Is cedar a good wood for custom bk7 handles?

B

buyer5207

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Mar 30, 2010
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I want to make my Becker Bk7 have custom scales. Furthermore, would a cedar work or would it crack and splitter to easy?

Searched blade-forums and can't find any threads on this.

Thanks in advanced.
 
I'm not an expert by any means, but to me ceder is a very light softwood and I would not use it for a knife handle.
 
I would not recommend using any kind of soft wood for scales unless you don't plan on using it. If you wanna use your 7 with these custom scales then use a good hard wood.
 
Although you can make damn near anything with cedar, I wouldn't recommend it for knife scales. Maple, rosewood, mahogany, cocobolo etc. Though I'm no knife maker, I've worked with red and yellow cedar enough, and find that it splinters very easily, and can be quite spongy and soft. For a showpiece or casual user, maybe, but if you're thinking of using a bk7 much (which is why you got a Becker) I wouldn't trust it. I'll probably be putting some rosewood or cocobolo on mine in the future.
 
Unless it's petrified, cedar will be too soft. You want sometime with a denser grain. Try Googling "hardwoods."
 
Haze240 said:
make sure "safe search" is ON.
Click to expand...

Good call. :D

For knife handles, you want a stabilized hardwood. Stabilized means its been saturated through with a non degradable material.

There are lots of good materials out there, but when dealing with wood on knife handles, it needs to be stabilized, or it will swell, crack ,split, or degrade too fast to be of use.

Good luck and keep us posted on the progress.

Moose
 
actually, if you're looking at stabilized woods, cedar would be fine -- so long as you're not talking about aromatic (red) cedar -- the oils in it make it very difficult to properly cure the impregnating resins.
Cedar that fences are made of is very coarse grained and open pored - if you're using a vacuum system to saturate it with the stabilizing resins, it soaks them up very well.
 
My favourite wood for handle scales is Birch. Great wood that is. Really dense, really hard, does not split easily, and looks pretty darn good to boot! I have made three knives out of really old wood files, and used 12 year old Birch for all three. I applied about 13 coats of danish oil, and sanded with 2000 grit sand paper over a period of about two weeks. It gave it a really glossy sheen, but has better traction then my Izula 2 micarta. :thumbup:
 
I'm gonna go the other direction and say cedar would be awesome for your first 5 sets. At that point most of the big mistakes will have been made and you won't have pissed away a bunch of really nice wood. I started with the good stuff and really messed up bad, then i'd fix that mistake but screw it up some other way. Wish I'd have saved all my osage and Amboyna burl and wenge till now.

Better than cedar, get some oak pallets from behind a hardware store and use that.
 
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