Pour les anneaux, repoussés, le fait n'est pas douteux

15:12 Apr 12, 2017 

the gold "sleeve/sheath" at both the bottom and the top appears to be flush with the surface of the main body of the wood (enlarge the view on that 2.bp.blogspot.com/ picture).

Assuming that we're not dealing with very thin gold leaf, that indicates to me that the handle was, first, cut into a (longitudinally) roughly round shape with blades (probably stone); then further rounded and rendered perfectly smooth with abrasives; then the areas at the top and bottom of the thing where the gold was to be applied were carefully taken down further, to a level which would allow for the gold to sheathing be flush with the wood.

A laborious process --but the Egyptians apparently cared nothing for the amount of labor and time which it took to fabricate something, whether it was a de lux sacred object like a mirror handle or a pyramid.

"Time out of Mind" was the operative phrase in the whole culture --for 3,500 years.

14:54 Apr 12, 2017 

"The capital is handcrafted"

Yes, it's definitely not machine made.

"the handgrip shaped and polished on the lathe"

I strongly disagree, but only because I've yet to see any proof at all that the Egyptians had lathes before the Late Period. However, whether they did or not is not relevant to the question at hand.

"The author"

Benediti

"calls the collar part a 'manchon' which I think is a sleeve.

Sleeve is good enough, though a bit vague.

"Couldn't the sheaths, sleeve, and little cup at the bottom be slipped [on?] and tapped [sic]?"

I'm at a loss as to how the gold sheathing was applied to the wooden handle.

It would be simple if it were just gold leaf, but apparently it is thicker than that --gold leaf would have been too thin and, thus, too fragile to stand much handling, and would have had no structural strength at all (perhaps important for the role which the top part played in joining the disk to the handle).

But if the gold were thicker than, say, 1/8th of an inch, it would have been too thick for even malleable gold to be pressed (not beaten, surely) into the groves of the three rings at the top which surely existed in the wood beneath.

Mmmmmm.....

18:55 Apr 11, 2017 

The capital is handcrafted; the handgrip shaped and polished on the lathe. The author calls the collar part a "manchon" which I think is a sleeve. Couldn't the sheaths, sleeve, and little cup at the bottom be slipped and tapped? on after hammering? I think everything is wood but the disk and plating so the ***metal*** gabarit must be like a mold (shaped like the handle) over which the plating was placed and hammered taking on the template's design. Repoussé means hammering from the reverse side. That's the way I understand it. I'm pretty sure though that the gabarit is not modern. But heck I've never crafted anything!

17:29 Apr 11, 2017 

I'd say that he's suggesting that the two "ornaments" (i.e., the gold ornamental elements, rings and "leaves") of the handle are metallic reflections of ones which are carved into the wood core beneath them.

Most evident are the rather thick "rings" --which are _en repoussé_.

The second "ornamental" element is the "leaves" of the papyrus which are, basically, incised into the metal. (Note that these leaves are barely visible on the blogspot.com pictures, but can be clearly seen in other pics of this object that we've been looking at.)

He's surely right about the metal rings covering similar rings carved into the wood below; but I would doubt that the shallow, incised leaves existed in the wood, for two reasons:

1) Why would they?

2) While quite thin, the gold sheathing is, apparently, not thin gold leaf, but rather thicker (and sturdier) --and thus too thick to be merely pressed into the shallow incisions in the wood.