After my blog post yesterday I decided it was high time I tested the Ring and Dot tool on something other than wood. The results were great. As you can see the tool did work but there were some unexpected things in the working.1) The centre point is to long. I had to start the hole with the centre point then use course and fine pointed files to deepen the hole so I could dig in with the outer tips to make the rings. It took forever. To do all five decorations took three hours. Definitely slow and it took a lot of patience to continue.
2) Some sections of the bone were slightly softer than others making it easier to dig deeper into the bone itself. the first ring and dot, the one at the top of the cross near the belt end, is deeper than the others because the files were able to dig the centre hole deeper.
3) Because the centre hole was deeper more of the outer points cut in making a wider ring. I actually like the wider rings but was not able to replicate it on all of them.
After I made my designs I added some tung oil to some iron oxide, made from an "Indian Paint Pot" a geological oddity that is essentially a piece of iron ore encased in a shell of rock, to create a orange red pigment to dye the strap end and make the decorations really stand out. Amazingly enough today's picture actually shows just how polished the ash and fabric made the strap end. The red line along the bottom is a small crack in the bone that I could not remove with carving and polishing. Once the tung oil is dried, three or four days, I will try to remove the staining with another concentrated polish.
Now on to the Glorious Find as I call it. I contacted a re-enactment group, at the suggestion of another person in the White Wold Fian, that had some photos of wood working and bone working tools on the gallery page. The owner of the pictures was kind enough to respond to my question by pointing me to Deagrad Tools, a company that specializes in making Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Viking, and other period tool reproductions. Their main site is in the UK but they had an ebay site that was much easier to shop from. They had a replica Medieval Pump Drill with a small Ring and Dot tool and a 3mm drill bit that is specifically designed to work on bone and antler. I have ordered it and hope it arrives soon.
I have also commissioned a Ring and Dot tool and Drill Bit from another semi-localish smith who has made the tools in the past and has more experience with tools of this nature. I have also asked my local smith to recreate the tools I got from him using a different type of steel. It may seem ridiculous to have so many different sets of the same tools but I look at this as a learning experience. I can look at the different methods, steel, and functionality of tools made by different people. One from a smith who is making the tools based on line drawings from books, another set from a smith who has made similar tools in the past that are know to work correctly, and finally a set made by a company who's sole business model is to reproduce tools from the period presumably for the experimental archaeological and professional re-enactor groups.
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