This is the real question. Honestly, I would consider using home stabilized wood on my own knives because I know only I would be responsible for it. But when your name is attached to a product someone else has, and that could fail, thats where it gets iffy. I dont want a product I sold to fail because of any fault of my own.
I get that to a point, but would you sell a forged knife?
In my industry what we're talking about are "special processes." Welding for example. Things that can't be tested without destructive testing. So I sell a part with a beautiful 3/8" fillet weld. It looks fantastic and meets all visual weld inspection criteria. No undercut, leg and throat dimensions are right on the money, no craters, perfect wraps and terminations. And then that weld fails in the field because it had almost no penetration.
Hand forging is another one. You forge a knife, meaning you heated it to forging temperatures and hit it with a hammer until it was the shape you wanted it to be. When you're done, do you
know that it will not fail because of a crack you couldn't see? Or that you only ever heated it between X and Y degree temperatures? Or that you didn't make a couple hammer blows trying to stretch out a heat, at too low a temperature? You can normalize, you can RC test, you can break a coupon and look, but you don't
know that internally, everything is perfect with that forged blade. Then we'll talk about damascus...
But you can establish processes for your practice. And that's how we control our 3/8" weld. I can't destroy it to test it, but I can establish parameters like voltage, amperage, wire speed, filler material, shielding gas, travel speed, transfer process, etc, etc. And I can weld a number of coupons using those parameters, and cut them and etch them and break them and bend them until I know that a weld that passes visual weld inspection, welded within the established process, is a good weld with a high degree of certainty.
Whether they do it consciously or not, that's what the better knife makers are doing in their shops when it comes to forging based on their experiences. "If I heat like this and hammer like that and quench like so, with this type of steel I get a knife capable of doing X task."
So why would stabilizing wood or casting Alumilite be any different? I wouldn't sell my first one. I wouldn't even put my first one on a knife. I would cut it and break it and bend it until I had a good idea that yes, this process I did or part I made is suitable for the task I wish to use it for, when done by these parameters I've set.
Honestly, the wood or scale failing would be the least of my worries on a blade I forged from a layered billet that I pattern welded myself.
But there's a risk with any choice, and given your business model I understand 100% why you've made the decision you have made. But taken to an extreme there is no point to any of us making or selling anything, because that's the only way to completely eliminate failures caused by yourself. Even with perfect processes and documented procedures, you will have a failure eventually. That's life. And statistics. But mostly life.
Would a pressure pot be good for that? Or does it still need to be stabilized afterwards. Alumilite is what I'm looking at for the resin, just wanted to see what else would work, or not.
