The How to Make a Shepherds Crook site

The first thing I want to look at before we start is the one thing that is going to drive you to distraction and make you ask why you ever started with the idea of making a shepherds crook.

Namely, rams horn. Rams horn comes in many shapes and sizes. Not all of it is suitable for crook making.  

However as rams horn can sometimes be difficult for the novice to find, it would pay to know just a little about what you may be offered in the name of rams horn.

Most of the horn for offer on sites like "ebay" will be from hill breeds. It would be worth doing a little research and learning about the horned variety of sheep we have in this country. As I have mentioned not all horn will be suitable, and that will generally be down to the size and weight of the horn, the age of the horn at the time of departure from the ram, and then the cross section of the horn.

It would be fair to say that a horn unsuitable for a crook may make a very nice trout stick. So its horses for courses with horn.

Take a look at the pics below. The first photo is of a horn that will only make a very small handle for an ordinary walking stick. The hole in the end is rather large and the wall thickness is a little thin. It would be difficult for a novice to form this horn without the thin walls folding over.

This is the ideal horn for the beginner. Buy loads of these, at the right price of course and use them for practise. Use poor horns like these to learn what you can do with the horn and what the horn will allow you to do.

You will learn and come to appreciate how much heat to use on the horn before it starts to move.

At this time you will start to build up the various blocks and jigs you will eventually need to work horn.

Although it suprises some folk how little in the way of blocks, formers and presses you really need to produce a handle in horn.  

I am going to try and show on this site the most simple approach to producing a crook head in rams horn.

The next picture shows a very large horn, about 29 inches long. The walls are about as thin as you would want to go, and while the hole is on the large side, it can be closed with time, patience and experience. This horn could be cut back a little to increase the wall tickness and still produce a ornate crook. If you find horns like these save them for when you have learnt to work horn.

Now we come to a horn that is probably the ideal once you are ready to make that first show crook.

This horn will be about 20 inches long and well proportioned. The cross section is almost triangular, which will help as you work the horn. The wall thickness is a result of the amount of horn removed. The further along the horn you cut, the thicker the walls become, until you end with solid horn.

As we cannot afford to cut back to the solid horn and lose the length we need,  we have to make a  compromise between the length saved and some work to close the hole left, and this is where the wall thickness is important. The thicker the walls and the smaller the hole the easier it will be to make this end of the horn a solid piece through heat and pressure.

Finally a horn that is not ideal but could with care make a small  crook or market stick. To a novice crook maker I would say stay away from this type of horn until you feel you can close the hole up without it folding, and believe me it will do everything it can to try and fold over. But with enough packing a lot of patience even this can be closed up and made into a handle.

So far we have just looked at the size of  the horn, the wall thickness and the size of the hole.

Next we need to look at the other side of the horn in the pictures. The side we cannot see in these shots. I have mentioned a triangular cross section, but a lot of the horn you will see for sale will have a very defined concave side to it. This will be the side that grew along side the rams face.

This concave can be a problem. There are ways to minimise its effect on the final finish of the horn, but to start with as a novice if you can avoid these horns then do so. But do come back and learn to handle them at a later date. 

Now the concave problem. The photo below shows a horn with a pronounced concave side. The problem with this is that the horn has a memory of its shape and after we have heated and flattened the horn and progressed on to the bulking operation the horn just wants to fold over and follow its old memory of being concave.

There are a couple of things that can be done to ease the problem. The first is to use some home made wooden blocks as shown further down the page. These are gauged out to follow the curve of the horn, and once the horn has been heated it is placed on a corresponding block and put in a press so that the concave horn is forced in to the gauged out channel in the wooden block.

This procedure is only as good as the wooden block being used at the time. Another thing that may help, and this all depends on each individual horn is to remove some of the bead which creates the concave . After early boiling,flattening and pressing in the wooden blocks, you should be able to squeeze up the top or crown of the horn without too much of it folding over.

The only thing now to be aware of is obvious damage to the horn. If it just practise horn then ok buy whatever you can and at as cheap a price as possible. When it comes to buying horn for serious crook making then watch out for such damage as holes being bored by the farmer/shepherd through the horn.

Also watch out for any kind of damaged caused by the ram itself, such as aggresive rubbing of the horn against walls etc to remove parasites. There may even be evidence of damage caused by fighting and butting other rams. This kind of damage will leave a blood blister in the horn, and in the worst case the blister will be an actual cavity. Low grade damage just causes blushing of the horn, which I quite like.

A good practise is to soak your horns in a water bleach solution, this will clean most of the muck off the horn and allow you to inspect the horn more closely.

Thats it for another night.

Cheers Joe.

www.wrencountrysticks.co.uk