GOLDCREST,
The danish oil finish has taken well, I applied a very thin coat using a cotton bud each day for a week or so, making sure that the oil was completely dry and not tacky between each coat, then buff out the finish by hand with a soft cloth. It's a technique used on gun stocks, the inside of the scales are finished in CA by the way.
UKROB
I'll try to take some better photos, my camera isn't exactly top of the range! In this case the blank started off at about 7mm, I profiled it to the shape of the scales, routed the scalloping to the edges on both sides on a table router with a tiny ball bearing guided rounding over bit, before splitting the blank on the bandsaw, then ran each side through my home brew version of this
Luthiers friend
each side was fixed to a backing board with double sided tape while sanding, the board serves as a carriage to hold the blanks while I gradually sanded them down to the final thickness of 2.2mm (yes the jig will let you get this accurate!). The Luthiers friend is the most accurate method I have found to date for accurately thicknessing anything, it works equally well on bone, or corian, and really comes into it's own when using difficult timbers that would suffer from grain tear out while planing, the added bonus is that accuracy is guaranteed and repeatable.
The scalloping was fine sanded with all the grades of micromesh wrapped around a short piece of pencil (tedious!)
I make and repair guitars so I just adapted gear that I use daily anyway, the brass washers are guitar string ball ends split in half, they make nice rounded edge washers. the scale blanks are offcuts from guitar projects, I have boxes of exotic timber off cuts too small for anything else apart from pen blanks.
This is my first attempt at re-scaling, hopefully I have made all the mistakes on this one as I have another three to do! Rio Rosewood, Black American Walnut, and flamed Maple next.
