Thread: Multi-material scales on liners

Hi there !

I usually post my works on the "What are you working on ?" thread, but here is a little "Howtodo?" thread about making scales with liners and various flat materials.

Brass and silver liners were used in the past for making scales.

Nowadays, other materials may also be used, with various characteristics of weight, resistance...

So far I've worked with :

• aluminium (lightest but quite sensible to shocks and distortions),
• copper (more resistant, but I wonder about oxydation in the long term),
• niobium (no problem of oxydation here, a little more expensive)
• and titane (light and resistant, perhaps a little hard to work with).

As veneer, I priefer to use materials as tortoise, mother of pearl or ivory. Each one can be found in adequate dimensions and thickness without too much difficulty.

Ivory on right dimensions can be found by recycling vintage piano clavier. Tortoise by buying vintage (broken if possible) fans, and mother of pearl by buying vintage casino tokens.

First I'm collecting old originals scales, as a "catalog" of shapes and size.

When I'm finding a blade I think deserves a rescaling, I look among my vintage models if there is a match :





Then I report it on the liner-to-be with a cd-marker



I choose the veneer materials.



I'm then using a jeweller saw



File the edges and divide the liner in three sections with the cd-marker



Report it on the veneer, that goes through the sawing process

Adjustement is done with double-face tape, semi-rough file and sandpaper taped on another file (for the finitions)



Then the pining is done with semi-hard silver wire



Et voilà !



You may find silver wire, silver and niobium sheets on metalclay4u website, aluminium, copper and titane sheet on ebay.

If you have materials too thin to use by itself as scales material, you may also use this technic. (Hereafter, tortoise on niobium)



I hope this thread will be useful for you

(I decline all responsability if your wife / kids / grandsons / dog complain about you passing more time in your workshop)

Beautiful work and great tutorial.

I’ve never tried washerless pinning, but will need to on my grandad’s ivory Kropp one day.

Well-Done, Thaeris! Lovely scales as well!

This is a long needed and highly appreciated post.
I have drooled over the posted photos of your works for years!
Thank you for the post!
~Richard

Pleasure is mine Richard !

It's always much encouraging to get nice comments from SRP's community, and I always enjoy to share my work here

thank you.
Is all the work done without machines?

Just the drilling part and paste-polishing with dremel, once I’m done with the sand-paper

Thank you for your posts.

How is Tortoise to drill? Anything special needed to know.

Maybe one day I might need to know this....