Last summer I carved myself a belt buckle out of a beef bone originally packaged as a dog chew toy. I was inspired by a few different finds, but mostly this one from York.
Nice, simple, strong and not covered with more typical anglo saxon or viking era carvings (which are nice, don't get me wrong. I just didn't have the right tools at the time to replicate them, but a graver should be coming in soon...).
I don't have any progress pictures, but my process was fairly simple. My bone was not cleaned, so that was the first step. I soaked the bone in soapy water for about a week, and was able to strip off the bone membrane and mystery chunks. My trusty coping saw worked to rough out the shape, and I used a power drill to make my interior hole. It was summer, so I took a dremel outside to do my second stage of shaping (wear filtration! Bone fragments and your lungs are NOT friends!). I finished with a file, and the whole process really didn't take as long as I was afraid it would. The pin that holds the tongue to the buckle was my next-to-the-last step, and it was pretty tedious. The pin itself is a piece of 16 ga steel wire that had been twisted for rigidity, and I drilled the hole with a hand twist drill. A drill press would have been the saner option, but I've never let that stop me before!
The last step was attaching the buckle (and strap end) to the leather. While a medieval person who could only afford a bone belt buckle would probably just have stitched it down, I went with rivets because hitting things with a hammer is fun.
You can see what look like nail heads on the back of my metal. I made those by heating the ends of the rod with a torch until pretty much molten, and then tapping it down square on a rock. I call them cheater rivets, and they mean I didn't have to add extra mass on my strap end with any other sort of backer (trying to peen a rivet directly to leather is about as useful as trying to nail water to a tree).
In progress. I saw the rod to about 1/8" sticking out, and then hit with the round side of a peening hammer to spread that end of the rod out, fixing it in place. I was a bit more ginger with this than I am with metal on metal applications, as too much spread would split the bone.
Yay! No do-overs needed! There was a brass backer behind the buckle itself, and both sides of the rod are rounded.
Nice, simple, strong and not covered with more typical anglo saxon or viking era carvings (which are nice, don't get me wrong. I just didn't have the right tools at the time to replicate them, but a graver should be coming in soon...).
I don't have any progress pictures, but my process was fairly simple. My bone was not cleaned, so that was the first step. I soaked the bone in soapy water for about a week, and was able to strip off the bone membrane and mystery chunks. My trusty coping saw worked to rough out the shape, and I used a power drill to make my interior hole. It was summer, so I took a dremel outside to do my second stage of shaping (wear filtration! Bone fragments and your lungs are NOT friends!). I finished with a file, and the whole process really didn't take as long as I was afraid it would. The pin that holds the tongue to the buckle was my next-to-the-last step, and it was pretty tedious. The pin itself is a piece of 16 ga steel wire that had been twisted for rigidity, and I drilled the hole with a hand twist drill. A drill press would have been the saner option, but I've never let that stop me before!
The last step was attaching the buckle (and strap end) to the leather. While a medieval person who could only afford a bone belt buckle would probably just have stitched it down, I went with rivets because hitting things with a hammer is fun.
You can see what look like nail heads on the back of my metal. I made those by heating the ends of the rod with a torch until pretty much molten, and then tapping it down square on a rock. I call them cheater rivets, and they mean I didn't have to add extra mass on my strap end with any other sort of backer (trying to peen a rivet directly to leather is about as useful as trying to nail water to a tree).
In progress. I saw the rod to about 1/8" sticking out, and then hit with the round side of a peening hammer to spread that end of the rod out, fixing it in place. I was a bit more ginger with this than I am with metal on metal applications, as too much spread would split the bone.
Yay! No do-overs needed! There was a brass backer behind the buckle itself, and both sides of the rod are rounded.
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