Turning a bone into nuts?

[Cam]

This may sound stupid, but I've been thinking, is it possible to resaw a bone into several nuts?

One of the butchers in town sells cow bones for a few dollars (we used to buy them for our dog) and I was wondering if it would be possible to slice one up for a few nuts. How strong is bone? I am thinking that if I were to do it on a bandsaw I would need about 10-14 TPI?

[Stu]

G'day Cam.

I've heard of it being done with great success, but that's where my knowledge on the matter ends. Dan Erlewine did a column on this very subject and talked about cow bones for making nuts.

Cheers, Stu

[woodrat]

Hi Cameron, I have done it with some bone that a friend gave me. He had it in his chook shed for about a year so that they would pick it clean and then it would age a bit. He gave me a large bone and I resawed it on my bandsaw. I use a 3 TPI bi metal for virtually everything including this. I also have friends who have a dairy farm and I collected some bones from cows that had died there. If they have been dead for less than a year the bones should be fine, any longer and the bones start to crack due to exposure to the elements. So there are a few avenues for getting it. Your local butcher would seem to be the most convenient. The smell is not the nicest when you are cutting it though.

[Cam]

Thanks for that, I might have to give it a try

[Hesh1956]

Cam M8 it certainly is doable (if "doable" is a word...) but it can be a big pain in the ass to do depending on your circumstances.

I just went through this, wanting to purchase my own bone and process it, and my results were not very good.

It is all too easy to not remove all of the fats and through soaking and boiling actually saturate the bone material with fat rendering (pardon the pun...) it useless.

I went through a series of 3 boils using a degreasing dish detergent. As mentioned this only impregnated the bone with grease resulting in it getting pitched.

What David Collins does which is similar to what is mentioned above is "wire" the bone to say a tree and let the critters pick away at it removing the fats and oils over time. Then he soaks it in white gas (Coleman Fuel is also white gas) a couple of times and his bone comes out clean.

For me wiring bone somewhere in my yard is going to attract Turkey vultures, skunks, and folks that yell "you lie" at the President so this does not work for me...

Something else to consider is that once you have some clean, processed bone if this works for you cutting it is very hard on saw blades and can easily dull a band saw blade if you don't have a blade that works well for bone. So, and this also happened in my case, by the time that I was done I had ruined a $35 blade, spent hours boiling the bones, driven my dog completely insane as he ran in circles salivating at the smell of the boiling bone, and ended up with a greasy mess that I could not use.

But YMMV

[Cam]

uhh, maybe I'll just stick to good old nut blanks then

[Allen]

I make my own all the time. I find it pretty easy to do, though my wife swears at me about the smell from sawing and sanding it. She says it smells like an abattoir, but I don't mind the smell at all.

I've got a mate who gives his dog a bone once a week and the dog does all the hard work, then leaves it somewhere on his property to age in the Qld. sun. My mate then comes across them from time to time when he's mowing the back paddock.

He then tosses them in the back of his ute, to bring to me at work. Problem is that his dog sleeps in the back of the ute at night, and occasionally finds a stash of his precious bones in a place he didn't leave them, and where they don't belong. He's been known to take all of them out the the back paddock and hide them good this time.

[Taffy Evans]

I buy bone blanks as I use a lot of them in the repair side of what i do. However I have made many for the guitars i build and cut them from the piece of bone with a hack saw. I do use my belt sander to hack off to the line then use my wet griding wheel [better on the lungs] to finish off. I use the same process for cutting pearl shell.

[vandenboom]

This came up a few weeks ago when I ended up with an oversized saddle slot....
viewtopic.php?t=1893&highlight=

There was a link in this post to a site which offered the procedure I have re-pasted below. This worked fine for me and I was very happy with the outcome. It looks like Hesh tried much the same thing but that it wasn't very satisfactory. Not sure what the difference was.
I rough sawed the blank on my band saw and then finished it off on my drum sander.

Suggested Procedure :
You can process bone yourself; the important thing is to get _all_ of the fat out. I have gotten beef bone (the 'pin bone' has the most usable material) at the butcher shop. Start by making stock from it. The next day put the bone in a largish pan of fresh water and bring it to a simmer. When you see some fat on the surface, shave in a little bit of plain soap. Don't use the fancy stuff with a lot of perfume and lotion in it: I like 'Ivory' soap for this. Keep simmering the bone and putting in a bit of soap when you see fat on the surface. Eventually the water will thicken up from all the saponified fat, and you'll have to pour it off and start over. Keep it up until you get no more fat coming off; then change the water one more time and cook out any residual soap.

To check to make sure you got al the fat, cut a little piece of bone off and put it in a jar with some white gas or naptha. If the solvent turns yellow, you didn't get all of the fat.

I usually use the bone from pet stores. Normally this is steamed to remove the fat, and if they used high temperature and pressure to speed the process up the proteins in the bone will be degraded somewhat. The bone you process yourself is likely to be harder and a little denser. How much of a difference this makes is anybody's guess.

[Cam]

I guess, I've got nothing to lose. A bone is only a few dollars and dad pays for all the bandsaw blades

I think I may as well give it a try.

What about a tenon saw for rough cutting the bone up?

[Taffy Evans]

Ever tried sharpening a tenon saw? I feel the fine teeth of a suitable hacksaw would be better.

[Allen]

Hack saw works really well, and the advantage is that the blades are disposable and inexpensive.

[Cam]

ok, I have a hacksaw. I'll see if i can get some bone this weekend and steam cook it or whatever to get the fat off

[Kim]

If you have red meat ants anywhere around where you live, or any other ants for that matter, forget all the rest of the the cleaning steps and let the six legged mini piranhas have a go. That and a spell in the Aussie sun and you will be right to go in no time.

Cheers

Kim

[Cam]

How long do you think I should leave the bone out for?

[Corky Long]

I've followed the istructions that Hesh laid out here - although I forgot about them soaking in the "white gas" for weeks. Interestingly, they never gave the white gas the cloudy tint that's supposed to indicate that all the fat is out of the bone. Perhaps my boilling process was mostly successful.
I actually found it a pretty OK process, with good results. Nice white nut, good quality. I don't think it will ever make sense from a time/value perspective, but if you're a nut like me and get a kick out of making a guitar as much from scratch as you can - go for it. I definitely echo Hesh's adivce about soaking them in white gas though - horror stories in some of the postings I've seen about what the fat in the bone can do to wood, finish of the guitar if all the fat is not removed.

[Kim]

horror stories in some of the postings I've seen about what the fat in the bone can do to wood, finish of the guitar if all the fat is not removed.

This is one of those things I have read about as well but it always seems to be based upon a supposition and I am yet to see it happen or see images of what is being suggested, de-lamination of the finish. I am not saying it could not or would not happen, but regardless of what people suppose, unless the particular peice of bone was saturated with fats, i can't see it being a problem.

I am not calling anyone a lire, its just that over the years I have seen some absolute nonsense posted by so called experts who should know better than to assume but instead seem to have become carried away with their own name and start believing their own educated guesses. Problem for the rest of us is because they do have a respected profile, word travels fast and before you know it misinformation has been propagated around the globe being preached as gospel.

I wonder how much attention they pay to all this in China when they are processing the commercially available product??? Boil it, bleach it, out the freak'in door me thinks.

Cheers

Kim

[Nick]

its just that over the years I have seen some absolute nonsense posted by so called experts who should know better than to assume but instead seem to have become carried away with their own name and start believing their own educated guesses.
Kim

I wonder sometimes if we tend to apply too much 'science' to building guitars in these technological times. I'm all for using modern findings/aids to assist us to build better, but sometimes I just wonder.
Stradavarius applied the knowledge he'd built up from years of working the wood and from what felt/sounded right. Even with all the scientific theories available to modern builders, his violins are still acredited as the best....go figure.