I Only Get in Trouble When I Think

Walosi

Walosi

Joined
Jan 10, 2001
Messages
2,618
I have bright, inspirational flashes from time to time which can turn out fairly well. When I sit down, analyze, quantify, qualify, determine and decide, I usually wind up lip-deep in doggy doo. With that in mind, the following is a report, and not a recommendation..yet, or even maybe :confused:

I had two coats of oil on the new Bura, and was as happy as a Labrador with a new tennis ball. The as-advertised crack sealed to invisibility, and more and more grain was blooming in the wood. DOOM!!! I picked it up after a couple of hours of drying, and there were three new cracks. This will give a Woodchuck heart palpatations, and I've got too many stitches in that area to risk it, so I began to analyze - Near-burl grain, trip from Nepal, dry Reno, 100% local humidity = needs stress relief, quickly. Murphy's soap came to mind first, and then an evil little light began to wink. I'd seen the Fiebing's Hoof Dressing almost visibly soak into a cracked horn handle. It is mineral oil with additives, and mineral oil is an old treatment for tool handles. Saatisal is an oak (no doubt in my mind, now) and I've seen oak tool handles treated and untreated, so on went a heavy coat of Fiebings, after I'd glued all but one crack and wooled off 90% of the first two coats of oil.
First, rouge came off in buckets. I had sanded this handle heavily, first with a fine Scotch Brite pad, and then with 400 and 600 grit, and 0000 wool. The rouge was gone...not. I know this is an oak, because the Fiebing's washed out rouge that had been compacted into the open oak grain, and now (except for the colors) it looks like the sworled open grain of white oak.
The crack I did not glue has almost closed - the glued cracks have disappeared after a light sanding. I'm wondering now, when does a deep, open grain line become a crack, and just not a deep open grain.
This will not lead to a return. This piece of wood will remain on the knife even if I have to dip the whole thing in a bucket of Bondini, and re-carve it. More later...I hope.
 
Wal,
I feel your pain...I pray for your burl...handle...piece of wood..(how come no matter how I say that it dosent sound right??)

Let us hope the Bondini Gene isnt out to get you. (Uh oh...I think you just created a new piece of HI terminology that'll give future newbys hell.)
 
I think that's the Bondini Djinn :) Don't start praying - just help me cuss the weather...not only has it fouled up the handle, it's starting to thunder, which terrifies the Cairn, which means I get no sleep until he stops pacing to the head of the bed to tell me "make it stop"....every ten seconds until it finally does. Guess I'll stay up and watch the handle... :rolleyes:
 
At least it went to someone who knows what he's doing. If it were me, I would have put it on the floor and go to a quiet corner and start crying. :)
 
Thanks for the moral support, Bruiser. I thought about the quiet corner, but the Cairn is curled up in it, hiding from the thunder :( After the original carving and shaping, and all the trials of the trip, they can't be much more than surface cracks. A seriously stressed piece of wood would have come apart in Nepal, under Bura's first few cuts. They know wood as well as they know steel - and the handles on the villagers usually only last a paltry 50 years, or so :rolleyes:
 
A little duct tape will fix that up just fine. :eek:

There does that make you feel better? :)

n2s
 
I think the dust bunnies would approve of the duct tape.

For some reason this story reminded me of an incident involving my then near new 1972 El Camino. Cold morning, ice and snow during the night, windshield covered. Being generally lazy I took coffee and cigarette out to the El Camino and fired it up. As soon as the engine was warm enough to exchange a little heat I turned on the defroster full bore. Why scrape and struggle when you have a machine to do the job?

A small, almost speck of a gravel chip in the center of the windshield suddenly came alive. It grew to about an inch, then two, three, six. I watched as that chip turned into a crack that covered the entire windshield from left to right.

I'm not sure if the State Farm claims adjuster believed my story but they put in a new windshield and I didn't have to dip the thing in Bondini.

Keep us posted, Wal, and good luck.
 
Well, she has gone twelve hours with no new surprises. The untreated "crack" is a grain line, I guess, and the glued ones are almost impossible to find. The finish is dull, due to the mineral oil, but I may be able to coax an "eggshell" finish out of it, if I can just remember where I hid my bottle of rottenstone. The grain is still outstanding, so the loss of a bright shine will be a minimal trade-off, if the wood has stabilized. I thimk (as they used to say at IBM) that if I had waited a day or two for the wood to acclimate (protected by the original wax) that some of this may not have happened. ¿Quien sabe? I do know that whatever effort I make to "purdy up" this knife will never equal that put into it by Bura. He should be as satisfied with this one as with any Kothimoda he has ever made, in quality if not in flash.
 
The mineral apparently did the trick (or, I won't really know until I chop something : ))
Everything appears to be stable, and the last two coats of oil are setting up nicely.
Saw this tag on a post in another forum - "Don't be afraid to try something new. After all, the Ark was built by amatuers and the Titanic by professionals".
 
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