Thread: Bending horn scales

Hi all!

The title says it all, I was wondering is someone has ever tried to bend horn scales back to its natural shape.
I have once, a long time ago, in my stupid years (last month or so) boiled a razor to sterilize it. What I didn't know was, that the scales were made from horn.
A couple of seconds in the boiling water the scales were al bent.

I threw the razor away, but now i have one that has slightly bent scales, so now i'm thinking maybe I can bent them back using steam or something like that. And then fixating them in the good position until cooled down.

Techniques vary a lot from person to person. Some use steam, at least one guy uses a heat lamp, and others use an oven. I have found it works best is you take them apart, heat them using your method of choice and clamp them flat until cooled. There are some that have heated and straightened them with the scales on. It sometimes takes more than one session to get them quite straight. There is a ton of information in the workshop forum, particularly in the stickie at the very beginning and in the work in progress thread titled what are you working on.

I have used boiling water, hair dryer, and just recently bolted one to a piece of wood and braced it in place where I needed it to bend and placed it on a radiator heater that gets extremely hot and once the scale was hot to the touch it stuck it in the freezer to cool it still bolted to the wood.

Yep, heat lamp works every time, for me.

Clamp flat once hot, and pliable.

The heating source I use to straighten horn is an electric hair straightener. Here is a previous post on this subject. http://straightrazorpalace.com/works...ml#post1587417 It works great and is really easy. Hope this is helpful. Austin

+1 for the hair straightener. just press and hold your desired amount of time.

I use hot water, almost boiling. Soak the horn for about 10 minutes and it is pliable. Then I screw and clamp the horn into a wooden jig carved to the correct shape. But I like to do precision wood carving so my method might be a bit of overkill.