Thread: Possible to use as scales...

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