Thread: Antique Store Surprise

can you explain your use of donor horn?

Originally Posted by ezpz

can you explain your use of donor horn?

I have a thread over here, but I've refined the technique considerably since then.

I've got a small piece of cow horn. Using a burr grinder head on a Dremel tool, I grind a lot of powdered horn out. I then put some glue in the hole or crack, pour horn powder on it, tamp it down, pour glue on top of that and repeat until the new horn is really densely packed in and thoroughly glued. Then I sand it down so it's even with the surrounding scale, dye it with india ink (presuming black scales), seal the dye with CA glue and polish with micromesh.

You can polish with sandpaper too, but you'll be doing yourself a big huge favor if you get a micromesh kit.

Bear in mind, I have not done this on translucent scales. I don't think it would look good. Others have used epoxy for that, results appear to vary.

Nice find, love the razor on the first and the last picture