Another way to skin the cat.(making horn scales)
At the moment I don't have any restore/rescale projects that I'm working on but this is something that I've been thinking about a lot recently.
Usually when making scales out of horn(and other materials), you trace your scale shape on a blank and saw them out, we all know that horn is bendable/moldable when you warm it up.
What I've been thinking is that instead of tracing the curves on the slab and sawing out the nearly finished design, you could start out with making the scales straight with a taper towards the pivot end, sand and finish, then heat them up in hot water and bend them around a block with the desired curve, if that makes sense.
It would require some extra effort but I would imagine that you'd save a lot of material in the long run and that it would be easier to both saw out and sand the scales
If anyone's got any thoughts about this, I'd like to hear them.