129 - A very special cane for a very special occasion. It's made from sections of horn and bone threaded onto a stainless steel rod.

Meanwhile our son and his fiancee set a date for their wedding. The months started ticking away, and I promised I would make a special cane to go with his wedding outfit. When it came time to start work on it, I remembered I had the makings of a very special cane lurking somewhere in the shed, so I dug out the box full of bits of buffalo horn and picked up where I had left off.

I had cut a set of pieces of ready-turned buffalo horn rod, the length of each section shortening from top to bottom of the shaft according to a geometrical progression. Drilling accurately through the centre of each piece proved extremely difficult, even with the aid of a special jig I had made up to present the workpiece to a bench-mounted drill in precise alignment. No matter how firmly everything was clamped in place, the 8mm drill bit would actually bend to follow the grain of the horn rather than go in a straight line! I got it near enough in the end, but it's not a job I would like to do again - it really needs to be done with a proper end-boring set-up on a slow-running lathe.

I threaded everything onto a length of 8mm stainless steel studding, with discs of buffalo bone between each section of horn, and glued it all up, a few sections at a time, using an epoxy resin mixed with high density filler for maximum strength. I then had the strenuous and seemingly never-ending task of scraping and sanding this lot down into a straight, tapered shaft of perfectly circular cross-section. Having achieved this, I then cut a series of discs from a piece of longhorn cattle horn, building up a tapering knob shape. This type of horn has a white outer layer with less distinct bands and whorls of various shades of translucent greenish grey and cream underneath. I topped it off with a couple of layers of ebony, separated by a thin band of shim brass.

The next job was to personalise the cane. I took another disk of buffalo bone and smoothed down one face to take an engraved inscription. A local engraver did the lettering (a first attempt in fancy Edwardian script failed because the material was too brittle to take the fine detail). I then filled this with black epoxy resin and embedded the disk in the top of the knob using clear polyester resin. All done!