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Just a thought, would vegans have an issue with nuts/saddles made from shed antlers? Perhaps elk? The animals naturally shed their antlers yearly, so no harm to them, obviously..
One of the first guitars I built, I was about 15 years old, had an elk antler nut.

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How many people even know that deer, elk, etc., shed their antlers every year? My guess - darn few. And I bet antler would make an excellent nut - after all, it makes great knife scales.

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

That’s a great idea Aaron, thank you.

I would never do that to you Josh my friend I like you Now if I didn't like you......

We have a practice of only referring people to people we vetted so our value add helps them. If they are someone who we would not want to deal with we won't refer and will get off the phone with them right away. Next.

To be clear we spend a great deal of time with our customers and do extra and special things for them. Dismissing someone is not our bag but we also recognize that we are not for everyone and won't let them ruin our day.

Dave was impressed and said so the first time I denied service to someone on the phone because when I asked them if they are OK wearing a mask in our non-public, private shop and they pushed back I simply said then have a good day, hung up and got back to the guitar I was working on.

Medium rare please

Good point Chris. We tried it and still have some deer blanks here, it was too soft and way softer than cow bone. Think toe nail that's about how hard antler material is so it's pretty soft.

Hi Aaron we tried it and it's too soft but good idea and renewable as well.

If you cut it from the base of a really large elk antler, and section it correctly without getting into the “marrow” (not sure if that is the correct word for this case) it is plenty dense, and works pretty well.
An additional saturation of thin cyanoacrylate glue hardens it a bit more. Definitely more work, maybe not practical, but an option in a shortage of other options..

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We tested it and it was very soft and of course we are not using marrow or areas that were more porous than others. It is toe nail plain and simple and it grows about that fast too which is indicative of it's lack of density.

Lots of things will work as a nut but not all that many substances stack up to requirements for being durable, attractive, sustainable, available, workable, not political... and for those who buy in to it tonally superior.

We find quality cow bone from cows that use their legs, free ranging cows and unbleached, multi year treated as well (it's a process) to be as good as it gets and that's all we will agree with work with.

Hesh, are you talking about horn or antler? I have seen lots of horn sold as nut blanks. If I have not seen antler. I ask because you refer to it as like fingernail. Horn is basically fingernail. Antler is bone, though probably my much softer than cow femur. The antlers I have see. Are fairly “spongy” throughout but the tips/ends seem to be pretty solid. A larger deer/elk may provide enough dense material for a nut (I really don’t know). Sourcing and processing would probably not be worth it in general but it may be worth it to honor this special request.

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Bryan Bear PMoMC

Take care of your feet, and your feet will take care of you.

I also wonder if mother of pearl would be considered vegan.. Shells that are found, rather than the harvested mollusk.
(Genuine) Lignum Vitae wood might work well for a nut. It is very hard (obviously still inferior to bone) and has sort of a smooth, waxy texture that may have some benefits as string slots..

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Guitar Maker and Purveyor of the World's Finest Tonewoods
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Hesh I'm very curious to know if you or Dave have ever applied your UV-cured dental fill material to a nut made of anything other than bone?

Wouldn't a Corian + dental filled nut be just as durable as a bone + dental filled one, considering that the strings would be riding in the dental fill reinforced slots in both cases?

I fully respect your choices of materials and I'm not presenting this as an argument for how you should do things, I'm just genuinely curious to know if you've already tried this before and what the results were. Any chance to learn from you and Dave is super valuable as far as I'm concerned.

Leo

Both, neither is hard enough in our experience. We have some "black rams horn" blanks, obviously horn from LMI. We thought it might be a good alternative to black tusq but we don't like it either because it's WAY softer than bone. Looks just like black plastic too when polished.

We really dial in a nut as I say over and over here taking the slots very low. As such we need a durable material that will not wear though the last thou of height over a fret quickly. So for us nothing is better than quality bone.

We have tried elk, ram, fossilized mammoth, pretty much everyone that you find in these discussions and we always go back to bone. That's our experience and it's considerable.

Hey Leo - great questions and the answers are yes. I do a LOT of guitars a week and keep metrics. I'm going in now at 4:00 AM because there are seven waiting for me. Some will get a dental fill on a nut slot that is too low. I do this nearly every day.

So I have filled pretty much everything from plastic to original Iv*ry nuts on vintage Martins with dental fillings. It works well in my experience on everything.

How I fill is important. I acid etch, carve mechanical dovetails in the existing slot with fine nut files and then fill. So my fillings are mechanically connected to the nut and chemically bonded as well. Have not lost one yet.

So yes many other materials can be filled too and that is when preservation may be important in that removing a nut on a pristine vintage instrument may be unnecessarily invasive when we can fill.

As a point of interest Santana likes his nut slots filled with brass so he has different looks to the nuts on the various guitars that he plays but can have the brass tone if he wants it. What is the brass tone? Beats me.

Now I need to ask, how do you fill a nut slot with brass?

I dunno who did or does it for him and we don't use brass either but Carlos likes to have brass lined slots on his nuts.

I've also used Tusq, seems to work well.