I am making my first stick tang and have a question. The tang has a threaded tail end of stainless steel. I want to put a stainless pommel on it. Do I use a stainless steel nut? What do I do with the nut? Is it ground off after glue up? Is the nut recessed into a hole in the pommel and capped? Or is the pommel drilled and tapped with a bottoming tap in a blind hole kind of way? Would you believe I have looked at dozens photos here and was never able to see this and how it's finished. Thanks! Dan
Like everything else there is many ways to do it. I just happened to be working on a dagger with a hidden tang and a pommel. The picture below is my favorite way of doing a hidden tang. I like having the threaded rod not only hooked into the tang but also silver brazed. If you were going with a thin pommel you could silver braze (not silver solder) a nut to it. If I don't want to have a pommel I use a piece of 3/8 SS rod and tap one end of it. I leave it long and cut a slot in it so I can use a standard screw driver to screw it on tight. I have also kept the rod short and made a plug using a scrap piece of the handle material so that there is no nut visible on the end. See bottom pic. Hope this helps. Note: bottom pic has the ugliest sheath I have ever seen and was scrapped.
Thanks Ilya. I had never thought about being able to disassemble it like your dagger. Very cool. Again, not sure how to go about this. I have welded the stainless steel machine screw on to a slot cut in the tail end of the tang. I was thinking about drilling a tapping the pommel. Threading it on to hold things tight while the epoxy sets. Then grind the excess screw flush to the pommel. It would leave a little circle where the screw shows. The other thought was to drill and tap a blind hole in the pommel. I'd prefer the fastener to be out of sight. Dan
Looks like you are on the right track. On my dagger the pummel has a blind tapped hole. For final assembly I will fill it all with epoxy, tighten the pommel clean excess epoxy and if I don't make a mess the dagger will be done. I do still have a bit of finishing before I get to that point.
I do the same thing as Icho, I also make my own finial nuts (fancy cap nut). Like in my picture My only word of caution is welding hardenable steel is it can (not always) cause grain growth and a very brittle joint. As a side note great looking knives Icho
It certainly would not hurt, I would take it through a normalizing cycle or two. If your knife is heat treated just rig up a way to hold the blade under water and use a torch. My only experience was with welding high carbon, I never have tried stainless. If I were to try and weld high carbon again I would preheat my work piece to a dull red before. I hate to say anything but if I did not I would feel worse if I saw a thread on "what happened to my knife"
