Which I will then reapply a second layer of sabi-urushi as filling material to ensure a flat surface. This will likely take a week or so to cure in the muro at 85% humidity and 75 degree F temps.
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More to come! Learning something new with each project!
 
At my house we are less worried about aesthetics and more concerned with function. JB Weld 2part epoxy holds stronger than the pot itself. The gold dust is quite fantastic, however. Thanks for the view into your methods (even though I, as a caveman, will not mimic them)
 
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