A participant describes a billhook that an ancestor reportedly took to war in Germany in the seventeenth century. The family had it restored after it had been left outside for two centuries. The blacksmith could replace the shaft, but warned that working on the badly rusted blade beyond cleaning risked breaking it. Its family provenance and dating are personal testimony, while the conservation constraint is the point of the example.
Notable Point · 1:37:42-1:38:46
A family's seventeenth-century billhook and its damaged blade
A personal artifact story distinguishes replacing a shaft from attempting to repair a badly corroded blade.