- Joined
- Sep 4, 2010
- Messages
- 2,893
Decided my SOS was a keeper and started work to personalize it this weekend.
Size reference with my other 'DUs:
Started by hand sanding the scales. My one minor qualm with the blade was the sharp corners around the relief wells for the flared tubes, which are recessed pretty deep. The sanding fixed this and made the whole grip extremely comfortable.
I always sand wet with quality paper. 60 grit made short work of removing the bulk of the milled texturing, then moved up through various grits. Here is the initial finish, left a couple of faint lines but they only took a few minutes to go back and take care of:
Proceeded to the Citristrip, skipped the etch on the logo this time. I've found a little heat really seems to help move things along. Just enough the get the blade up to 100°f or so. I use a heat gun on low and monitor the temp with an infrared thermometer, but a hair dryer on low should be fine too.
Here's a shot after the first round of scraping. Scales are also finished but very dry here:
A little more gel and scraping helped finish off the coating. Next, I clamped the blade to my bench and went to work on the decarb. Having the blade clamped down and using a little push block on top of the paper really helped to make short work of it and helped save my fingertips big time.
This is what it looked like after attacking it with 100 grit paper:
Used a vice to hold the blade and continued with the block and sandpaper to clean up the spine, etc. I'm out of 220 grit paper, so next I jumped straight to 320 to continue removing decarb and refine the scratch pattern. This worked fine with the micarta, but might be too big a step on the steel. Will probably need to do another full round with the 320 before I think about going higher. Really happy with the results so far though, plan to take this up to an LE-type satin finish as time allows:
Really, really pumped about this blade. Thanks for reading.
Size reference with my other 'DUs:
Started by hand sanding the scales. My one minor qualm with the blade was the sharp corners around the relief wells for the flared tubes, which are recessed pretty deep. The sanding fixed this and made the whole grip extremely comfortable.
I always sand wet with quality paper. 60 grit made short work of removing the bulk of the milled texturing, then moved up through various grits. Here is the initial finish, left a couple of faint lines but they only took a few minutes to go back and take care of:
Proceeded to the Citristrip, skipped the etch on the logo this time. I've found a little heat really seems to help move things along. Just enough the get the blade up to 100°f or so. I use a heat gun on low and monitor the temp with an infrared thermometer, but a hair dryer on low should be fine too.
Here's a shot after the first round of scraping. Scales are also finished but very dry here:
A little more gel and scraping helped finish off the coating. Next, I clamped the blade to my bench and went to work on the decarb. Having the blade clamped down and using a little push block on top of the paper really helped to make short work of it and helped save my fingertips big time.
This is what it looked like after attacking it with 100 grit paper:
Used a vice to hold the blade and continued with the block and sandpaper to clean up the spine, etc. I'm out of 220 grit paper, so next I jumped straight to 320 to continue removing decarb and refine the scratch pattern. This worked fine with the micarta, but might be too big a step on the steel. Will probably need to do another full round with the 320 before I think about going higher. Really happy with the results so far though, plan to take this up to an LE-type satin finish as time allows:
Really, really pumped about this blade. Thanks for reading.
