- Joined
- Aug 27, 2003
- Messages
- 595
Received a Tibetan short sword from the In Honor of Father sale. WOW! Upon first inspection I thought this sword was perfect in every way except the carved horn handle looked tough. It was covered with the usual red rouge but then had areas of gray somewhat soft areas beneath. I thought this might be the softer inner part of the horn. Also not much relief. Well I started carefully removing the red rouge and was down to the black horn and the softer gray areas. Picked at the gray areas and found - black shiny horn underneath
Scrubbed it all out and found an extremely beautiful deeply carved dragon on very sound horn. Obviously water buffalo horn is much more solid than cattle or bison horn which has living bloody tissue inside a thin outer shell - I've accidently broken one or two while working cattle and it's not pretty.
My guess is the gray matter is some type of wax the kamis use to protect the carvings. Between it and the red rouge it sure encloses the carvings and probably eliminates cracking due to climate changes during transport. I wish I had taken some before pictures, but here is the handle after clean-up and being soaked in Watco Danish oil for 24 hours.
Many Thanks Yangdu!!!
Scrubbed it all out and found an extremely beautiful deeply carved dragon on very sound horn. Obviously water buffalo horn is much more solid than cattle or bison horn which has living bloody tissue inside a thin outer shell - I've accidently broken one or two while working cattle and it's not pretty.My guess is the gray matter is some type of wax the kamis use to protect the carvings. Between it and the red rouge it sure encloses the carvings and probably eliminates cracking due to climate changes during transport. I wish I had taken some before pictures, but here is the handle after clean-up and being soaked in Watco Danish oil for 24 hours.
Many Thanks Yangdu!!!
