BACKCraftsmen of Nepal
They have only two burins, one lozenge shaped and with a heavy set-up,
and one flat. The heel is covered with a ball of engraver's mastic as
a handle.
They have so few saw-blades that they don't keep them in the workshop
but in a different room of the house; they go and pick them one at a time
when needed.
As
a soldering surface they use normal bricks.Sometimes they use wood, when it
catches fire, they blow the flame out and go on soldering till the piece of
wood becomes convex and charred all over.
To borax and to lay the paillons they use a hen's feather cut in a
suitable way. It works better than
the usual brush.
They employ pure silver, not alloyed unless they have to cast in sand;
in that case they add 2 or 3 percent copper.
The craftsmen of Patan, accustomed to narrow spaces, must be very tidy.
They never clutter the worktable; they keep on it only the tools needed for
the job at hand and they put them back prior to taking out the ones needed
for the next task.
Unlike we westerners, who have a specific
tool for every job, they must manage with a few tools and adapt them to the
needed task. In fact they become kind of virtuosos of the not-so-good tools.
They don't have micro motors, flexible shafts and burrs: they pierce
with bow drills; they carve and remove chips of metal with chisels and hammer,
the piece held in engraver's mastic.
Only very light raising, or just doming is performed in Jugendra's workshop,
they don't need many hammer shapes. The most used hammers have a four-cornered
truncated pyramidal shape, with a rectangular or square face, a little convex,
and a cross peen on the other end. The eye is round and small, and the handle
is made from a branch. The steel of hammers and stakes is not hard and their
surface must often be planished with an abrasive stone.
For
big soldering jobs they use a Primus type gasoline blowtorch.
For small soldering they use a kerosene lamp, made with a small glass jar
through the lid of which a cotton wick is passed, in conjunction with a blowpipe.
Most of the times they use a hand made gasoline torch: they put some gasoline,
taken from the motorbike's tank, in a glass jar on the lid of which are two
plastic pipes, one takes air from an aquarium compressor, the other carries
the gasoline/air vapors to the torch.
The tank of the bike is regularly very low on petrol; at times they have to pour back petrol into the tank to get to the gasoline station.
They don't use sandpaper; usually they finish up with the scraper
or a sharp cornered blade, usually pulling instead of pushing the tool.
When they need tracing paper, they dampen with kerosene a white sheet of paper making it semi-transparent: pencil, felt pens and ink leave a clean mark on it.
A single shaft polisher is made up fixing a tapered spindle on an old chinese motor. The polishing wheel can be replaced with a self-made grinding wheel.
Often their files are hand made, they soften a rod of steel, make indentations on it with a wide chisel and harden it vertically in water.
They
don't have rolling mills, for small projects they hammer down the ingots
either to wire or to sheet. When they need lengths of wire they go to a professional roll miller. He works with very old rolling mills on a pig iron scaffold, with electrical engine and drive belts.
He is a virtuoso; he can roll a ribbon the required width and thickness at the same time. He can pick the wire out of the grooves, turn it 90° and insert it in the next smaller pair of grooves and so on for four passages simultaneously.
His wife anneals the wire wound into a coil with a gasoline blowtorch in a basin full of sand.
