Big Ugly BK-16 Megatransect Sheath

Hey Doc......

Looking forward to your arrival......Very cool sheath......BTW a trick i used for piton hammer sheaths when i owned CMI was to take the leather parts and submerge them in melted Johnsons paste floor wax until they were impregnated......Added stif and helped weather resistance.......probably all melt out in the Mato Grosso though.........lol......Just a thought.....

All Best....

Ethan
 
Ethan Becker said:
Hey Doc......

Looking forward to your arrival......Very cool sheath......BTW a trick i used for piton hammer sheaths when i owned CMI was to take the leather parts and submerge them in melted Johnsons paste floor wax until they were impregnated......Added stif and helped weather resistance.......probably all melt out in the Mato Grosso though.........lol......Just a thought.....

All Best....

Ethan
Click to expand...

The floor paste trick sounds like a good one. Someone else mentioned boiling in bees wax. I'm sure both of those would help. The problem that they had with leather, and I've noticed this myself with leather gloves and a leather belt in the jungle, is that when it gets wet it swells. Eventually it dries out and then it shrinks. If it happens over and over again the areas where you are connecting the leather together loosen and fail. In the case of the Pathfinder sheath, it was put together with 3 rivets and some stitching. All of the stitching loosened and failed and one of the rivets failed. The hole around the rivet eventually shrunk/stretched to the point that the rivet just fell out.

The other problems they were having were with the screws holding the leather to the kydex portion of the sheath loosening. I'm guessing that the leather swelled, then shrunk and there was just enough room for the screw to loosen and fall out. The problem could likely have been prevented by using a little Lock-tite. I'm gessing that the reason they didn't use Lock-tite on the screws is because they wanted to be able to remove the sheath from the leather and connect/lash it to another carrying system or pack. The idea being that the user has multiple carry options should one fail or if the user prefers another. On the expedition they used super glue to glue the ends of the screws and it more or less stopped the problem.

Right now I'm thinking a good solution to most of these problems is to use the kydex back and belt loop. There are going to be people who prefer the leather because it allows the knife sheath to move around a little. I think that I can get most of the ergonomic problems of using a stiff kydex back solved with little tweaks and that it will be worth the compromise for people who are going to be in and out of wet environments over a long period of time. I find this to be especially true given that the other options for kydex sheath backs are made of nylon with some sort of a plastic insert which greatly limits the flexibility of the product.

Another solution, if you wanted more flexibility between the kydex belt loop and the kydex sheath would be to connect the two using a piece of rubber. The rubber would have to be BOMBPROOF. It CANNOT fail. There needs to be reinforcements in the rubber like you would find in ripstop nylon. And the system would need to be set up so that if the rubber did fail, the kydex loop and sheath back could be screwed directly to the kydex sheath.

Anyway lots to think about. Equipment design and testing is FUN.
 
Here's what I made for one of my knives. Kydex belt loop with a metal ring connecting it to the sheath.

2012-10-09162024.jpg


The ring is too big, but it's what I had. I think my next one will have a smaller d-ring, instead.
 
Haven't checked in on this forum for awhile, but wanted to add the ring option was used for centuries by the scandinavian folks. Love this thread! Been distracted with traditional slipjoints for awhile, nice to see the BK16 in use.
 
This is a great discussion. I have toyed with kydex and leather belt loops/backing, and I am still on the fence, so I am very interested to see where you land on the decision after some more trials. Great write up, man.

That expedition looks pretty amazing, too. The Amazon is pretty incredible. I hope to be able to spend some more time down there in the future. How did you hook up with the team?
 
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