 Ivory Gaming With Poker Chips (8851)
All ivory gaming cane. The lathe work on this cane is unbelieveable. The loose rings were turned on the cane, and are a perfect finish and polish. I taught three years of highschool wood shop after college. I understand the concept of undercutting to separate the ring, but I wouldn't know how to finish the ring so perfectly without breaking it. Ivory is a far superior a material
to wood for carving or turning,because the grain is closed, and you can get a far smoother finish. Basicly what you can make in wood you can make in ivory. The finish on ivory is far easier to make fakes of than wood. Patena is harder to fake on wood. There are many who claim to know how to tell all the fake finishes,but I've never seen an article about how to tell them. I wouldn't claim to be know all, as that is not my area of expertise, but there are a lot of colors that are easy to tell once you see them. In repros and fakes there are some examples. Looking at the natural patena on this cane illustrates all that is right about old ivory. There are 75 original paper thin poker chips all with matching color and the exact size for the handle. The ivory ferrule is removable, with the dominos inside. The shaft is 1.2" mahogany. I think it is more difficult to age smooth ivory than ornately carved. The finish is even not blochy. Mostly antique ivory is a light yellow color. I do have one white umbrella handle that I am told was from a certain type of elephant in Africa. I don't remember where or what. White is the exception not the rule.
Let me tell you about the first piece of ivory I ever bought. It was 1971 and I was teaching school and doing antiques part time. I went to an estate sale and bought a 12” statue of a Chinese Goddess for $100, knowing nothing about it. I took it to several antique dealers to find out what it was worth. You really only learn about an item after its exposed to light. One dealer offered me a $1000, and another said there was something odd about it, but couldn’t put her finger on it. The next day she called be and told me she had just seen the identical statue at her local drug store for $5.95. It was called ivorine, a mixture of ivory dust and a form of glue. It was molded, then hand carved in China. What was so good about it was that there were no mold lines, due to the carving. It had just been invented and even the experts had not been exposed to it. One thing about reproductions, they very seldom make just one. To this day I have that statue and an entire drawer of things I’ve been cheated with, it keeps me humble.
From that I learned ivory always has grain. No grain it’s not ivory. The grain looks like lines in wood, which is directional, it’s not everywhere. The finish is smooth with no pithy marks, black indentations in the finish, which means it’s bone. The only material that has even lines over the whole piece is celluloid, a form of early plastic. If you put a hot needle in ivory nothing happens, unlike the hole and smell in celluloid.
In the top of some ivory handles you see a little black speck, it’s the nerve ending of the tusk. It means its near the point of the tusk, it’s ivory, and it’s natural. I don’t know if other ivories have it or not. Walrus ivory has matrix, and whales teeth are different yet, this is the time for experts to forward and tell us the fine points of how to tell all the different types of ivory.
Category: Gadget
Sub Category: City - Manufactured
Listed: 2006-08-02 00:01:40
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