Source for unbleached bone nuts?

[Skip Kelley]

Does anyone have a source where I can buy unbleached bone for nuts and points? Stew-Macs nuts are just to expensive. I really don't want to buy from a pet store or butcher and work it up. My wife has a weak stomach and wouldn't be able to stand the odor. Thanks in advance!:)

[sunburst]

Cows

[sunburst]

Are there any cattle farms around where you live? Often farmers will drag dead cattle to a remote place where they decompose leaving behind a pile of bones. I've been given bones from just such a source.
Also, check with butchers and meat cutters.

[dunwell]

Pet stores carry unbleached chew bones for dogs that are just the shin bone w/o any of the joint parts, get the largest you can find. They are usually under $3.00/ea and often come in shrink wrap pack of 6. I resaw them on the bandsaw and then chunk out the big pieces. There is a lot of waste but they are so cheap it doesn't matter and I save the pieces for doing inlay things. All this assumes that you have more time than money since refining the chunks down into nuts and saddles on the belt sander is a slow and tedious process. You can't just blast them hard or they heat up and warp. I double stick tape a few to blocks and then work them down in round robin fashion. I like to do this whole process since I can get dark colored pieces if I want, or decolor them later if I want them "bone white". It also lets me pick out only the good hard pieces.

Alan D.

[Bill Snyder]

... I really don't want to buy from a pet store or butcher and work it up. My wife has a weak stomach and wouldn't be able to stand the odor...

:whistling:

Oh, I have purchased them from International Violin. They are $2.00 each.

[buddyellis]

IV is cheap, as bill pointed out.

However if you get fresh whole femur bone from the butcher and cook it up like soup till all the flesh falls off, it smells like a nice beef soup cooking, not dead cow. Two of those bones will give you enough material to work with for a good while. I've probably got enough scrap from one of these 'sessions' to make 20 mandolins or more.

Get the butcher to cut it up into 6" segments or so (sometimes you can find it already cut like this, in that case hunt the thicker pieces that are away from the end of the joint -- look for the flatter pieces near the middle/bottom of the leg bone (generally thicker there). Keep away from the joint ends, because it can be somewhat spongy there and obviously doesn't work well.

Toss the bones in a soup pot and lightly boil (do not use a pressure cooker, it will soften the bone, and don't heavily boil them for the same reason) till everything falls off (I use a small kabob skewer, or somesuch to work the marrow out) make sure you get every speck of flesh/fat off.

Dump the stock into your soup pot, sautee some onion & garlic and toss it in there with veggies and chuck roast.... er sorry I got off onto a soup recipe...:))

Add fresh water and a 1/4 cup of dish detergent or some other liquid soap, and lightly boil some more (lemony fresh smell through your house!) to get a bit more of the grease off of it (I usually repeat this twice, scraping well in between because you really, really don't want to leave any fat behind, especially INSIDE the bones where the fatty marrow is), dry, and then dump the bones in a jar of alcohol, acetone, or Colman fuel for a couple weeks. Take it out, and let it sit in open air for another week or so to thoroughly dry out (band saws, sparks and fresh fuel really aren't a good match)

It doesn't smell bad at all, and if you save the first dump, you really can use it for a nice beef soup/stew. You really want FRESH bone anyway because older dog bones, in my experience, get fat leaching into the bone which is hard to get out, and the longer they sit around, they start to smell smell like #### (well dead cow) cooking off, and, well, I just generally don't like them :grin:

[Geoff B]

what problems arise from having fat in the bone?

[Gail Hester]

Fat leaches out over time and will ruin the finish and the wood if there's enough. I would not use any bone that isn't processed/bleached which I'm told involves soaking in white gas, rinsing and drying to get rid of all the fat/oils. Compared to the cost and effort in building a mandolin, processed bone for nuts and points is cheap.

Here's a nice article on cleaniing bone. http://www.bearmeadow.com/build/materials/html/bone-clean.html

[buddyellis]

Fat leaches into the wood, making a mess, seperates finish, and generally is a nuisance. If you soak the bits in alcohol or Colman fuel or acetone or some kind of solvent, and make sure you've gotten all the bits of flesh off the bone, it's not to be worried about. Keep out of the knuckle areas of the bones (the spongy part) as that part tends to retain fat more than anything else.

Really, it's not that hard to do.