[greybeard]

Not wishing to upset anyone here, I stopped using ivory, a high-end traditional material for fan makers, many years ago.

However, never having found a good alternative, and my early life experience in the plastics industry never pointed me towards a ready-made one, I've recently started to wonder if the EG approach might work at small scale.
The desired raw material needs to be cast with a 1mm thickness, perhaps 25mm wide, and 200mm long, and capable of being cut with a piercing saw.

Does anyone have any experience of working at this sort of scale ?

Regards all,
John

[awerby]

EG - are you talking about epoxy-granite? I can't see that working as an ivory substitute at all. For one thing, it's very difficult to cut, since the granite's so hard while the epoxy's sort of gooey. I'd suggest looking at phenolic plastics instead. There's a material marketed as "Paperstone" (here in the USA) that carves pretty well; it's a paper-reinforced phenolic. It's used for countertops, and could be cut into 1mm strips.

Of course, you could also look into more traditional materials, like beef bone; you could get a strip like that out of a femur.

[greybeard]

Hi Awerby,
Thank you for your reply.

Spoiler alert.
Please don't take this personally, but you have just triggered an 85-year old's rant.

As I have chosen to post this in the 'Epoxy-granite' forum, it's a reasonable assumption that by 'EG' I mean epoxy-granite.
However, if you read the title of my thread, I do use the words ' EG type composite'.
Trying to be succinct, I thought this might be sufficient to suggest that materials other than granite or epoxy might be considered in providing a solution.

early life experience in the plastics industry

and

never pointed me towards a ready-made one

Oddly enough, this might have indicated a familiarity with a wide range of polymers, and composites using them.

Phenolics are far too brittle in this context, but I will look at the product you mentioned

Beef bone - I don't think so. I have tried camel bone and sperm whale jaw bone, as well as mammoth ivory, but getting back to the whole justification for my posting in this forum, it is to look for synthetic alternatives.
I'm assuming that the French research in ratio and distribution of different size particles in concrete, and that led to the development of EG, which maximizes the stiffness of a resulting composite, was scalable.
If anyone has knowledge that suggests otherwise, I should be pleased to hear.

And I promise to remain calm.
John

[greybeard]

Update

I'm now developing my own version of a material produced in Germany in 2019.
When my experiments produce some results(still building my own chemistry bench equipment ! ), I'll post the results here.
John

[joeavaerage]

Hi,
there was a material that has been used as a look-a-like ivory for many years.

It was a plastic based on casein. First developed in the early 1900's it was very common through the 50's and 60's as the handle material for 'bone handled' knives and forks.

https://www.realmilkpaint.com/blog/t...asein-plastic/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...-milk-plastic/

Craig

[peteeng]

Hi GB - Look up Digory
https://www.sciencedaily.com/release...0414154935.htm calcium phospate and silicon dioxide (quartz or sand) in resin.... What is the hardness of ivory and what properties do you want? Peter

[greybeard]

joeaverage.

Casein is useful in bulk mouldings, but in thin sections, ie 1mm and less its lack of stiffness becomes an issue.

Hi Pete,
It was coming across the original work done at the Max Plank Institute that led me to Digory, the commercial outcome of that work. I contacted them to find out if they produced anything as thin as 1mm sheets, my prime requirement, but the answer was no. (Slab sawing blocks into sheets is an economical no-no.)
This led me to some earlier work, that in turn prompted me to have a go myself. I've got as far as producing a cheap form of calcium phosphate that's ivory coloured, and will soon take the final step of converting that into a solid.