Thread: Horn questions

If shopping for horn scales that are some characterics I need to look for so I kno. And if I go to a antique shop how can I also tell its horn is there a certain thing to look for. And where would be a great place to shop for horn

Sorry no help but I find the best place to shop for horn is a horn store

The horn found in "the wild" will usually need to be prepared before you can use it for scales (boiled and pressed to become flat) I buy my horn (and bone) from a eBay seller: White Mother of Pearl, Guitar Bits n Bobs items in Pietra Dura Etcetera store on eBay!, they come in pre-cut blanks 160x60x5 mm

As far as natural materials go, horn is the most common scale material. Bone and ivory are hard to confuse, as they are white or white-ish and opaque. The natural material you potentially could confuse horn for would be tortoiseshell, but that is really quite rare in razors. I have not seen any. The easier horn to identify is the blone horn, as it is see-through and hard to confuse.

I am not aware of any easy tests to distinguish tortoiseshell from horn.

I always take a cheap loop with me to look at the blades and materials. Bone will have pores, Horn and Ivory will not. Ivory will have lines, sometimes very hard to see, but better in sunlight and not unformed. The hot pin test will also tell you if it is ivory, bone or horn. Horn will smell just like burning hair because both are made of the same stuff as hair and fingernails, keratin, and the other two will not. In fact the ivory will hardly burn at the touch of a hot pin and neither will bone unless it is a LARGE hot pin.

You will probably not find any real toroise, but there is plenty of horn dyed to look like tortoise. Most real tortoise is quite old and the color is darker and more faded usually than you would think. Dyed horn is usuallly only dyed on one side, the dye does not go all the way through the horn.

Will N.

I just had to come back and say that boiling horn will not soften it enough to do anything. It cannot, it doesn't get hot enough. In order to shape horn and have it harden up again and retain it's strangth, it takes dry heat in the 300 to 350F range. Less than that and it will not become plastic and more than that and it will burn. The only time you boil a horn is when it is green and you need to remove the bone core.
You cannot microwave it either, but I have been told that you can fry it at 325F, but then you have a really hot greasy piece of soft (plastic) horn to deal with.

The traditional way is over hot coals, but that takes practice. A hot plate is easier and an oven set at 300 to 325F is ideal.

Thanks for the advice guys very informative indeed