Thread: First try at pinned scales

ya that's nice!! Will you put something on the copper so it wont turn green??

Very interesting. You have taken a very complex drawing to start. At least it was necessary excluding the rectilinear figures.
I liked it. It is necessary to go on ...

Very meticulous and tedious work. You pulled the project off very expertly. Did you count how many holes you drilled and peening taps it took? Laborious but the results look well worth the time.

Again, thank you for sharing.

Randy

Funny, I was just thinking about doing the same thing!

I've got this 7/8 John Shaw razor in desperate need of scales and I was thinking of picking up some bone blanks from Masecraft and making myself a set of fancy scales quite a bit like what you did!

Now to just do as good a job of it as you did...

@ Harrywally, I think I'm just going to leave it as is and polish it once in a while when the copper turns brown. It shouldn't turn green unless it's in really bad conditions.

@Whitelion, I have no idea how many holes and preferred not to count as I was working on it, but I also want to know. I'll have to count at some point. It was a lot.

@Voidmonster, I can detail the little tricks I found out for horn, but I don't know if it will be the same process for bone. I have a feeling horn is softer and takes the pins easier. I don't know exactly how they used to do the pinning for ivory.

What you could also do is drill all the way through the scale and peen both ends of the wire to lock it in

Originally Posted by ScienceGuy

@Whitelion, I have no idea how many holes and preferred not to count as I was working on it, but I also want to know. I'll have to count at some point. It was a lot.

We should start a lottery to see who can come closest to the count. My entry is 196. That means 196 holes drilled, 196 pins cut, and averaging 10 peens per pin that's 1,960 taps of the hammer.

Makes me appreciate the end results even more.

Randy

Originally Posted by WhiteLion

We should start a lottery to see who can come closest to the count. My entry is 196. That means 196 holes drilled, 196 pins cut, and averaging 10 peens per pin that's 1,960 taps of the hammer.

Makes me appreciate the end results even more.
Randy

I think that's pretty close! I did a rough count from the pictures (I'm away for a while), and got around 200. For each hole I used a pin vise to hand drill a pilot then a drill press to finish, placed and cut, then peened ~ 10 times, so yeah you're spot on. I think I went through 12 or 14 inches of wire, so it's actually not an insignificant amount of weight put into the horn. If my calculations are right, over 300 mg of copper (about 1/10 of a penny)

Lovely work. Did you have a depth gauge set on the drill press? How did you arrive at the depth you used?

Originally Posted by DGilloon

Lovely work. Did you have a depth gauge set on the drill press? How did you arrive at the depth you used?

I set the depth to be just before (maybe 0.5 - 1 mm) before coming through the other side of the scale. That way there was enough scale left for the pin to hammer into.