Industrial canvas Bakelite as knife handles

[peppen108]

I found 18x7x(2/5)" slabs of industrial canvas Bakelite for 20$. Bakelite is a a thermosetting phenol formaldehyde resin and canvas bound its the weird Belgian ancestor of micarta. Has any one used this material for knife making? Pros, cons, hazards?

 

[Nathan the Machinist]

That looks like regular linen reinforced phenolic to me. It should work fine for handle scales. And by the looks of it, it isn't old, it is current production.

As far as I know, nobody using "micarta" is actually using Micarta. Westinghouse sold the name ages ago and when I ask my plastics distributor for "genuine Micarta" he told me the folks who own the name simply own the name. He told me that someone else bought the old presses and are making reinforced phenolic but aren't calling it micarta. And for that matter practically everyone using "micarta" have no idea where their material really came from.

Beware. It is not all created equal.

 

[Karl B. Andersen]

I'm with Nathan on this one.

Bakelite was not linen reinforced.
I've used it quite a bit.

Here's one with some of the original Bakelite.

 

[peppen108]

Thanks Nathan and Karl for the helpful answers. Karl the knife looks fantastic! I've done some research and every thing that is said in the tread kind of ads up. The material is "vävbakelit" witch translates to woven Bakelite or cotton fabric re-enforced Bakelite (so its different from regular Bakelite as Karl said). Its made by a current hi-end Swedish maker called Fermprodukter. I guess that Micarta was a "trade mark"-product that became synonymous with a material in everyday language usage. Over at this side of the pond were the original Micarta never made it big this material is still sold under the name vävbackelit (cotton fabric re-enforced Bakelite).

 

[tryppyr]

Bakelite is definitely a trademark here too. My wife researched it extensively some years ago. As with Micarta, the trademark was sold and now people produce what they call Bakelite, but it has no real lineage back to the original Bakelite. Alas, it's even more confusing than that because even when Bakelite was being produced here, there was competition from a company that was producing colored resins, called Catalin. To make a long story short, a lot of what people call "Bakelite" today started off life as Catalin, but the name "Bakelite" carried more value in the collector market, so the Catalin prodocts are described as "bakelite" (small B intentional).

It's all thermoset phenolic resin... but there are differences.

 

[Stacy E. Apelt - Bladesmith]

I have used the product you have. It makes good handles. I buff it with a stiff wheel to get a slight texture.

 

[Daniel Fairly Knives]

That will make great handles! Keep your shop ventilated and grind away.

I have found what I think is the old canvas or asbestos material at mine sites, I bet some of it is 80 years old. It is degraded beyond use and probably toxic but neat to see... of course wrought iron is a lot better!

 

[alrob]

We call it tuffnol in the uk ,I also use a material called bakelaqe which is a type of paper based tuffnol, a deep uniform choclate colour

 

[Frank Niro]

Overall, here and there it's still a popular material for knife handles. A while back a very friend of mine asked if I had some in a certain thickness. I was very pleased to be able to give him what he wanted. He built a replacement "sacrifice" gear for his lathe with it.

 

[jdm61]

Bakelite is not the composite material per se, but the polymerized resin itself. If you want to split hairs, you could say that Micarta is a composite made with Bakelite resin and fabric. I am pretty sure that when Westinghouse invented it in the early 1900's, they were using Bakelite resin to do it. IIRC, the stuff actually sold as Bakelite like old telephones, disributor caps, billiard balls, dice, etc, were reinforced with a powdered binder, but I make be wrong. Some dice are still made from Baketlie resin.

 

[jdm61]

It's all thermoset phenolic resin... but there are differences.

This is a VERY imprtant point. Micarta which is not made with thermoset phenolic resin, not Micarta in name or otherwise. "Mycarta" made with epoxy is just that. Cloth and epoxy.

 

[Calvin Robinson]

We call it tuffnol in the uk ,I also use a material called bakelaqe which is a type of paper based tuffnol, a deep uniform choclate colour

Does it look like this?

 

[alrob]

Does it look like this?

That's the stuff ,looks better jigged nice knife