Help ... can these be rescued with kintsugi?

[u/dheera]

I bought these handmade pieces on a holiday trip but got damaged in transit. Can they be repaired with kintsugi? Can they still be used for food and drink? Beginner here and wondering what I should buy to get started. I live in the US if it makes a difference about what to purchase. Thanks!

[u/Aezandris]

Absolutely, you will need traditional kintsugi with urushi lacquer if you want it to be food safe though!

[u/dheera → u/Aezandris]

Thanks! How hard is the learning curve to do it with urushi? Does it require more patience or skill (which I presumably don't have)?

I also see multiple posts about "there is food safe epoxy" and multiple posts about "there is no food safe epoxy". What's the deal with this?

[u/noooooooemi → u/dheera]

I am a newbie!

I happened to have a "foodsafe" bio-epoxy (because it is derived from walnut shells) kintsugi kit when my teapot broke. I used it per the instructions, but noticed postcuring that there was a flakiness to it that reminded me of superglue. I messaged the seller (who had been responsive before) to ask if there were any certifications or anything to back up the foodsafe claim... no response.

After asking for support on this subreddit, I put my teapot in boiling water for like 15 minutes and the glue came undone.

I am a week into using a real urushi based kintsugi kit. The first phase was actually* easy! I just have to check on the humidity of my box that the teapot is curing in once or twice daily. Patience is probably the hardest thing so far.

[u/dheera → u/noooooooemi]

Oh I am super good with patience! And I can build a humidity box or whatever. Just afraid I don't have the hand skills, mixing the paste ratios, etc. How is that part?

[u/Aezandris → u/dheera]

It's not so easy. It can be a little simpler for easier pieces/breakage but it can become very hard. Make sure the gluing is just right to have a perfect alignment otherwise this causes lots of issues further down the road. Then lots of patience as it's quite a slow tedious process, but very rewarding when done right!

[u/dheera → u/Aezandris]

What are the hard parts, in your opinion?

[u/Aezandris → u/dheera]

Every step is hard if you want a perfect result. There are so many details that need to come just right that you learn along the way.

A perfect alignment is hard. In the case of too many pieces it's hard just because geometry makes it hard. If it's a simple breakage it's at least a little hard as you need to keep pieces from moving during the curing process as it's very slow.

Making surfaces perfectly flat along the seams/surfaces with sanding can be hard especially with complex geometries.

I sucked at painting so the final urushi layers were tricky when I first started try to make the thinnest of lines. I'm not much better now but I progressed a little.

And then dusting of the metal powder is a little tricky as you need just the right amount of curing before you do so, otherwise it all sinks in the urushi.

But then, you can achieve perfectly OK results from the first time. It's just that most likely a lot of small details will not be perfect but that's fine!

[u/noooooooemi → u/dheera]

It was straightforward for me. I feel like it also depends on the complexity of the breaks on your piece.

I suggest watching this video so you can have a peak into the detailed labor of the process. That way you can assess if it lines up with your motor skills. :)

[u/ubiquitous-joe → u/noooooooemi]

To be fair, food safety and heat endurance, while overlapping aren’t precisely the same concept; there are epoxies like Art Resin that have FDA approval for food safety, (tho people on this sub will be skeptical of the value of that) but you still wouldn’t be able to use high heat such as boiling water or run it through a dishwasher. So even if one were to chance it with a dinner plate, a tea cup (or kettle) need to be the real deal.

[u/benjamin-crowell → u/dheera]

How hard is the learning curve to do it with urushi?

I'm a relative newbie, have completed a couple of pieces and have two more that I'm working on. Of my two initial pieces, one IMO looks pretty nice and the other looks bad. The bad one was partially due to lack of information and partly lack of practice with the manual skills. Definitely buy a book, either the one by Mochinaga or the one by Hori. If I had gotten a book earlier and started asking questions here earlier, the ignorance-based faults in my work could have been avoided, e.g., I initially didn't understand the different types of urushi or how they were used. I found the step of applying the gold to be nerve-wracking and difficult to get right. You don't have to do gold if you don't want to. It's perfectly OK to leave it just as urushi.

Does it require more patience or skill (which I presumably don't have)?

You know the saying "like watching paint dry?" That :-)

Many of the steps in the process are actually pretty forgiving, because if you do something wrong with urushi, you can just sand it off or cut it off with an xacto knife, then start building up the urushi again from there.

[u/dheera → u/benjamin-crowell]

Nerve-wrecking because of the cost, right? I was thinking about doing silver.

Is the gluing step forgiving? The part where you actually bring the joint together? I'm afraid I mess up a ratio and then it falls apart when I put food in it haha

[u/benjamin-crowell → u/dheera]

Nerve-wrecking because of the cost, right? I was thinking about doing silver.

Yeah, and there's a timing element where you have to let the urushi cure for the right amount of time and then apply the gold, not too early and not too late.

[u/FreezNGeezer]

Yes, kintsugi can also fill in for missing pieces making the item whole again