Little Jack Horner sat in a corner, eating his Christmas pie, when he stuck in his thumb, and pulled out a made in china sticker.......
Ok,ok,ok, back to the problem at hand. Multiple solutions...... go on line, and look up knife making materials, and go to the handles, and you can find all kinds, or bone, artificial ivory, various types of exotic woods, laminates, etc. You can get slabs, blocks, and rounds. Also packa wood comes in rounds, and slabs. It is basically laminated wood. As for lamination's, What about laminating slabs of bone, and turning, or filing it to the shape you want? Also for your plug piece, Dixie Arms sells plugs, and finials for tying your thong, or strap to, The leather string thong, and leather or cloth shoulder strap! Just thought I would clarify that, before you put the wrong material on your....."Horn"
also, they have the ones that screw into the plug, with an escutcheon ring, which makes it easier to fill your horn. There is a little depression where the finial sits. They come in brass, and wood. Also, you can use the bone, for decorations, on your plug, by cutting out, little wedge shapes, and inlaying them around the edge of the horn, or any shape you want. Check out craft sites, especially carving sites, and look for Taugua nuts, or ivory nuts. They were once used for buttons, and are very white, and will yellow like ivory with age. I have a little mouse netske' I carved years ago, and it is now yellow like older ivory. They vary in size. Just do a search, and you can find the material. Cool off a couple of days, and then get back to it. Never thought about dividing the circumference by "8" to get the flats. D'uh! Like I have said before math ain't on the good side of my brain. Whatever side that may be...
As for scraping, when I was a kid, some friends of mine and I would go down to the butcher shop, and watch them butcher the cows, and get the horns, and bury them in ant piles, and then shake out the bone core, and pour boiling water down the horns, to sterilize them, and then we would start scraping and filing them. When we got all the scale off, and down to nice horn, we would soak the horn in water, and use a piece of broken glass jar, or something of that order, and the scraping went like a charm. We were able to get them down to where you could see through them, and then we would cut off the tips, and drill out the end, and bevel the holes, and make signaling horns out of them. Then we would get bored, with that, and go see how far we could dig a tunnel in the side of a canal bank before it caved in on us, and take turns digging each other out.
If we stayed too close to the house, we would have to mow the lawn, or some other form of dangerous work.
But I hope that will help you out some. Hey, if you get some time off, and feel like driving for two days, come on up to Thompson Falls, and we can work on that horn, or a bottle of Crown Royal Black, or some Cruzan rum, or just about any other stuff I have in my cabinets. Or, I can show you the Merriams we have around here. They are usually in huge flocks. But the stinking coyotes, and wolves, have thinned them out some, but still lots of them. I have them in my yard now and then. Trying to get them to be more now than then......
Seen where they have been scratching the left over deer feed, uh, I mean free range cattle feed......
found two small wing feathers. Good luck with the horn.
Wayne
