Friday, November 19, 2010

Making it comfortable

Almost but not quite finished.

So here's how it was this morning:





I rarely make a knife where I don't do something new for the first time. One of the things this go-around was using a fairly aggressive (36 grit, I think) sandpaper wheel on my angle grinder to rough out the handle. In this picture, you can see that I have the sandpaper wheel backed with a worn flapwheel.



This really ate it down in a hurry. Saved a lot of time and clogging at the belt grinder. Had to be careful not to mess up the handle, though.





Then, off to the belt grinder.



After getting the end of the handle fairly close to where I wanted it, I drilled the lanyard hole.





I left myself some wiggle room in thickness so I could grind down past any splintering from the drill coming through the wood. There was a little bit, so I worked on the belt grinder some more.



There was a bump in the Filipino ebony where the index finger goes. I took it out with the four-in-hand rasp before smoothing on the belt grinder.





The lanyard hole was going to be lined with a metal thong tube, the second time I had tried this, and the first time I had used "official" thong tube material.



I tried to flare the ends with some flaring tools I had made and used on the other thong tube, but this was much sterner stuff, and actually began to dig into the flaring tools more than flaring! I ended up peining lightly, which did the trick, then grinding over the outside.



After some more time at the belt grinder, this is where it stands now:

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