Thread: Possible to use as scales...

Hey Neil,
I will try to take some photos showing the pitting before I head to work tomorrow. The scales were fairly straight from the get-go, only the wedge ends needed some tweaking. Just like they were twisted a bit. I went ahead and did the boiling yesterday. Didn't seem to make anything worse. Was actually quite flexible and when it cooled down seemed really hard.

Not too worried about the warping, more concerned with the peeling and pitting, and how to fill in those places.

The horn was about 7mm thick at some parts and 4mm thick on the thinner parts. The scales are now about 2.5mm thick on each. As such, I had to remove a lot of material, and that is how I ran into the pitting problems.

Originally Posted by Neil Miller

The peeling part is a symptom of delamination - the layers are coming apart. I couldn't see any sign of it in the pics you posted, or I would have mentioned it. Sometimes - if the material is thick enough - you can sand through it, sometimes not. You mostly see it in old, dried horn. Soaking in neatsfoot oil doesn't cure it, it just makes it look less obvious - the refractive index of the oil must be somewhere near that of horn, so oil fills the gaps between layers rather than air. If the oil dries out/evaporates, the delamination will still be there.

Not sure about the knot and pitmarks - never seen that before. Perhaps a finer grade paper would help - try it on a scrap piece.

Seeing as the horn has several issues already I'm not too keen on the boiling water bending process - it might make things worse!

Regards,
Neil.

I decided to go ahead and take the photos as I am up waiting for a conference call. Anyway, here are the issues I was talking about.

Overall photos of the two scales. They are pretty flat. I upped the contrast so you could clearly see the peeling. Also, if you look at the dark striations on the lower scale, to the left of the longest striation you can see a bit of the pitting:


Close up of the peeling:


Pitting on both of the scales. Can it be filled with epoxy? Or do an epoxy wash similar to what is done to micarta?


Close up of the pitting (knots) from the inside of the other scale. It always happens where the dark striations are, but only if those places are sanded to the surface. I tried to keep those areas from coming to the surface, but I need to get the scales down to 2.5mm, and unfortunately both sides of each scale had the striations reaching the surface:



A close up of the problems. 1 shows the pitting. 2 the peeling:

I think I'd fill with clear epoxy and sand smooth. For that matter, you could seal the whole scale as you mentioned.

What GeauLSU says sounds reasonable. You would have to fill - sand - fill -sand until you evened everything out, then cover everything with the smae medium. Make sure it is perfectly dry. You might still get some stress-cracking due to differential movement over time.

I haven't seen that sort of pitting before. I'm guessing that this is from the inner part of the horn and is part of the living material (horn is just keratin, like nails or hair - dead - the outer layer) making the transition from bone to keratin.

The keratin layers are laid down like a sheath or covering over a core of bone, which obviously has its own infrastructure of capillaries and nerves. Perhaps the closer you get to this, the less keratinised the sheath is.

They still look good though - you have made some nice scales!

Regards,
Neil