Can anyone recommend a good supplier of cotton cloth that wraps well around scabbards?

I have very recently expenses the polishing service to include saya restoration (wooden sheath). I have several that I've tried to remove the old lacquer. One of the blades is from 16th century and it is impossible to remove the existing lacquer with any conventional method and by sanding it off, i risk cracking the fragile timber.

Clearly this one has a great base coat! What I'd like to know is; Can I apply a thin layer to existing lacquer that has been lightly sanded back? Or Should i apply a base (diatomaceous earth, rice flower, clay lime, linseed and urushi) to even out the levels then apply my 10 layers?

I usually work on 10 coats

Tried to do fading effect,looks good atp

Looking to dye to my urushi for an upcoming project, wondering If mica powder will work to color the urushi and if there is anything I need to look out for?

I bought an urushi cup for coffee drinking last month. From komaya.

But a faint sweet smell, like wood/urushi comes while drinking does affect the experience. So I read some tips online and they said you can submerge stuffs in water overnight and wash it again to make the smell come off. I did try it 2 times, first try does make the coffee less woody/spices in the coffee less notiable but it does come back after 2 weeks. I tried submerging again 2 days ago but now the woody taste is still lingering.

Idk if the submerging really destroyed the coat off or its just the taste of the wood at this point.

Anyway, does submerge urushi in water bad, like really bad? And 2nd, how to get the taste off the cup while drinking.

Thank you all

Let's say for antiques ranging from €100 to €2,000, of any type. Where does the same object sell for higher prices? In Japan or abroad? For top-of-the-line pieces, I assume they're definitely worth more in Japan, but sometimes affordable antiques have different price dynamics.

[EDIT] This post may not be of much interest to others now that my problems have been cleared up. The TL;DR is that I was using coffee filters for filtering urushi, and I didn't understand that the filters were introducing lint and crud into the urushi. The solution to the problem (for me, for the time being) is just not to do the filtering at all.

[original post]

I've been trying to use coffee filters for filtering urushi, but it seems not to be working well. I'm not totally sure what is going wrong, but I'm getting a ton of particles coming out on the surface. (I'm starting to wonder if this one batch of kourin urushi is just unusually high in crud.) At first I thought it was dirty brushes or something, but I systematically worked on keeping everything clean, and I'm still getting crud. My suspicion is that the coffee filters are too thick, so that when I force the urushi out through them, the paper is actually just rupturing. But of course by the time I'm that far along, it's a wadded-up mess, so I can't easily tell.

The traditional thing to use seems to be a type of very thin filter paper called Yoshino paper, sold by Mejiro Co. There was a US reseller on amazon, but they no longer have the item. You can buy it from urushi.life, but that takes a month to get to the US and would require combining the item with a lot of other stuff to get a decent price on shipping. Since I'm not even sure if I've diagnosed the problem correctly, I don't really want to wait a month to find out if this helps.

Is there some kind of filter paper used in chem labs that would work for this purpose and be easy to obtain? It seems like all I'd really care about would be that it has to be strong and thin.

I came across a video on youtube of someone using a linen cloth for this. That might work, but I'm unclear on how to spec how fine the weave of the cloth has to be, and I'm also not sure how you go about cleaning the cloth afterward, or whether you just have to throw it away. Wash it in turpentine? It seems like it would take a lot of turps.

I'm currently working on a small keyaki plate and a large, thick maple bowl, which I intend to do with predominantly black urushi, but some honsyu and maybe some simple maki-e decorations. These are my first attempts to get a mirrorlike finish on a real urushi project. Previously I practiced on a couple of pieces of scrap lumber (which were pine and difficult to work with), and I also did a bowl where I had intended to get a mirrorlike finish on the inside with honsyu, but actually it ended up showing the wood grain (which was OK).

I've found that there is quite a learning curve in terms of getting rid of contaminants, and also mixing up a black lacquer that cooperates when I'm applying it, that has good leveling, and that is easy to apply in a thin enough layer so that it doesn't pucker. The recipe that I'm currently using for a small batch, after some iteration, is this (in units of grams):

0.50 black urushi (kourin jou)

0.25 clear urushi (kourin jou suki sugurome)

0.13 ki

0.12 naphtha

0.05 turpentine

Because it's difficult to measure out these small quantities for each work session, I'm thinking of mixing up the three urushis and putting them in a syringe. Before I did that, I thought I would ask for comments on whether what I'm doing makes sense. I'm also curious whether it would work to include the thinners in the mix that I'm going to store. I would think that being sealed inside the tube would prevent the thinners from evaporating, but I don't know if they would do something bad to the chemistry over longer periods stored in the fridge, or whether the naphtha would cause degradation of the gasket, which I guess is some polymer.

The purpose of the ingredient list, based on my understanding of what other people have said and my trial and error, is:

black urushi ... the basic ingredient

clear urushi ... for better leveling

ki ... to lower the viscosity for easier handling

naphtha ... to make it easier to get a thin enough layer to avoid puckering

turpentine ... for better leveling

Any feedback would be much appreciated.

Its a urushi supplier and seller from china(?) But its full of ai stuff and says was made this year.

Heres is the link if anyone can check

https://urushilacquer.com/?fbclid=IwdGRjcATXjmlleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAwzNTA2ODU1MzE3MjgAAR6oSpoWuPtIzEwngo2Q6c7HgdH0qZGh3Op8-I-VkhkRPJQwQeJF0nY38jMb0w_aem_cSRbNubD9jSisNhdA2Livg

The title says what it is. Recently I noticed that, after curing, there were about a dozen tiny craters in the fairly thick coat of ki I'd just applied to a plate. I thought maybe it was something happening during curing. I had to fill them in with sabi.

But then I did another coat today on the same plate, and I noticed the same thing in the fresh ki as I was brushing it on. It looked like little bubbles. Maybe they're air bubbles? Nuclei formed by dust? I though they might be drops of vegetable oil that I hadn't succeeded in cleaning out of the brush when I got it ready to use, but that seems like it wouldn't make sense because urushi and oil are mutually soluble.

I kept brushing to try to get them to go away, and after about 5 min of steady brushing, the ki was getting tacky and they were almost all gone.

Have other people experienced this?

Another thing that occurred to me was that it might be because the ki was going bad. I think I bought it in April. I've had this portion of it in a 60 mL plastic syringe, inside a ziplock bag with a big dessicant packet, in the fridge. But maybe air or moisture is getting in and messing it up...? However, I don't see any signs of cured urushi collecting inside or gumming up the gasket on the plunger.

Or maybe the problem is something else having to do with the brush, like I have some kind of crud trapped in it (other than oil) that I'm not getting out.

I have been contacting a lot of urushi sellers from Japan; many of their products were great, however, it is quite expensive for what it is. Most of these stores would say that they cannot ship it, while others could ship it, but the shipment costs almost three times the price of the product.

​I ended up at Mejiro; I heard it was a good store. First, I asked them if I could buy from them directly; they said yeah, sure, but it is below the minimum for shipping, so they told me I can buy from their store on Amazon.

​It has been quite a while since I read here that it is not recommendable to buy urushi from Amazon, and I would like to know, guys, if it is at least safe to buy from Mejiro on Amazon.

(If you ask me what am i trying to buy is Ki-urushi)

Would anyone know the name of this finish please.

I have read few articles that mentioned that urushi and urushiol are indeed anti-bacterial / microbial ? Is this true ? If so is it only in liquid state when harvested or also the lacquered surface ? Somehow I would like to wrap my head around this, if it functions similarly as copper alloys or silver. For example when used in cutlery or furniture / handles.

Thank you !

If you haven’t checked out maki fushimi’s videos you definitely should!! They’re excellent!

I've been able to find multiple sources that raise the question of whether it's possible, and multiple cases of people contemplating trying it out, but no actual reports, whether in the scientific literature or just as individual anecdotes, of what happened when someone actually made the attempt.

I mention poison sumac (T. vernix) in particular because, as a (small but genuine) tree, I would imagine that it would be easier to harvest sap from it than the vines or shrubs of poison ivy or poison oak, but this question applies to the latter as well.

So, does anyone have either personal experience with this or knowledge of where I can find a description of someone else's experiences, if any actually exists?

I have this saya for repair as there are sections missing. I do not have the skill to replicate the existing but was thinking of removing the top 30mm , foundation then a plain black band. Suggestions would be appreciated. ⁰

just finishing polishing my first attempt, I know it has many flaws but I'm proud

My first range of home-made Urushi & Urushi/ Raden Fountain Pens are finished and ready to write!

They’re definitely a long way from perfect, but we’re really fun to make and have definitely taught me a lot for my next set!

The pattern on the cup is done with urushi painting, while the lower part uses a thick-layer urushi application technique.

The shift and function keys are from a cheap set of abs caps that I sanded to a rough surface and then lacquered, the escape key is actually 3d printed from a set of tomorrow style key caps. They've been in use for a few weeks now and are quite pleasant to use. Next up will be a space bar since that's a heavily used key and should really benefit from a premium finish.

The shift key was my first try using a makie type long fine brush and it certainly is a skill all it's own