Nuts and Saddles

[mangorockfish]

Is there a big difference in sound between bone nuts & saddles as opposed to fossil nuts & saddles? If so , which produces the better sound of the two?

[evanreilly]

There is also the Fossil Bone option.
Anything that has fossil ivory also has bone...
And I have a fossil bone saddle on my Phoenix #301 mandolin that has exceptional sound. A mastodon leg-bone, if i remember correctly.

[mandroid]

Fossil walrus tusk bridge top is nice , one from Kurt Gisclar in AK went on an already decent '21 A-4, #Picking the material with the right propertys #is important.
hard to compare between #it, and an aluminum top of the bridge on #the A-0, #
not the same, #but different is good.

[Paul Hostetter]

A lot of fossil bone/ivory and so on is pretty soft and chalky. Simple unbleached bone is your best bet.

[kww]

Can someone explain what they believe the difference between "fossil" and "rock" to be?

[Paul Hostetter]

Organic matter becomes fossilized when the organic matter (plant and tissue cells and so on) are gradually replaced by minerals, usually while buried in mineral-rich muck. A really hard fossil would be your typical petrified wood where the wood is usually replaced by a quartz (a form of silicon) called chalcedony, which has close to the hardness of glass. 7-something on the Moh’s scale.

Other minerals, notably calcium, can enter and replace organic matter. Some calcium-based minerals are hard - marble, for example. Some are less so: limestone and chalk, for example. Once the original stuff – whatever it was - is replaced by other minerals of any type, the stuff becomes, for lack of a better term, rock.

Tusk and bone are largely calcium to begin with, so the transition from their original state, which is sort of rock-like, to the mineralized version, isn’t huge.

The hardest calcium-based material we luthiers usually work with is fresh mother of pearl, which is harder than marble or any of the usual fossilized animal or sealife parts, and harder than modern bone or tusk.

Part of the hardening process is a factor of elapsed time. Fossilization with chalcedony and quartz and so on takes a lot more time (and different circumstances) to occur than any of the calcium fossil processes. Nonetheless, some of the fossilized bone and tusk is at least as hard as it ever was in the first place, which can be pretty hard. Unbleached modern bone is still harder than elephant ivory. Fossilized ivory and bone is simply centuries-old ivory and bone that has been degraded over time and to varying degrees remineralized. Which is why I approach it with caution. Sometimes it’s harder than it ever was when the animal was alive, sometimes it’s no different, and too often it’s way softer.

[kww]

If you are using ivory that is undergoing fossilization, I can at least listen to arguments that it will be different from using stone. Once fossilization is complete, the resulting substance is stone, with the original ivory contributing nothing more than the shape.

I worry sometimes that people choose their materials based on voodoo, and was concerned that the answer was going to be couched in terms of the fossil ivory being more organic than an exactly equivalent piece of limestone, or that mastodon-bone would help bass response because mastodons were large.

[Paul Hostetter]

Chalk is stone. Limestone is stone. Neither is near hard enough for nuts and saddles. Stone is a very vague term, and for our considerations, next to useless. Voodoo has long held sway in consumerism in the instrument world!

[Michael Lewis]

All of the "fossil" ivory that I have seen is basically just old, not mineralized or stone like. It smells like bone or ivory when it is worked, and some pieces smell of the sea too. I have some mastodon ivory that is not as hard as walrus or elephant ivory, and it smells bloody aweful when it is cut or filed. Like it was at the bottom of the pile of rotting animal for a few thousand years. The various types of ivory can be identified by the angle of intersection of the cross hatrching pattern that you see on the end grain.

And, without Voodoo and smoke all you folks would be playing some pretty plain instruments. Forget about special woods, finishes, hardware, etc. just the simple and plain stuff. If we were pressed we could make some pretty good sounding instruments from the scrap piles at a construction site.

[fidlmaker]

TO elaborate a little on what Michael said, the "fossilized" ivory in all of the samples I've seen and used is not fossilized at all. It would be more accurate to characterize its condition as varying degrees of freezer burn. Most of the mastodon, mammoth, and walrus ivory is taken from remains that have been frozen from a few years to thousands of years. Examples that have been subjected to repeated thawing and/or exposure to the air, sunlight, etc., degrade accordingly, and can even be too soft to use for nuts and saddles. Material that has been buried in ice since the demise of the beast, and never thawed is usually in the best condition. Some of the "fossilized" walrus ivory is younger than most of the people reading this.

I really appreciate Michael's comment on lutherie, and less-than-ideal lutherie woods. Right on.

[Stephen Perry]

Some of the walrus material from Kurt appears to be nicely crystalized, possibly from alteration over time. But I have no fresh walrus material to compare it to, Tennessee being outside the range! It is far different from the various qualities of mammoth ivory I've seen, which often shows a good deal of internal fracturing. At least the pieces I've seen. The fossil walrus is much harder than modern ivory. Works very well and easily. The Draleon mandolin I put a fossil walrus bridge on enjoyed a distinct improvement in focus & response.

I suspect the term "fossil" is perhaps too vague for the level of distinction made in this discussion. Might consider whether there's been replacement of material, restructuring of material, weathering, etc against the backdrop of the original material's characteristics.

I was under the impression that the initial push to mammoth was the drive away from modern elephant ivory. The idea being to get ivory's characteristics without exploiting modern populations. From that perspective, changes in the material would be a bad thing.

[kww]

Sounds like the word "fossil" is getting used to mean "pretty old." Paul's description of fossilization is spot on, but it doesn't sound like you are actually using fossilized material at all. Even if it were, "fossil" doesn't tell you much unless you can describe the conditions the fossil formed in. If "stone" doesn't mean much, "fossil" means even less.

(from Michael Lewis)If we were pressed we could make some pretty good sounding instruments from the scrap piles at a construction site.

It's scary to see how many denizens of this board really think that the material contributes more than careful construction and workmanship.

[Dale Ludewig]

Quote
(from Michael Lewis)If we were pressed we could make some pretty good sounding instruments from the scrap piles at a construction site.

It's scary to see how many denizens of this board really think that the material contributes more than careful construction and workmanship.

I don't normally check out this section of the cafe, but after talking to a friend today I did check out this thread. I couldn't agree more. Take your various woods, top woods, back and sides, neck- a good luthier could craft something very fine. Red spuce, sitka, engleman, cedar, whatever for the top. And so on. A competent luthier would probably build you an instrument that you'd be proud of. Even if it didn't have fossilized anything involved.

[Martin Jonas]

"Fossil" does not mean mineralised, it refers to any remnant of a living organism from a different geological age. Frozen mammooths in Siberian permafrost are still fossils, as are insects trapped in amber. The precise cutoff between "fossil" and "recent" remains depends on context. Soft tissues buried in the ground, as opposed to frozen or encased in amber, do become mineralised with time until eventually only the shape rather than the tissue remains. Calcified tissues on the other hand (teeth, bone, ivory) consist of a mixture of crystalline calcium apatite and various other tissues. The apatite will undergo very little structural change over a few thousand or hundreds of thousands of years, but the non-apatite components will get mineralised. Tooth enamel, which is virtually pure calcium apatite, basically won't change at all, whereas bone will gradually become more brittle and stone-like. Ivory is halfway in between. I would expect fossil ivory to remain usable for saddle or nuts up to a few thousand years age, but would expect "fossil" bone to become too brittle for use in a century or so in most soils (much longer in peat bogs).

I have a certain professional interest in this: my PhD was on age determination of fossil tooth enamel although it involved the structural changes in bone and ivory only peripherally. Archaeologists, on the other hand, have a fairly good handle on the timescale of deterioration of bone in different soils: it's one of the things that give them their initial age assessment of a site.

Anyway, I fail to see the possible advantage of using fossil bone over recent (and plentiful) bone. I wouldn't think any of the changes that happen after burial are for the better as far as use in instruments is concerned. Fossil ivory makes more sense, though only because of conservation laws.

The entire topic makes me think of the venerable folk ballad "The Two Sisters":

...
Some minstrels walked along the strand
And saw the maiden float close to them

They made a harp of her breastbone
Whose sound would melt a heart of stone

They took strands of her yellow hair
And with it strung their harp so fair

They went into her father's hall
To play the harp before them all
...

Martin

Martin

[Paul Hostetter]

Martin - thanks for tagging in with this good information, especially the clarification about what "fossil" means. You're right that some fossils are mineralized organic matter, some are just old. I have seen quite a lot of stuff now passed off as fossil ivory and so on, some of it is quite substantial and hard, a lot seems nice to look at at times but quite degraded and useless for anything but bridgepins and so on.

Some of us worry about bleached new bone being too degraded to be useful. I think modern ivory is too soft for nuts and saddles. If these aren't reasons for suspicion, you just have to work with it and listen to the results to know a bill of goods is being sold to hapless consumers. By the same token I once made a nut and saddle for a customer from jade. It wasn't that hard to work, but it sure sounded bad!

My father was one of the Army engineers leading the construction of the Alaskan Highway during WWII. Some of their roadcuts went through massive middens of dead pachyderms. He called them mastodons but I'm pretty sure they were mammoths, because the souvenir tooth of one, which I still possess, has been identified as being from a wooly mammoth. I could get dozens of saddles, nuts and bridgepins from this charming bookend, but won't. He said where the bulldozers dug down into these giant seams of dead animals in permafrost, the meat on the animals was still there, and when it thawed, it rotted and became rather fragrant.
I don't think a lot of mineralization had occurred there. The last of them died off only about 5000 years ago, seemingly flash frozen.