King Tut's mask crappily repaired with epoxy

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That’s it. Shut this thread down while it’s perfect.

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Why do you egghead elites hate the epoxy industry?

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I assume that this will be handled properly…

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Reminds me of the beard of the Great Sphinx, which was probably added after construction and probably fell off long before the nose.

The Great Sphinx is still the largest monolithic statue in the world, but I don’t think it counted as monolithic when it had the beard.

Clearly, this was a job for duct tape.

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There are only few contexts of adhesive use where I wouldn’t suggest epoxy.
This is one of them.

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And this is why the Elgin Marbles will stay in the British Museum.

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There is basically no way to remove epoxy without damaging whatever its attached to. I remember someone talking about the difficulty she had reverse-engineering a virtual pet during a Chaos Computing Congress. The main processing chip was embedded in epoxy and she ended up using nitric acid, which won’t react with gold, but I don’t know what it would do for the paint.

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Hot nitric acid, altered with acetone, is used for deencapsulation rather commonly. It has to be water-free, in order to not attack the aluminium metalization on the chips.

Disassembly of epoxied joints can be facilitated by heating them to a moderately high temperature (~150 'C). This is used for e.g. disassembly of potted ferrite-core transformers.

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Well… This thing has been sitting around on display for decades, and maybe it never occurred to anyone that it might break one way or another? So maybe someone said, “One of the exhibits broke so I can’t put it on display. How should I fix it?”, and then someone else thought it was a plastic souvenir stand or something and told him to get the epoxy.

This repair of an injured Monet painting is an interesting contrast.

How about this Anders Zorn painting that got hacked to pieces. By Anders Zorn.

Detailed image of the “repair”. This would be considered bad quality repair on a $1 thrift-shop vase. I did better ones.

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especially this part:

One of the most interesting things about the detailed account of the restoration is that along the way, every single technique was designed to be reversible.

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apparently i’m qualified to work there, since they repair things like i do: “dammit! where’s my gorilla glue??”

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So the story of the nose being shot off by Napoleon’s troops for chuckles isn’t true?

I can’t really imagine the conservation conversation that led to this but it must have been something like:

  • Well, we tried Pritt-Stick and spit but the damn thing kept falling off.

  • Super glue?

  • But what if they want to repair our repair later? I heard super glue is permanent. Did you see the ad with the guy suck to the board being flown around by a helicopter? That was awesome. Does anybody else fancy a bite of lunch?

Apparently not:

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