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de Corbin
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Preparing bones for use
I make bone handled athames like these:
Bone is an excellent material to work with - it carves, can be scrimshawed, and has a nice look and feel.
You can buy bone slabs from companies that supply materials for knife making. The bone slabs are used to make knife handles.
However, you can also find bones. I pick them up in the woods in the spring. If you are hunter, you have access to all sorts of bones. You can also pull them out of your dinner. Another good source is the pet store, where big, solid bones are sold as dog chew toys.
The problem, though, is how to clean them. If you don't clean them properly, they end up smelling like rancid grease. This is not a good selling point for your work!
To clean bones
First, scape as much of the meat and gristle off with a sharp knife as you can, without making yourself crazy.
Second, put the bones in a pot, and cover them with water. Boil them for 3-4 hours. This will get the left over organics off. Rinse the bones, and rub them with a soft scouring pad.
At this point, the bones will seem to be clean, but they will still be full of grease. The grease will start to seep out later giving the bones an oily feel, and rancid smell. To get rid of the grease, submerge the bones in a pot of water, and add a cup or two of household ammonia. Let the bones soak for 3 days to a week.
Pour off the liquid, rinse the bones in clean water, and set them outside in the sun to dry. The sun will also bleach the bones to a nice white color - be sure to turn them regularly so that all sides are bleached evenly.
If the bones are not white enough for you, you can dip them in a solution of 1 cup bleach to 1 gallon of water, then put them out in the sun again. do this as often as you need to.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Never, ever, for any reason should you mix ammonia and bleach! This will give off deadly chlorine gas. People have been severely injured or killed from doing this. Chlorine gas was used in bombs during WWI. It burns the lungs, and can, literally, cause you to cough them out! Chlorine gas IS NO JOKE, and SHOULD NOT BE PLAYED WITH.
When bones are clean and dry, you can cut them with a hack saw or jeweler's saw, shape them with files and sandpaper, carve them with woodcarving tools or a dremel, or scratch ornate designs in them (scrimshaw).
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12/1/2008, 8:30 am
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TexasMadness
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Re: Preparing bones for use
quote:
de Corbin wrote:
First, scape as much of the meat and gristle off with a sharp knife as you can, without making yourself crazy.
Or toss the bones in to the chicken pen for a short time...
Seriously though, we gave the turkey carcass after Thanksgiving to the little buggers and they attacked it like piranhas. This morning I noticed that the larger bones were kinda cool looking but left them in there. Maybe I should go and collect those...are turkey bones hollow? Hmmm....
What about really old bones that you find in the woods? The ones that are kinda cracked with age. Would those be any good for making things are has their time passed? I'm always picking up old weathered bones but they mostly just sit around on book shelves collecting dust!
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12/1/2008, 1:10 pm
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de Corbin
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Re: Preparing bones for use
He he.. when I was a kid, my mom used to boil the leftover Turkey to make soup, and I'd save the neck bones because they had such cool shapes. I never figured out what to do with them, though.
Turkey bones, like all bird bones, are very thin and hollow. You can't make anything that needs to be sturdy out of them, but you can cut leg bones into disks for necklaces and such. And that big blade that goes in the breast would be good for cutting a large disk or ornament for a necklace. I'm not sure how it would take scrimshaw, but it might be worth a try.
The athame handles are made from deer bones I find in the woods each spring. After a season outdoors they are generally pretty clean.
The long bones do crack - if you look at the picture, I use a wedding band (the brass band between the guard and the bone handle) to hold the split ends together securely, I also stabilize the bone by filling the interior and the cracks with epoxy. I actually like the way the cracks and weather stains look on them - they look less "manufactured" and more like old, hand made things.
The cracks are generally only in the straight part of the bone because the grain of the bone there is straight, Near the joint the grain twists, so the cracks seldom get that far. Cracked bones can also be cut into pieces, and the pieces are easily carved and shaped for all kinds of purposes.
Also, the ones I find are usually weathered rough, but a little 100 grit sandpaper takes off the outer layer and leaves a very nice, smooth surface.
If the found bones still have gunk in the marrow cavity, you'll need to soak them in ammonia.
Not only can you use an ant heap, Firlefanz, if you want to do it like the biologists do it (that sounds vaguely dirty) you get get a load of carrion beetles. I understand they can reduce a rhino to a skeleton in about a week  .
There's another method I hesitated to mention - I call it "The Really Stinky Method" because it's really stinky - but very effective. I use this when I clean skulls that are hard to scrape clean (I just realized that I'm starting to sound kind of creepy - but I have a lovely beaver skull that looks like a piece of sculpture).
Anyway - All you have to do is toss the bones into a bucket of water, and leave it outside - far, far away from the house. Everything on the bone rots in a few days. (Be careful, though, it will attract bears. Like dogs, bears love to investigate anything organic that stinks.)
Then you go out, gag a few times, and pour the water off the bones. They'll be very clean, but they'll still need to be soaked in ammonia. The advantage of this method is that the ammonia actually smells good in comparison.
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12/1/2008, 8:09 pm
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TexasMadness
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Re: Preparing bones for use
Hey, don't worry about sounding creepy! I was actually just thinking about another suggestion.
A friend of mine swears by this technique. Lets say you actually find a carcass of some animal that you would like the bones from. If it's something small, you might not mind removing the bones yourself....but if it's something big, well that's quite a task. This guy had a horse die on his property. To get the bones, he dragged the body to the woods and stacked the whole thing down under a blanket of hogwire and chicken wire. Scavengers took care of the flesh and he got to keep the bones! He still did all the boiling, ammonia, etc to get the rest of the grease out, but he didn't have to do much in the way of flesh removal...
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12/1/2008, 11:08 pm
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TexasMadness
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Re: Preparing bones for use
I'm not quite sure what he did with them for the first 10 or so years he had them. But then I worked on a haunted house with him one year. We had the whole skeleton rigged up to come swooping down from the trees (the intro part was outside) with its leg looking like it was running and everything. It was pretty darn cool. No idea where the skeleton is today though...
The haunted house was awesome by the way - it took place at Britannia Manor, Richard Garriot's house. You can read about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britannia_Manor
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12/2/2008, 10:01 am
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MaevesChild
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Re: Preparing bones for use
I tend to use found bones, since there is less ick that way. But you can also bury bones for a season and dig them up, if you want to try the natural way. But there's much gagging involved in that one. At least there was for my hubby. Smell didn't bother me all that much, but he was a mess. 
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12/3/2008, 9:07 am
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TexasMadness
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Re: Preparing bones for use
Our share croppers have been burying road kill on the farm to keep the bones. So far two spotted owls and a coyote. Should be cool when they dig them back up!
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12/3/2008, 11:54 am
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Sorsha Akai
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Re: Preparing bones for use
good to know! .....One time, I found a cat skull that was atattched to the spine out in my back yard....poor kitten, the coyotes must've gotten to it.  I wanted to keep it and do something with it, but my mom wasn't about to let me bring that thing into the house, lol! ......I'm so morbid.
--- "Make Your Dreams Out of Paper Mache." - Beck
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3/6/2009, 1:11 am
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