Hello all! Love the site - great resource. Situation: I recently purchased a very rough late edo era tsuka for parts and to disassemble for research purposes. The menuki are not high quality, they look like cast brass. In fact the whole tsuka was pretty poor quality when it was made. I have been doing some cleaning to remove the surface grime but maintain the ageing & patina etc. but have reached a dilemma... Normally i would not consider polishing something like this but they are so badly dirty and blackened and have some kind of reddish film on them that the design is not really recognizable. So my question is given the circumstances would it be better to polish the menuki using flitz, prelim or similar method and have a clean yet recognizable design, or leave them in their current state and have old crappy looking menuki?
According to me, it depends
According to me, it depends on your research. I'm more the kind of guy who believes in "don't mess with patina". If you really need to seed the design without destroying anything, you may consider x-raying.
Francois
François Marquis