PariahZero
Member
I decided to give this ‘vegetable ivory’ a try... mostly for the sake of practice and see if it could be done. I saw a few old questions here on AZB where a few asked if it could be done, and figured “learning is fun.”
I figure somebody’s search the forum in the future, and might benefit from this. Hello from 2021! Did you ever visit Iceland like you wanted?
I sort of succeeded at making a ferrule, and made a few beads. I’m sure with a bit more practice I could probably get better results. I “wasted” a good 1-1.5 mm of diameter and another 5-6 mm of length. It seems to chip into a table-salt sized powder, and has no disagreeable odor. Larger nuts have a big chamber inside, full of cracks, and working around the cracks can be tricky.
My Tagua has a Shore D hardness of 81 or so. It’s also somewhat brittle — I had to work it fairly slowly. I’m not sure if it’s the material, or my desert environment with 20% humidity. I’ve read advice that real ivory isn’t easy to work in the desert either. That said, I was able to turn, drill, and tap to 5/16-18 without much problem.
It polished up reasonably nice. You can see the side of the ferrule that is next to the shell, and there’s a visible bit of shell as well. I have no idea how it’ll age, or hold up to chalk.
I’m pretty certain it’d never work on a break cue, and I’m kind of dubious that it has any properties that make it better than the various thermoset and thermoplastic ferrule materials.
I’ll try to get pictures with better lighting, if anybody’s interested. It does have a translucency to it, and looks pretty good.
My first ferrule attempt broke...
I figure somebody’s search the forum in the future, and might benefit from this. Hello from 2021! Did you ever visit Iceland like you wanted?
I sort of succeeded at making a ferrule, and made a few beads. I’m sure with a bit more practice I could probably get better results. I “wasted” a good 1-1.5 mm of diameter and another 5-6 mm of length. It seems to chip into a table-salt sized powder, and has no disagreeable odor. Larger nuts have a big chamber inside, full of cracks, and working around the cracks can be tricky.
My Tagua has a Shore D hardness of 81 or so. It’s also somewhat brittle — I had to work it fairly slowly. I’m not sure if it’s the material, or my desert environment with 20% humidity. I’ve read advice that real ivory isn’t easy to work in the desert either. That said, I was able to turn, drill, and tap to 5/16-18 without much problem.
It polished up reasonably nice. You can see the side of the ferrule that is next to the shell, and there’s a visible bit of shell as well. I have no idea how it’ll age, or hold up to chalk.
I’m pretty certain it’d never work on a break cue, and I’m kind of dubious that it has any properties that make it better than the various thermoset and thermoplastic ferrule materials.
I’ll try to get pictures with better lighting, if anybody’s interested. It does have a translucency to it, and looks pretty good.
My first ferrule attempt broke...
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