I have a couple large Herford range bull horns with all the rough scale on them. What is the best method of removing the scale to get down to working on the horns?
I get a fair number of horns from our grazing range and that of neighbors in the Southwest each year, and they're often quite scaly. Rasps proffer the sincere potential of cutting too deeply, leaving you to chase scratches and scrapes to tarnation and back.
I have had the best luck by far scraping them, mostly from the butt to the tip. I formerly used a large butcher knife held with the edge 90 degrees to the horn, but with time have worked my way down to a good-sized pocket knife. It's much easier to hold the horn in one hand and manipulate a small knife than a larger one, and only the same amount of blade contacts the horn whether a large knife or a somewhat smaller one is used.
Best of all, scraping is much faster than rasping, even without consideration of the time required to remove all the rasp marks. Then there's the elimination of the potential for creating flats, as can happen unless great vigilance is applied along with the rasp.
