GUEST: I bought it at a sale, and as I was approaching the sale, there were many things, and this caught my eye. And the young lady had told me that her grandfather had given her some things to sell, and he was from Hawaii. And that made it even more interesting.
APPRAISER: And how much did you pay for it?
GUEST: I paid $10 for it.
APPRAISER: Well, you're right about it being from Hawaii. But what's really special about it is the age. I think this bowl is probably even late 18th century.
GUEST: Oh!
APPRAISER: The bowl is handmade. It's a long process. They take the wood, and then they quite often key it. They put it in a swamp so it stays the right shape. Then they sometimes will put hot coals on the top and scrape it all out. This one is very sensitive. It has some nice sort of small swelling, which is barely perceptible, in the bowl. We have a repair here, which is metal, which is really unusual, because they're usually wood. But it's hand wrought. There are some more repairs on the side here. They're not done with the same wood, and there's some fill there, which is a previous generation, again. Not fabulous repairs.
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: But they've done whatever they can to sort of preserve this bowl. I'm not sure of the wood. It's not koa wood-- it might be milo. But it's really rare to find early bowls like this. The really early bowls always have this dull matte surface on them. And you can see the age in the rim. It's really an old, old bowl. I think a retail price for this would be about $5,500.
GUEST: Oh, wow! Okay. All right, fantastic. That's great. I knew it was special. I didn't know it was $5,000 special.
APPRAISER: Right.
