Getting a little Unhinged perhaps

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Chris Hall
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Getting a little Unhinged perhaps

Tue Dec 09, 2014 12:29 am

No need to be alarmed at the title - all is well, just a little word play is all.

I'm in the midst of ordering bronze hardware for the Japanese gate project and have been going back and forth with my contact in Japan about the details. It's a bit complicated.

The old gate had what are called leaf-shape hinges, or hassō-kanamono, circled in the photo below:
DSC07522 annotated-small.jpg
DSC07522 annotated-small.jpg (322.74 KiB) Viewed 2538 times
Because the ones on the old gate were mild steel, along with their fasteners, they rusted and were starting to flake apart, and rust stains were flowing down the wood panels.

I don't much care for the plates, especially in mild steel, as they are purely decorative, but the Museum wants the new gate to have them as well, so, well, that's the way it's going to be. I want to replace the hassō-kanamono with bronze plates, but this seemed to be a no-go, until tonight, and I was starting to accept that I'd be replacing with more mild steel crap.

There is but one supplier of bronze gate hardware in Japan, and from their website I couldn't find anything on the type of bronze hinge plates I was looking for, and was, as i said, starting to resign myself that it wasn't possible. My supplier though is more resourceful. He got in touch with them and it turns out they do have a suitable type of hassō-kanamono in bronze:
Hasso in Bronze Type Z-2.jpg
Hasso in Bronze Type Z-2.jpg (55.94 KiB) Viewed 2538 times
These are beautiful!

They have to be custom made to the gate stile dimensions, so I will be double-checking that and sending the info along tomorrow.

Here's the interesting thing: in looking over the detail sheet for these hinges, I noticed the following bit of text - note red circle:
Hasso in Bronze (detail) b.jpg
Hasso in Bronze (detail) b.jpg (113.72 KiB) Viewed 2538 times
I'd never seen that character before, so I looked it up in my kanji dictionary, but it wasn't to be found. When that happens, I head over to the Unihan database and look it up by radical and stroke count. The i found it, but the data page for that character had no info - I mean, it exists but seems to have no meaning. I did further searching, googling the character, but again, it exists but no site seems to be able to state what it means! Imagine looking in a dictionary and finding the word only to see (no definition). How weird is that?!

Despite all that, I think the character means 'hinge', though I do wonder why the company's catalog has a page with such a character written when 99.99% of Japanese people would have no idea what it means.

Weirder still, when I try to post this entry with that character inserted like i do with other kanji, it comes back as an error - the posting won't happen unless I remove it from the page. So, how about a illustration instead?:
u28ac9.png
u28ac9.png (930 Bytes) Viewed 2538 times
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Brian
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Re: Getting a little Unhinged perhaps

Sun Dec 21, 2014 1:54 pm

I have designs on traveling to see the MFA once the gate is complete.
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Chris Hall
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Location: Greenfield, Massachusetts
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Joined: Mon Nov 22, 2010 12:46 pm

Re: Getting a little Unhinged perhaps

Sun Dec 21, 2014 2:22 pm

I would be most honored if you did that.

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