Is it hard to make custom wooden knife scales?

depends on what you want, you could just go to lowes and be a piece of wood from their, or you could cut your own.
 
Its not that difficult. I've made wood scales for my Tenacious and Kershaw Chill. One of the benefits of making your own scales is that you can shape the scales for your hand and how you use your knife. I was really surprised at how different my Tenacious feels with thicker and contoured scales.

I'd give it a try. A good source I found for cheap scales is flooring scraps. Found some nice birdseye maple, walnut and ipe at a building materials recycling center in San Francisco a couple of years ago.


Ric
 
Definitely give it a shot. Absolutely.

I'd encourage anyone to try it before buying pre-made scales. Proper tools help, but you can get away with a lot just using a saw, file and good assortment of sandpaper.

One technique that really helped me contour my last set was "shoe shining", that is, taking a strip of sandpaper (try backing it with leather, or not) then using a shoe shine motion to round any sharp edges. Also, one place where people tend to go way too conservative is the scales thickness. You can go pretty thin. Lastly, do whatever work on the ricosso area that needs done before attaching the scales to the tang.

I have a knife build-along thread in the Workshop sub forum if you want to see how I did mine.
 
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