Thread: The French Love of A Mouton Rouge (by moutonrouge)

mop is like glass, and a small piece has no real flexibility,hence the metal backing. is the metal sheet that flexes at the places were the panels join. practically you have to imagine the scale made of 3 joined rigid parts (once a panel is pinned that part becomes rigid). I cannot deny a fairly long enough piece of MOP to possess some flexibility (I've never had one in my hand, a razor with single MOP scales I mean), but a small one like these definitely not.



The overall thickness is nearly 1 mm, the height of the engraving has an average of 0.5-0.6 mm so the outer border is in average 0.5 mm thick or under

I know that carving stile, Pitulice my friend..is that you?

Project finalized, a trained eye can catch on many errors easily: from measurement, to design and finishing but I learnt many things and the most important of all, due to the nature of MOP's surface, to carve without the use of blueprint transfer as I did on previous bone projects - just free hand doodling with a pencil and direct carving.









Hope you enjoyed it and found something interesting for your own projects.

Yours,

Mouton rouge (aka pitulice)

Another beautiful project. You inspire me.

Truly wonderful, great work and thanks for all the info and pics. That is all pretty time consuming.

Wow amazing

Sent from my SM-J700P using Tapatalk

Thank you. These projects are not very much time consuming.
The first carved bone project took me 2 weeks with a dremel



it turn out absolutely appalling but I understood the rotary is not the way to go. So I moved on the hand carving way just to meet another failure. it took me a month to get these chubby, chunky bone carved scales



Moved further I made this one, somehow a little bit better (the one with the blade) and 2 weeks after I got the second one (the scales without blade), that looked much better



But still not with finesse I 'm after. So I went further and refurbished it into this



Curved scales are the most difficult to make because of the mirror image effect. I no longer have the first one (no 1, it was sold) but it gave the kisk start for the second one (no 2) that I refurbished it later on.



The no 2 took about 2 weeks to finish. However, when I decided to attach a shield and dismantled it, I dropped it on the floor and one scale broken in 3 pieces. Still secure with CA but I'm not using it. I'll have new ones made in future.

The last bone carved project it took only 4-5 days to finalize.



So not very much time consuming.

Now I want to move to another MOP - straight MOP scales, with finial, inlayed shield, some carving and if possible to inlay silver wire in the same way. This starts from a previous experiment. The blade is good and it deserves better.













Another project just crossed my mind

I too have played around a bit of bone carving. My challenge is layout, especially because of the curved scales. I need to get busy with some carving and scrimshaw. Very inspiring work my friend. I like it a lot.

I found some black MOP I thought it lost during house move, so I left the other project pending and got started for the set I dreamed to have, a pair in black and white MOP with silver bits. To carve the black MOP turn out to be b...y difficult because of its colour and light reflections. I have made already a few mistakes (carving wise and overall shape of scales but I'll sort these out). Anyhow, I have enough to keep me busy for a month.

I can't wait to see this finished.