Making your own bone scales

Well we have a steer going to the freezer soon which got me thinking about making bone scales for one of my restoration jobs.

Has anyone got experience of going from raw bone to finished product or able to point me to a good online howto ?

Was eyeing his horns as well after seeing links to how to do that - but they're a bit short.

Haven't had any luck in finding anything online so far.


cheers

I have never done it from raw bone, but, I have from boiled/cleaned bone available from the pet shop.

I found that using the knuckle bones works well, they usually have fairly long, flat pieces usable..at least from my local pet store....

@Undream, This is a great idea. I just started with straights. If they work out for me (I have A LOT still to learn) I'm going to give this a try.

The poor man's way-

Boil it and scrape all the junk off. You're going to want to leech out all the fat/marrow so you'll want to soak it in ammonia until it no longer feels greasy. Change the ammonia as needed, this may take a couple weeks. Then bleach the bone by soaking it in peroxide until it's as white as you like. A few hours to a couple days, depending on what you want.

Neurotopia said:

The poor man's way-

Boil it and scrape all the junk off. You're going to want to leech out all the fat/marrow so you'll want to soak it in ammonia until it no longer feels greasy. Change the ammonia as needed, this may take a couple weeks. Then bleach the bone by soaking it in peroxide until it's as white as you like. A few hours to a couple days, depending on what you want.

Click to expand...

This is great information on preparing the bone, but there are other considerations you need to look at. One is the stabilization of the bone itself. Bone is an organic material and thus susceptible to expansion and shrinkage and also warping, thus the reason for stabilizing.

Once you have the material stabilized, you need to take precautions while working with it.

The stabilization process is quite easy. Bill Ellis mentioned using Epoxy, in a recent thread, as a filler and stabilizer. Excellent choice, but to make it work better, thinning the Epoxy needs to be done to penetrate the pours as deeply as possible.

Some will try and use Acetone or Lacquer thinner but, as these will thin the Epoxy, it will also weaken it as well. So there is a trade off here that maybe you don't care about, but certainly should. The best method is to simply heat the epoxy and allow it to flow, by itself, without changing the durability of the product. By the way, regular epoxy works better than super epoxy for this type of application.

The other thing you need to take into consideration is the organic structure of the bone material while forming the scales, AKA sanding. If by some chance your application of Ammonia or hydrogen peroxide didn't kill 100% of the bacteria, then you will stand a good chance of introducing some foreign type of bacteria into your lungs, along with fine bone dust. Neither of these should be acceptable by you or anyone else. Therefore it is imperative that you wear a tight fitting mask when working with this type of toxic substance.

Good luck,

Ray

Thanks Undream, I needed that!
Respectfully
~Richard

Thanks Undream - pics are worth a 1000 words.

Appreciate all the other advice as well.

Instead of boiling you can just clean as much meat as you want off the bone and leave it in a tub of some warmish water (outside, it stinks) Bacteria will eat the meat off for you. You have to change out about a third of the water every few days. If you have alot of bone this might be easier. Then you degrease and bleach with peroxide--be sure to use peroxide to bleach, chlorine bleach will damage bome.

I MUST say, Those are B-E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L bone scales! Has anyone ever done a jig or pic bone handle? Pics? I would like to do something like this for my $ 10 razor chalange!