questions about working with bone

J

Justin King

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Nov 8, 2009
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I am trying to educate myself on working with bone as a grip material. I have never used it but I am becoming more and more interested in re-creating period style pieces, and bone is one of the materials I expect to be using as it was a fairly common grip material. It also appears to survive the effects of age very well, judging from the number of intact bone grips from the 15th/16th centuries especially; wood grips from this same period typically show extensive deterioration, if they survive at all.

What, if any, health concerns are related to working this material, specifically in regard to breathing the dust?

How does one dry, stabilize or otherwise prepare it for use?

Does it shrink and swell with atmospheric changes, and/or what treatments work well to counter these effects?

Are they typically fairly solid or is there a large soft core, hollow center, etc.? Most of the grips I have in mind are through-tang rather than slabs or scales, and are heavily shaped/sculpted, with little or no original surface on the exterior. They would require fairly solid pieces that allow extensive shaping without cutting into any soft or hollow spots.

Any suggestions, related to the above questions or not, would be greatly appreciated.
 
Justin,

I've used bone a lot. However, even the thickest walled piece will only allow limited sculpting. Once you go through the outer layer, of..well for lack of a better word, the outer layer of dentine you are getting into a softer layer and the entire surface will start to look streaky. Areas of brown show through.

There's two ways to go about it. If you are doing solid tangs and want to pin bone slabs, you will find a large variety of bone slabs, mostly solid cow bone for sale at the knife supply stores. If you are doing through tangs, you'll have to find a supply myself. I've used bone from Petco, butchers, hunters, etc. If you are preparing the bone youself, all you can do really is boil it, change the water and do it again. The boiling has never harmed the bone. Let it dry for a few days, submerge it in bleach for about half an hour, and once completely dry, it's ready for use. There will be a large hollow going through the center, and most tangs will go right through. That's why you will need to fill the cavity with a good glue. I use expanding white gorilla glue. Tighten down your tang nut so you have a good tight fit, and prepare to spend quite a bit of time wiping the oozing glue up. If you go to my BF site and look at my photo albun, you can see several bowies I did with bone handles. Once they are affixed, they sre there to stay. I've never had one fail.

I wear a mask when working it. If you put it to a grinder or sander you will quickly be covered with a fine white dust. I don't know if it's a particular hazard, I just don't want to breath it.

I've never had one move once attached. It doesn't seem to respond to heat, cold, and wet conditions at all.

One last note. You will find yourself getting frustrated very quickly when working with this material, as (1) it splits when being worked if it gets too hot while sanding (2) you will unexpectedly "go through" and get brown spots. Be prepared to do multiple efforts before you get one that is perfect and shaped the way you want.

If the sculpting is important to you, natural bone isn't a great material. I'd look into hippo or even wart hop tusk. These materials are pretty thick, buff out beautifully, ans can be heavily carved.
 
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I asked someone about this a few years ago. His reply was we were still adding newly discovered untreated bone to our ever growing fossil record. It sounds like a good bone handle may outlive the steel, maybe.
 
The best and old way is to fit a wood plug in the bone, along with cutlers rezin. Today we can use epoxy in lew of cutlers rezin. Then you can drill through and treat it most like any other through tang grip. Elk leg bone works well. Deer for smaller knives. This dagger was made as a through tang riveted over a washer on a bone butt cap, and was inspired by an original in George Newmann's book, "SWORDS and BLADES the AMERICAN REVOLUTION"

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Ant piles do great work of picking raw bone clean. I am working on a local butcher for easy to acquire bone, our first discussion didn't bear fruit.
 
Thanks, LRB for the picture. Beautiful knife.
Bones in the pet section of Walmart that are sold for dogs to chew on can be used.
 
I did several scale type handles from moose leg bone. The lower part of the leg was great material to work with and appealed to many hunters since I could use the bone from a moose they had taken. These were just left in a natural colour. I did a couple of folders with with the moose bone and other bone I dyed myself. Rit dye seemed to work pretty good. Frank
 
The cow bone stuff probably won't work very well for your goals of sculpted hidden tang handles. On the other hand it obviously works well (as you have mentioned as as used for generations) for scales for both fixed and folding bladed knives. We use a lot of it in our Hawaii bone fish hook carving high school art classes.

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Louie the Fish does some AMAZING small scale jewelry sized sculpting with cow bone.



Charlie and Harry Matthews of Twin Blades do some fantastic carving (a lot in antler, I believe).



Giraffe and camel bone are MUCH thicker walled than cow bone, not sure if they'd be a possible solution for you.

That spiraled elk bone handled knife looks real cool!
 
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Thanks for the info and examples, there is some impressive work shown here!
LRB, I have admired your work for some time and that dagger is no exception. Very nice. Is there any risk of a wood plug expanding inside the bone due to moisture and causing the bone to split? Is there anything that should be done to prevent this?

It didn't occur to me to ask in my original post, but is there much difference in working with different types/species of bone? Especially if certain bones may have thicker walls in relation to the soft/hollow area in the core, that would be useful to know.

For what it's worth, one of the tidbits of info I have come across is that bones sold as dog treats are often cooked/baked, some folks say this makes them more brittle and therefore they advise to avoid using them.
 
I would think that as long as the wood is coated with epoxy, and also the ends, there would no effect from moisture. I seal all joints with epoxy, even blade to guard. I have found no great difference in bone from animal to animal, in general, but I'm sure there may be exceptions. Stabilizing would be a good idea, but in the work I do it might cause more problems than prevent. Cooking/baking can do no good to bone. Heat and a constant dry atmosphere can cause cracking and a break down of the surface making it chalky. Air conditioning is detrimental to many grip materials, if exposed for long durations. I even had Westinghouse Micarta shrink from being in AC for 3 months or so. Most of the whole bone I get is deer, and has been buried for a couple of months, and or, just left exposed to the elements. When I use slabs, I buy them. Probably water buffalo, or cow. I very rarely have problems of any kind with these. I have a friend who has used the leg bones from some large bird in Australia that are very impressive. These are nearly true round and quite straight. I will see him in August and try to find out how he gets them.
 
Just so you know, the Roman gladius typically had a bone handle, and the preferred bone was a calf's metatarsal... the cross-section and thickness are ideal for hidden tang handles. The metacarpal looks similar but has a 'D' shaped cross-section that tends to be non-ambidextrous...
 
Thanks again for all the advice. I recall seeing an elk skeleton in the woods recently that was about 90% picked clean by scavengers, I may go have a look and see what I come up with.
 
GHEzell said:
Just so you know, the Roman gladius typically had a bone handle, and the preferred bone was a calf's metatarsal... the cross-section and thickness are ideal for hidden tang handles. The metacarpal looks similar but has a 'D' shaped cross-section that tends to be non-ambidextrous...
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Man, I had to go look that up! I think that's what many us might refer to as the shank or shin bone...or even lower leg?

That elk skeleton might be a score of bone material. Let us know how your journey progresses.
 
When attempting to source bone from a local butcher in california I was asked repeatedly which "bones" I wanted. I replied with shin bone, but stated any thick or dense cattle bone would be of interest to me. Again I was asked"which" bones I wanted.

It may be worth looking up the specific names before attempting to network with folks, some butchers are seemingly very suspicious of laymen.
 
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