Beast of a Sabatier Rehandle, WIP, pic heavy!

[jameson2]

so my buddy, a chef here in town, was rooting around in an old shed behind his restaurant and came across this:

it's an old, beat up Veritable Sabatier, i'm interested in any info about the knife, if there are any french knife geeks out there.. here's the mark (notice the fine hammer work on the spine, this knife is a user!):

the blade next to a straightedge, looks like deep ocean on a rough day:

as you can see, it's lacking in the ergonomic department, so he decided he wanted a handle. I like to use pins instead of rivets, so the first order of business was to clean up that rust and drill out those teeny rivet holes to make room for some beefy brass:

BEFORE

AFTER

i've got some nice bird's eye maple still, conditioned in my shop for almost 2 years, so i figured i'd give that a go. he wants the handle dark, and i'll deal with that later..

i wish you could see the action going on in this wood, it's not even sanded here and it's still purdy:

HOLES DRILLED:

i don't have a pic of me cutting the pins, but here's my super high tech pin crowning machine in action.. all precision!

and the super high precision pin truing device, the tolerances are mind blowing!

pins in the block:

and finally, the handle glued up with 12 ton epoxy, good night knife, see you in the morning:

MORE TO COME..

 

[Matthew Gregory]

I have one just like this sitting in a box in the basement, in need of new scales, as well... I'll be interested to see how this turns out! How did you match the slight radius where the wood meets the integral bolster?

 

[jameson2]

handle is stable, looks like everything set nice. hogging with the 36 grit:

refining on the 80, these blaze belts make short work of anything:

rough finish on the 220:

hokay. no pics of me filing/hand sanding because i was the only one there and i think you have all probably seen sanding. finished to 600 grit by hand and touched up the bolster with a 1200 grit soft belt on the grinder. now it's time for color.

he wants it black. i want to do something close to that but still let the figure come through a bit, so i decide to try some sumi ink as a dye:

if you haven't worked with sumi, it's nice and thin so it soaked in well, but it's BLACK, like opaque-black-right-now:

4 coats of sumi with lots of rubbing after they dry, then hit the handle with the buffer (sorry, this is not the best pic but it's the only one i took at the time):

couple more coats of sumi and another buffing, then i cleaned up the mess with acetone. these are pics of the buffed finish with 4 or 5 coats of beeswax-linseed oil-mineral spirits:

and moses wandering around on the drafting table, he likes it up there, much to my chagrin:

i don't have any pics of the edge work, but you probably couldn't see it much anyway with my photos.. one of the pics with it on the grinder after the dye job shows about as much as i think possible. i had to chop the bolster down maybe 1.5mm, but this is something i do to most any european style knife with the bigass bolster so you can reach the edge with the stones.

DONE!

now to wait 3 months for the linseed oil to dry :barf:

i really enjoyed this project, i think the new pants fit well with the beat up look of the knife. i like working on old stuff like this. please critique!

 

[jameson2]

How did you match the slight radius where the wood meets the integral bolster?

TLAB engineering, just trial and error moving the grinder's table a wee bit at a time. the angle was fairly easy to deal with, it was getting the inside radius from that angle to the tang right that took the time.

edit: i just realized that the radius was your question, hah! after i had the angle cut, i laid a new sheet of sandpaper on my reference block (aka the other end of the bench) and made a couple of passes on the flat paper, test fit, and did it again until it was a tight fit. this wasn't difficult but it did take some time, i worked with ~400 grit paper so i didn't go overboard and i figured that since i was going to be sealing the handle joinery with epoxy it didn't have to be spot-on perfect.. but it did come pretty close

 

[Sam Salvati]

Gorgeous restoration! Thank you very much for the photos