I have been working on an 8" filleting knife. Chugging right along. The piece of wood decides to... So back to making a new handle.
New. Stabilized dyed blue curly maple. A little bit more fine paper finesse work and a cutting edge and she's ready for a sheath.
Crying shame. Me being the cheap @ss that I am would have rounded the back edge on both sides to match the chip. But Mcgyvering something is never beautiful.
Looks good Dan - great work. A couple of questions if that's ok - I'm trying to learn so I know what to do when I do the same thing. Where the original scales stabilized? They obviously weren't blue so did you grind both scales off and change material?
The original "Awwwww Snap!" scales were sold as stabilized cross-cut spalted maple. I got this block from a vendor in Russia. This set of scales were cut from quite deep in the middle of a larger block, so I'd call them "partially stabilized." I guess stabilized can be a vague term. I should have known. Spalted is weak and cross-cut is weak. In hindsight, the both of them together was asking for trouble. For deconstruction, I took the opportunity to learn something. Instead of attacking the scales with the grinder, I drove the pins out and used a heat gun to soften the epoxy and pried off the scales and then the fibre spacer material. Epoxy starts to soften around 80°C. The fibre spacers were tough to scrape off, even with the heat. I ended up cleaning all the extra holes in the tang with a drill and various sizes of bits. After a soak with some acetone and a wire brush, the tang was pretty clean. It wasn't easy to do, but it was reassuring knowing that my epoxy and construction techniques makes for handles that aren't going to fall apart anytime in the foreseeable future. I scuffed the tang with sandpaper before attaching the new scales. The blue maple ones are from WoodStabilzer.com in B.C. Dan
Good to know. I'm sure I'm going to get a chance to use it at some point. Lucky you had a chance to deal with it now rather than later from a buyer. As an aside, thanks for your help on the poor Man's Etcher. Here's a picture of the finished product. Now I just need to figure out times - I'm kind of boiling off my nail polish. https://photos.app.goo.gl/6ffAz7JhZvL34jpi6 God I hate this website for photos. Obviously I'm doing something wrong cause others are doing it. I use Google photos and share the photo but can't ever get the photo itself - always the link
Ya, I just attempted to copy the image from Photos and it didn't work. What I do is create a draft blog post in Blogger and insert the photo there. Then select and copy the image. Come here and paste. Dan
Don't want to hijack your post - just want to try this. Maybe I just don't understand Google https://photos.app.goo.gl/5m2XMHMkzDpnKZc69
The share link in Photos (and many other image hosting sites) is to a web page and not the image itself. This is because there's often ads on this web pages. The image button here in the post editor is expecting an image. Like the .jpg or .png, not the HTML web page. Looks good by the way. My "method" is etch 10/wait 10, etch 10 wait 10, mark 10. After listening to radio station WWV for years, I am pretty good at counting in seconds so no timers required.
