Thread: Unknown scale material

Definitely not tortoise - I have had similar sets.

They did a number of variations, including blue-mottled and red-mottled, some with the sword design in gold foil, none of them precious or semi precious materials. Each of these variants was some sort of man-made plastic or resin, neither tortoise, hard rubber nor horn.

Ern tended to use the darker, single colours of hard rubber, especially black, up to around the 1930s, so I suppose the use of resins, xylonite and celluloid were confined to the early 1900s - 1950s.

I would suspect they are synthetic - the hot pin test would give the same result for either horn of tortoise, and real tortoise they are almost certainly not.

You can tell that the material has been cast/vacuum formed by the scale-dais set onto the inner surface of each sclae and the presence of the metal foil instead of a cast design. They are a higher-end scale.


Regards,
Neil