20,000 Year Old Mammoth Tusk Restoration

hey this is cam with Blacktail studio and this week I acquire a 20 000 year old woolly mammoth tusk that I'm gonna do my best to restore despite not knowing the first thing about restoring fossils and decided to mess with my wife a little bit is this worth putting a prank on your wife there's no no cost too high you ready uh yes all right let's go you seem a little more excited than usual I am way more excited than usual I've never been this excited over a project because you can always buy more wood or always grow more wood but I will probably never get a chance to get another Mammoth desk I allowed to ask how much a mammoth test costs oh yeah it's uh I paid 7 500 for this test where did you get a mammothusk this one came from a gold mine in Alaska and we're going to pick it up from the airlines which you shipped down on I promise I actually told my wife that I was going to spend this money before I did but for some reason she got in her head that this was some sort of Mammoth sponsorship so a year later she just found out that I spent 7 500 on a Tusk and wasn't super excited about it thank you oh God it's heavy truck actually said it smells bad yeah was it heavy it was heavy I really can't understate just how bad this thing smelled I don't know if you have ever accidentally left the freezer door open went on vacation and come back a week later to find that half a cow you just purchased thought out and rotting in your sweltering garage because I have and this was worse we got the blue I didn't know this had any blue on it actually looks like it's in really good shape so this is my first look at the mammoth husk and the guy who sold it to me didn't tell me it had this blue mineral deposit on it and I'm going to say it wrong but it's called something like vivante or Vivians or something like that but it's a natural mineral deposit that's like really really desired in this Mammoth test Community if you didn't know there's a mammoth test Community there is uh cracks aren't too bad from what I was expecting what he told me is I can use these hose clamps I'll add some more and every few weeks I'll go through and I'll tighten them a little bit more as it continues to dry out because right now it's still really wet just like freshly cut wood and it actually smells really really bad so I'm gonna have to cinch this up let it dry out for probably about a year so as much as I want to start working on it Gotta Wait let's do it my original plan was just to stick this upstairs in the shop and let it dry up there but this overwhelming musk dictates that I find a better solution and we have a room where our furnace is and we call it the wine cellar despite not having any wine in it and it's not attached to the house and it stays like 55 degrees year-round so it'll be a perfect spot to dry this Tusk nice and cool without rushing that drying process foreign the Tusk had only been drying out for about a month or so at this point but you can see just how loose those hose clamps already are which means this Tusk is getting smaller which means it's getting lighter which means it's getting drier which is exactly what we want but I realized I needed to come back way more frequently than once a month to tighten these so I'm going to come back every single week and repeat this process but next time I'm not going to bring it outside [Applause] this is the closest thing to an Epic film Scott and I have got a chance to create because we knew this process was going to take at least a year Scott being the awesome filmmaker that he is had the foresight to choose the stationary shot to really immerse you in this Mammoth test drying process [Applause] something that was pretty cool but I didn't really notice it at the time was just how much smaller those cracks were getting as they continue to tighten those hose clamps down each week but by the very end so many of them had basically disappeared it was kind of like the forehead of a real housewife following a divorce they say that drying mammoth ivory is a lot like drying very dense species of woods where you want to go really slow for a long time which I did in my wine cellar and at this point the hose clamps weren't really getting any Tighter and then in theory I should be able to finish it off in a kiln just like regular wood slabs and this is Aaron up at Gobi Walnut and he knows a ton about drying stuff and he told me if I use something like a vacuum Kiln it can actually work too well suck all the water out and basically shatter the wood or the Tusk in the process so he's gonna put this in one of his lower temperature Kilns and hopefully not ruin it but he did say it's a pretty substantial risk well yeah well I'm incredibly nervous and don't say that confidence confidence is Ilana excited about the mammoth test oh no no no she doesn't she doesn't get the mammothus um and I don't get her not getting it uh she will put an old-timey bicycle from Kohl's made with child laborers that cost five dollars it means nothing to her in our house but a 20 000 year old fossil like then move the needle for has she not seen it yet no that hasn't even asked I don't think it'll do me any favors to show it to her now because it's so beat up you should get like a second crappy Tusk like out of paper you know how expensive like a paper mache yeah so like show her a crappy version and then when you see the good one yeah it'll make that the real one look even better I could make a crappy Tusk I know I could do that is this this is why we got you Scott this is why we're keeping you around carve it out of like a branch or something okay that's the chainsaw you're gonna use I know what you're doing I know what you're saying but we're only cutting like a six inch branch and anybody that uses a bigger chainsaw just for the sake of using a bigger chainsaw is overcompensating for something okay let's go [Music] all right are you gonna need a hand carrying that up there no it's no different than ready for the CrossFit you do crossword no no okay hold on saw this on Commando oh God is this worth putting a prank on your wife there's no no cost too high for that you'll learn you get married this is what keeps me going are you sure you don't need a hand never felt stronger this maple tree fell down in our backyard a couple of months ago and what I'm attempting to do is cut up something that Loosely resembles a woolly mammoth tusk and hopefully doesn't look fake but also doesn't look too good where my wife actually prefers this to the real tusk after about a month or so in the Kiln up at Goby Walnut Aaron called me and said my tusk was ready to be picked up and they were cool enough they even went through and tightened the hose clamps every couple days in the Kiln to make sure there were no problems and pretty remarkable how much smaller those cracks got from the time I first bought this Tusk and it's actually lost a lot of weight I weighed it when I first got it and it was 115 pounds I weighed it here and I weighed 89 pounds so a pretty remarkable amount of water loss since I don't really know anything about restoring tusks or fossils the first thing I did was mix up a batch of epoxy because well that's just what I do and my idea is that I will stabilize any loose or crumbly Parts with that epoxy so then I can go through start sanding and then filling those cracks okay I suppose I should address the mammoth in the room here and that is the ethical concern of using the ivory from such a rare animal as decoration in my home and I'd had some people tell me that the pita crowd was probably going to be furious with me for using this mammoth ivory and initially I thought they were kidding but then I remembered when that other content creator posted the picture of him with the Triceratops and the internet shutdown calling for his head so I don't want to give anybody too much credit here but I'm a little excited I'll get those comments but also slightly terrified I meant to mention this earlier but we have a huge giveaway we're doing as a part of this mammoth-usk restoration I have an actual chunk of this mammoth tusk that I polished up and mounted on a plaque it is really cool looking we're also giving away the brass hammer and the marking knife that I sell it's free to enter it's free shipping worldwide and if you think that I'm just doing this is trying to buy my way out of Getting firebombed By Peta you're only partially right is this the uh final color it's gonna be no the epoxy was just to harden it up I'm actually really excited because these will vary from like a chocolate brown to like like white and all kinds of different colors I don't know what this is going to be can you see me smiling under it I don't know why it's so much fun for me but like yeah it like stands down and you can see the ivory it's a light color oh which I don't know I like them all but I'm pretty excited if you're wondering what it's like to sand this giant chunk of ivory first off the smell is absolutely overpowering and it's a different smell than it was early on this is like the dental office of your nightmares that grinding drilling enamel smell you get at the dentist it was that but times like ten thousand it was pretty unbearable and as far as how hard it was to sand I looked up the Mohs scale and ivory rates somewhere just a little bit harder than aluminum brass bronze copper the non-ferrous metal so it does not sound easy is what I mean it's not quite as hard as grinding iron or steel but it's much much harder than sanding through wood during this mammoth tusk restoration process I have gone down some deep rabbit holes learning about them and there's some crazy cool stuff out there like apparently in the 18 and early 1900s these carcasses which sometimes surface and Siberia and the locals would feed them to their sled dogs which is crazy there's even one report where they fed it to people at a banquet but that was proven to be largely an urban legend but got me wondering would you eat woolly mammoth and what's the weirdest thing you have eaten I'll go first nutria is mine so I had about a year to prep for this mammoth tusk and so I did a ton of samples and I found I got deep into some website I don't remember a website and somebody mentioned something about mixing bone Ash and epoxy to make faux Ivory so that's what I've been doing I've been doing these different samples mixing bone Ash which is what it sounds like it's burnt bones and different colors to try to match this Ivory and I think I'm gonna do similar to what I do with Walnut where I'm going to do kind of a darker Hue like I'm not gonna try to match the ivory perfectly so I'll pick some of those dark chocolate tones mix up the bone Ash and the dye and then just kind of the small sections that way foreign through the research I did leading up to this I found a few Tusk restoration shops out there that were absolutely world class the skills they had were something I would never be able to match however it was kind of sad to see that I would say the majority of tusks that I saw for sale over the last year were absolute hack jobs it looked like they just filled cracked with Automotive Bondo ground the tips down so they didn't even resemble a Tusk anymore and then sprayed them with a thick shiny lacquer just this plasticky feel and I am terrified that mine is going to look like that so I am painstakingly going through every possible step I can to hopefully be in that upper tier even though I know I'm never going to be as good as some of those guys yeah we're gonna believe what I just got in the mail what what is it look at this look at this and look at this this is pure bone Ash we've been using stepped on bone Ash this whole time and I didn't know how good bone Ash could be so I'm not gonna do anything but if you sell the wrong person stepped on bone Ash without Tom bad things happen this allergy season is killing me my videos generally get a couple million views and if there is one thing that motivates me and sustains me as a content creator to keep making videos is that with that large of sample size somewhere in the world somebody time this video just perfectly wronged that an employer or a pastor or a parent walked in at just the wrong time and now you're frantically trying to explain to them that you're actually watching a video on a mammoth tusk restoration that's what keeps me going as you might expect filling hundreds of tiny Pits on a round surface is a rather painstaking process but over the years I've learned to have lots of patience and red cups if this is the first video you've ever seen in mine first off welcome to the channel second off I think it's probably a little too early for you to subscribe because you might find my lack of fossil content slightly alarming after seeing this first video that said if you've seen other videos of mine and you like those and you also like this one I feel like you're pretty safe to subscribe and I would really appreciate it if you did it's exhausting how's it looking does it look how you thought it would actually pretty excited yeah this side looks awesome the other side has more cracks which I mean it's a 20 000 year old Mammoth test sure very happy with the like brown color you chose it's it's in my wife's color story okay she loves those like this color of her cat okay uh it's that kind of like cream with like medium Browns um I think she's gonna like the overall color but she's not gonna like the splotchiness of it but she'll learn to love it looks cool oh yeah I didn't notice that I will admit I'm pretty disappointed with how much of that blue mineral deposit the vivante however you say it ended up getting sanded off I would have loved to have it more of a blue Tusk however it was such a thin flaky layer I don't know how I could have kept it and also had a solid Tusk and next up though I'm creating a metal stand but of course I'm making it more difficult than I have to so I have to drill a hole right down the center of it I looked at hundreds of Mammoth stands when I was trying to figure out how I wanted to mount mine and none of them really captured exactly the look I was going for so the look that I'm going for is kind of this floating design but to accomplish that I have to drill an extra large hole right down the middle of this Tusk a 1.25 inch hole about 9 to 10 inches down the solid Ivory Center so this is how I rigged it up let's see if it works who do you think uh an hour for that setup probably about that what do you think our chances of success are normally I'd say 100 because I like the Optimus but this time you don't like being optimistic like 20 percent I don't uh yeah that's still optimistic all right let's get I got this speed all the way down um see what happens [Music] [Laughter] [Music] 200 not 150 is the RPM for ivory something's good [Music] four is better if you've seen my videos over the last few months you've probably seen me talk about the new M3 Nano system and if you don't know M3 Nano is a nanoprotective layer that goes over any wood finish and it's compatible with all wood finishes from hard wax oil to shellac and everything in between and it will not only improve the color and the contrast and the look of it but most importantly the protection and what I'm really excited about is that the review videos are starting to come out on YouTube and I won't even leave a link in the video description of a specific review because I want you to search it and find it on your own and none of these are sponsored but they're saying what I've been saying all along and it is really exciting to see this feedback from The Woodworking Community that's already given me so much so I highly encourage you to search those out and we started initially with just a hard coat and a top coat but now we have a total Craftsman kit that has the hard coat top coat a pre-cleaner that won't mess with any wood finish you have as well as a maintenance spray that'll keep it looking beautiful for years to come when you need something extremely custom-made it can be very challenging just to find a Craftsman to even take the job on so for this stand I had to call some favors in and I guess I haven't actually done favors for them yet but this is how the favorite trains start so big thanks to Ace Metal Works the kid I went to high school with or because he's a 40 year old guy I went to high school with but he's super cool guy down in Albany got everything cut out for me and this is Joe with Otter's Customs Fab Joe is an incredible hot rod Craftsman he builds quarter million dollar cars in his garage he's booked out to 2025 but if you want an amazing car you should check out his stuff I will leave links to both their Instagram pages in the video description below my original idea was this was going to be my first welding project I was going to teach myself to weld on this stand project and after seeing Joe work on this I am so glad I had a real professional doing this because there was way more to it and this test weighs about 90 pounds but it's not just those 90 pounds that I have to worry about I also have to worry about the toddlers that come and visit our house that put their hands on everything so this has to be extremely strong strong enough that I don't get sued and Joe did an incredible job there is zero deflection in this and for the edge profile I told him I was just gonna hit it with a flap disc when I got home he said that would not do it all so he hand scribed and then hand chamfered this which I can't make this clean of a chamfer with a router bit and he did that all by hand so pretty incredible stuff you know this is strong enough I know it's strong enough but I want to show people that this is strong enough can I stand on this oh yeah no problem Tusk is 90 pounds I'm 190. so if I could stand on this we think it should handle anything that'll come to it right yeah okay to lean on yeah ready Scott Yep this could get awkward or for Joe if I break it there's zero Flex in that oh no hands I think we're good there is no it didn't wiggle at all let's throw a test on there most people have no idea how hard it is to get something this sturdy and this substantial that looks so minimal but Joe absolutely knocked this out of the park huge thanks to him at Otter's custom Fab as well as Ryan over at Ace Metal Works and if you're wondering how I'm actually going to attach this test to the stand it's going to be adhesive my original idea is to use construction adhesive which should be strong enough to hold it there but not so strong that I couldn't remove it someday down the line I'm in the home stretch of finishing up this mammoth tusk but Scott got a well-deserved vacation this week which means for the first time in over a year I'm completely on my own and I feel like that's fine though I filmed a hundred plus videos all on my own but if any of the footage suffers because Scott isn't here that's it kidding me even though I felt like I was almost finished I forced myself to take a step back and focus on the little things just like I would on one of my tables for a paying client so I spent probably about a day day and a half just smoothing out all these little aspects these little things that nobody is really going to notice but I will this side of the Tusk is handed to 400 grit and the polishing process happens so slow but it's kind of hard to tell the transition so I'm gonna do one quick section where I'm gonna send it all the way up to the 2000 grit so you can really see the contrast from this kind of really dull 400 grit to the 2000 Grit thank you foreign [Music] this is why I can't imagine why anybody would spray this with a lacquer or a varnish because this Ivory polishes up so nice and it was incredibly time consuming which I guess is probably why more people don't do it but I did run into another problem here that Discounters stepped on bone ash left little particulates of white dots and I have an idea how to fix it though some of you are probably clutching your pearls right now because you can't imagine anybody using a Sharpie on an ancient Tusk like this but I bet I can change your mind if you didn't know a Sharpie is basically just a form of dye and I used dye on that bone Ash when I was putting it in there and that probably didn't bother you either so this is just a highly concentrated highly specific dye and I got this series of different Brown Sharpies and I'm using it to just kind of flow it in and keeping it as natural as I can and in the end I'm actually really really pleased with how it turned out and I actually have no shame using a Sharpie at the end I use this little tortillion as an art tool I remember from my 8th grade art class hit it with a sander lightly and it looked I want to say perfect but it looked really good I don't often get a work with construction adhesive but when I do I usually love working with it because it's just a remarkable substance to me I'm always working with epoxy and having to mix that stuff up so having a single part system that has this much holding power and will last basically forever is pretty remarkable to me however it was not the right adhesive to use on this project and I'll explain why in just a minute but for now I got it clamped in place and the next day I came through and I was applying a coat of the M3 hard coat and this is just to protect it from fingerprints and Spills and just smudges from people and I felt a little bit of wobble in there and I really didn't feel comfortable that it was going to be sturdy enough right well it's been about 30 hours since we put the construction adhesive on and I'm just not confident in it if I'm going to keep this forever I don't want that much wiggle in it and it's not the bar it's just the uh adhesive I used so now I gotta try to pull it all the way off and clean it up and do this over again but I don't know if it's even going to come off so wish me luck the problem with using construction adhesive here is because it's not a two-part system like an epoxy it requires the air to cure and it doesn't cure in its own little tube of caulk and so I essentially took it from one tube and shoved it into another airtight tube being that hole I drilled in the inside of this Mammoth husk so this was all completely gummy and it would have likely stayed like this forever because it had no access to the air so that was my mistake shouldn't have used this construction adhesive and I do have an ace at my sleeve this is some silica filler with Marine epoxy this stuff will hold the Mast on a boat the only downside is it will likely never come off but I don't really think I'll ever plan on taking it off so I am very very confident this will hold it on just not as confident in me Ever Getting It Off so you are gonna love this I bet how would you describe your dream fossil ready for your dream fossil that's the word for it wow have you been described with me this whole time because I would never that is not a tusk of any kind hopefully at all like are you kidding look at this this Sharpie is spreading I thought that would turn out better so you you didn't spend seven thousand dollars on a Tusk because that would be amazing uh I have another surprise for you this is your real dream fossil okay so you did spend the money on this I did spend the money but like that at least looks like a fossil still very tree-like right yeah got the devil's curve going on here I know I know your style it's greasy it is I'll give you a moment to be honest do you do you hate it are you happy with the face I am extraordinarily happy with it and fairly often people will hear the jokes I say in these videos and tell me how bad they feel for my wife that she has to put up with my immature and borderline misogynistic sense of humor but if you heard how she described this Tusk as girthy veiny and with a devil's curve should be some evidence that she's actually way worse than me during this restoration I was shocked to find out that not everybody loves Mammoth husks as much as I do so every week I like to give a little bit of credit to people who make it all the way to the end of the video so this week start your question or comma with either yes or no to whether or not you would have a Tusk in your house thanks so much have a great week play not be in the house

Channel: Blacktail Studio

Views: 1,021,117

Keywords: mammoth tusk, mastadon tusk, tool restoration, fossil restoration, ivory, scrimshaw, how to restore a mammoth tusk, blue mammoth tusk, polishing ivory, fossil hunting, boneyard alaska, joe rogan, joe rogan mammoth, ice age restoration

Id: bhj33-ZhTFA

Length: 27min 45sec (1665 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 06 2023