1311 mod - well THAT worked!

fishface5

fishface5

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Feb 3, 2001
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Got a 1311 but the handle was too short and thin for me. So I did the obvious - spend a ridiculous amount of time and mess figuring out how to make my own handle for it, out of some natural micarta block and black linen micarta sheet I had around. Since it's not a full tang and there is only one hole in the tang for a pin, it took a while how to figure it out. For anyone who wants to try something similar, what I found worked for me was to make and epoxy in the piece closest to the blade first, and make sure it was trued up before adding the other parts. Man that made a lot of micarta-stink grinding that to shape!

Once I got it shaped properly it was of course time to go chop the crap out of something. Luckily my friend had a dead tree with a major branch overhanging his parking spot on the street. SYCKO to the rescue!

Now just need to do the finish-work to make it look pretty, and make some pants for decency's sake . . .
 

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looks cool, very Indonesian looking, one of those leather covered wood sheaths would be very very cool.

Great job man.
 
Very nice work! Been very tempted to do something similar with different materials, but the large ResC fits me fairly well
 
Thanks guys! This handle doesn't absorb shock like the ResC does but I only had a couple glancing blows (since chopping at a weird angle while standing on a stool) that transmitted any shock at all. For my hands this handle makes it a much better balanced and more functional tool.
 
nice job!
by any chance do you have any "work in progress" pics so I can see how wide the tang is?
I've been thinking about redoing mine with stacked birch bark.
 
I don't have any WIP photos alas, but I didn't throw away the old handle yet -- so you can see here from the indentation in the ResC that the tang runs fairly parallel around 11/16" from the butt to the index finger, then over the last 3/4" it widens out dramatically to 1.25" before exiting the handle. I did some reshaping of the tang in that area to make the transition into 1/2 of the choil (the other 1/2 is formed by the handle). I think stacked birch or leather would work well but you would probably need to put the tang-holes in the middle of the material off-center, with more material on the edge-side than on the spine-side to get the most useful handle shape for a big chopper. The trick is to have strong pieces of material at the hilt and butt, between which the bark/leather/etc can be slightly compressed and held in place.
 

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fishface5 said:
I don't have any WIP photos alas, but I didn't throw away the old handle yet -- so you can see here from the indentation in the ResC that the tang runs fairly parallel around 11/16" from the butt to the index finger, then over the last 3/4" it widens out dramatically to 1.25" before exiting the handle. I did some reshaping of the tang in that area to make the transition into 1/2 of the choil (the other 1/2 is formed by the handle). I think stacked birch or leather would work well but you would probably need to put the tang-holes in the middle of the material off-center, with more material on the edge-side than on the spine-side to get the most useful handle shape for a big chopper. The trick is to have strong pieces of material at the hilt and butt, between which the bark/leather/etc can be slightly compressed and held in place.
Click to expand...

thanks for the description with measurements -- very tempting!
 
Looks good. Glad I'm not the only one who would a little more handle on the 13.

GregB
 
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