BONES,packer bones,prairie bones,camp bones,Raw bone meal,Case-hardening bone,Fertilizer bone The dried bones from cattle and from Asiatic buffalo form an important item in international commerce. In general, organized packing plants do not ship much bone, but utilize it for the production of glue, gelatin, bone meal, and fertilizer. The bones shipped from packing plants are called packer bones, but the source of much commercial bone is slaughterhouses, local retail meat shops, and the bones from farms and fields known as prairie bones and camp bones, the latter name being from the Argentine word campo, meaning field. U.S. imported bone comes from Argentina, Canada, Uruguay, Brazil, South Africa, and India. Raw bone meal was the term for the scrap pieces and sawdust from the manufacture of these articles.
Case-hardening bone, for carbonizing steel, and bone meal, for animal feed, are processed to remove fats and prevent rancidity and are steam-sterilized. Fertilizer bone is bone meal that is of too fine a mesh for carbonizing use or for making bone black, but it is not cooked or processed and has an analysis of about 45% ammonia and 50 phosphate of lime. Knucklebones, and the hard shinbones, are preferred for gelatin manufacture. Dissolved bone, used for fertilizer, is ground bone treated with sulfuric acid, or the residue bone after dissolving out the gelatin with acid. The steamed bone meal produced as a residue by-product of the glue factories and soap factories is suitable only for fertilizer, but it contains only 1% ammonia. The steamed bone meal for animal feed is merely steam-sterilized raw bone.
Bone black, also called animal charcoal and bone char, is
charred bone ground to a fine silky powder for use as a pigment, or as a decolorizing agent for sugar and oils. It has a deep, dense, bluish-black color valued for engraving inks of depth and tone, and to give a dull velvety-black finish to coated paper. Its covering power, however, is inferior to that of carbon black, as it has only about 10% carbon, is largely calcium phosphate, and has a very high ash content. The best blacks may be treated with acid to remove the lime salts. Federal specifications for bone black for pigment require that 97.5% pass through a 325-mesh screen. For filtering, the material used is from 4 to 16 mesh. The specific gravity is 2.6 to 2.8. Bone black is made by calcining ground, fat-free, dried bones in airtight retorts.
Drop black is the spent bone black from the decolorizing of sugar, which has been washed and reground for pigment use. Ivory black, having the same uses as bone black, is made by heating the refuse of ivory, working in a closed retort, and then grinding to a fine powder. Aquablak No. 1, of Binney & Smith Co., is a water dispersion of bone black used to give a velvety-black color to inks, water paints, and leather finishes.
Bone oil, used in sheep dips and disinfectants, and in insecticides and fungicides, is a chemically complex oil with a pungent, disagreeable odor derived as a by-product in the destructive distillation of bones. It contains nitrides, pyrroles, pyridine, and aniline.
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