Preparing horn

©2018 Barry Smith - Five slices of buffalo horn for pendants - rough cut

I got a bit of a twinge in my back after shovelling some gravel so no heavy work involving bending and twisting was the order. The next planned post installation for the terraces just has to wait a while. I decided to continue my riveted jewellery work but combine slices of almost black buffalo horn with the metal and rivets.

Slicing and sanding horn is quite a time consuming process because I do it by hand to: minimise horn dust; and also not to burn the horn with fast rotating sanding equipment.

The goal was horn for three pendants and 3 pair of earrings. But one tends to cut a bit more when one is in the process.

©2018 Barry Smith - Pieces for earrings and a couple of odd offcuts - rough cut

©2018 Barry Smith - Pieces put back into the horn stash for another day

I do the sanding sequentially with the following grits: 80, 240, 400 and 800. I finish off by polishing the horn with metal polish.

©2018 Barry Smith - Sanding on 80 grit creates quite a lot of horn dust - smells like burning hair when sanding with the coarse sandpapers - I wear a good quality charcoal filter mask when I do this work

©2018 Barry Smith - Pieces of hon with 4 grit level of sand paper as the background

©2018 Barry Smith - Buffalo horn being given the final polish with m,metal polish - takes a few blemishes away and bring out the colour

©2018 Barry Smith - Before and after photo

©2018 Barry Smith - Though I put heavy cloth bandaids on my thumb and finger I still managed to sand a bit of skin off my thumb - the sacrifices of artists???

The pieces are then ready for drilling, riveting etc.

©2018 Barry Smith - Three buffalo horn pieces ready for pendant making

©2018 Barry Smith - Three sets of buffalo horn for earrings

©2018 Barry Smith _ Not sure what this will become - I cut a section off the horn where I had been doing the vertical cuts to create the slices for pendants and earrings.

The process of making the above horn pieces took about 3.5 hours. I'll post on the finished pieces on Sunday.