Leonard wrote: > I once met a violin maker who used glass for his scrapers. He would >let a pane fall from vertical to flat on the floor, and insisted he was able >to find among the pieces scrapers for any radius surface he was working.
A friend of mine, a cabinetmaker who taught me much about woodwork, used to use pieces of glass as scrapers as well. He didn't go to the bother of dropping a pane of glass as he also did some work with stained glass windows and had plenty of broken bits lying about. > No one has mentioned stone tools for cutting. In recent years some >surgeons have used flint blades with great success. I believe the >microcrsytaline structure of flint provides a much finer edge (no >serrations) than metals. Perhaps a geologist/anthropologist can elucidate >on this. I recall seeing a show on the Discovery Channel many years ago where an anthropologist enlisted the aid of a surgeon and a flint napper to try and recreate stone age tools in order to better study the tools our prehistoric ancestors used. The flint napper created some "scalpels" out of flint and obsidian and the surgeon went to work on some animal carcasses. The surgeon later evaluated the quality of the stone age "scalpels" to be as good or better (especially the obsidian) than modern ones. Regards, Craig To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
