Home grown knife repair

300Bucks

300Bucks

Joined
Apr 19, 2005
Messages
5,533
I bought a knife on the spur of the moment, that I might have passed on if my head had been out of my.....oh well. It was a 1988 303 in stag which was good stag but had been trashed, in a sense, by the factory. Both rivets had multiple strikes that jumped over on the stag itself. See photos below.
Full view of front side.
StagcloseupA.jpg

Front side rivet:
Stagcloseup2.jpg

Reverse side rivet:
Stagcloseup.jpg

Its 1988 there is not much factory help can offer. So OK, I will give it a go.
I carefully and I mean carefully, used a dremel on low speed and tried to semi-artfully blend the stamp press marks into the stag. I also very VERY carefully used a sharp pointed bit to grind off the smashed rivet edges. At some point, not being expert, I feel you have to say : enough is enough and I will regret going on in the attempt at perfection. So here are my results. Haebbie wanted to see them so here you are.
Front side view:
StagRepairA.jpg

Front rivet close-up:
StagRepairAClose.jpg

Reverse side view:
StagRepairB.jpg

Reverse rivet close-up:
StagrepariBClose.jpg


The rivets could stand a little more polishing, and I am thinking it over.

What I would say to everyone is, if knife is in hand- really look it over carefully. And if you have the right tools and think you might fix something, go really, REALLY slow and don't make things worse. If I had just bought this knife it would have gone back to factory, if it was a high dollar old knife it would have gone to Eric or Leroy. Slow and steady wins the knife race.
300Bucks
 
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By the way, your PM box is full and won't accept any messages. I tried to reply to the last one you sent me, but couldn't.
 
Great, 300, you did a good job. And thanks for posting the
picture. Did you already buff out the scratch in the spring?

Best,
Haebbie
 
Looks to me like it turns out that your head really WAS out of your......

:D

Nice stag and you probably got it very reasonable. It's called "seeing possibilities."
 
Nice,,,its fun to fix one up to make it more acceptable than it was. Maybe a thread for home grown fixes is in order.
 
CC,
Your right! I should not have assumed Bucks warranty. But, I was prompted by my knowledge that often older slipjoints are unable to be repaired because of the lack of parts. Such as a blade that suddenly breaks while peeling an apple. I will guess that there are no 1988 date stamped 303 blades left to replace such a warranty claim. Buck will then offer to put a modern blade in the knife. If say your GGranddads 301 from 1967 went thru a house fire and you want if fixed no matter the cost, all you will likely be offered is to replace it with a new knife or they might even say if you can find another 67 301 for parts we will take as much of the old knife and use it as we can to make one good one. I am putting words in Joe Housers mouth, but I know he goes as far as he can to give customer satisfaction.

I believe I am assured if I had sent this in I would have received all NEW stag that was correctly riveted. But, bear with me here, I am a 300 collector, a ALL original 1988 stag scaled 303 was a issue for me. To have new stag on it is sort of like buy a corvette that was in a wreck and then rebuilt. In my collectors world just a little off the path. I guess another way to say it is , I like all the serial numbers to match....

I worked at fixing my 88 stag scales, yes it wasn't prestine factory but its all the original stuff. I should have used a little different statement in the original post. I am confident the factory will go as far as they can to fix peoples problems, especially ones are linked to factory mess ups. Use you 305 to pry open a gallon of paint and break the blade, you will get the squint eyed old west gun-fighter look from them.

Anyway I fixed up my 88 stag as best I could and I could re-sell it today saying it is all orginal with some work to fix the rivets.

Hope that gave you some info or at least where I was coming from. Maybe Joe will look in an comment on my comments.

ch/300Bucks
 
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Makes perfect sense. I am a bit curious what they might do about something like this. Most likely they'd rescale, I assume, and there goes your all original.

Thanks for the clarification.
 
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Craig, I think you did a very good job. Espically with what you had to work on and not much experience in this area. :thumbup: DM
 
Like Red Green says: If the girls don't find you handsome they can at least find you handy.
300
 
I also think you did a good job. If it something you can attempt yourself and not make it "worse', then try it. Buck is always there as a backup but with the thoughts of not getting the original parts back would also stop me. Thanks fot the great before and after pictures.
 
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