Thread: CA & Soda: Bone Scale Repair

I repaired a set of bone scales the other day, and figured I better take pics of my progress.
Hopefully I can explain as well.
Someone here on the forum had posted a video awhile back on using CA and baking soda to repair the fwd. bridge on a guitar, so I gave it a go on the bone scales I had that were needing help.

Razor in question is a Oxford.
Here are pics of the scales after removal and a cleaning in diluted muratic acid (to remove as much rust as possible) wich softened the scales slightly as well.
I then clamped them and let them dry completely, before the actual repair. Only one scale of the set needed repair.
Wedge end.
[ATTACH]226098[/ATTACH
Pivot end

The how to

I placed a piece of wax paper down on my work bench (Something flat) so to remove scales after glueing . first will be the dished out area of the wedge end.
I placed more than enough soda on the repair area, and using a razor blade I lightly scraped the excess soda off the scale untill leveled.
Then a couple drops of thin, slow drying CA, and allowed it to soak into the soda, then a spritz of accelerator to instantly cure.

Then sanded it flat with 220 sand paper, the layed the flat side down on the waxed paper, and pushed soda around the end, so to reshape and match the length of the other scale.
[ATTACH]226119[/ATTACH
Placed pins through scales to hold them from moving.


And sanded to match other scale

Thanks for sharing this Outback. Does the baking soda do anything special or is it just used for the color? I'd like to try this with some other materials. I assume the accelerator will just speed things up and you can get the same results if it's left to cure over night.

Originally Posted by BeJay

Thanks for sharing this Outback. Does the baking soda do anything special or is it just used for the color? I'd like to try this with some other materials. I assume the accelerator will just speed things up and you can get the same results if it's left to cure over night.

It acts as a binder, the CA by itself is brittel, and for its color.
Sorry it took awhile for me to reply, but the keyboard on my phone quit working, seems ok now.

I'm definitely going to be experimenting with this. I found a guy on YouTube fixing an ivory guitar nut with CA and bone dust and it looked pretty good. I just filed some Bakelite and mixed it with CA to see how that looks. It would be awesome if I could get a nice glossy black to fill in deteriorated horn scales. I've been using Miliput and and painting over it. It looks okay but this may lead to a better solution. Now that I have this stuff out I'm going to try to fix the nut on my guitar. That buzzing A string has been driving me crazy for months.

Great idea outback, subscribing for reference.