Mod'ing The CS Trail Hawk

BryFry said:
Been a while since I worked on a hawk, but I got my hands on a CS pipehawk and decided to try few mods...

Started out with some reshaping, by rounding off the sharp angles near the haft and pipe area. Stripped the paint (that paint remover is some nasty stuff!) sanded it, ...then dicide to try my hand at some etching, (thanks to Pullrich and others for the helpful etching info!)

I decided to leave a lot of the pitting since I'm going for the "functional antique" kind of look. I'm doing an old style vine pattern theme with my initial "F" thrown in there. The vine pattern took about 12 hrs, while the F didn't take the first time, so I had to re-do it with another 12 hrs of rinse and soke....
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Did some vine pattern filework on the top, and a gun blue patina...
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A before and after so you can see where I reshaped it. Also I purposely used the etchant to cause pitting on the areas I filed down to create a more uniformed old-timey look...
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Sticking with the vine theme I burned this pattern into the haft, stained it, and put some brass tacks in the top and bottom. I also filed out the screw hole into this star pattern (thanks to hawkhead for that idea) ...then filled it with a liquid steel type epoxy. Sadly I should have done that after the etching since the etchant caused some unwanted discoloring...
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Messed around with some cord wrapping, but I'm not happy with it yet, so it will get redone soon. OH and I gave it a good hair shaving convex edge, cause you never know when you may need to scalp someone. :)
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....and a pic of the sheath and belt loop, courtesy of Goose52....
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Thanks for looking, this was a fun learning experience! I think my next hawk will be better now that I've figured a few things out. :)
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That junglas is SWEEEEEET love the handle that looks so good how did you do it?
 
Ok, standing down from DEFCON 4. I traced the head outline, then put three layers of wood glue in the area where the head seats and sanded it smooth. Nice tight fit now.
 
Ok...the spikehawk project has officially kicked off.

I didn't get a picture of the "before" as I'm pretty sure we all know what they look like by now, LOL.

The hawk head is now sitting under a coat of Citristrip and sometime this evening, I'll check it and see how it's coming along.

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After the paint is removed, I'm guessing you guys are just rinsing them off and letting them dry?

After this process, I will break out the Dremel and work on the eye a bit seeing as how the hawk head has so thoroughly jacked up the end of my haft.
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I guess I'll get a sharp knife and kinda whittle away at the burrs before I break out the sandpaper and try to even it up a bit. I may even try to file it down a bit to save me a little time. Hopefully it won't turn out to bad.
 
Make sure you take off any sharp edges or burrs around the top of the eye before you do anymore fitting. A radius there will help get a good fit down the inside of the eye where you want it.

I've found sandpaper wrapped around a small dowel is a good tool to selectively remove the high spots on the handle, without removing too much material elsewhere where you need it. Sometimes slower is better.
 
BRL said:
Bah. I've got a bad feeling that the haft that came with my CSTH is simply too poorly shaped to ever allow firm wood-head contact.
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Don't worry about it. My frontier hawk has the same problem, about 60% of the handle contacts the head. It uses fine; in fact it is my favorite chopper. When you use the hawk, the head will seat itself better, so don't worry about getting a perfect fit.
 
The Citristrip worked out pretty good. I let it sit out there and do its thing for a few hours before I tried to scrape the paint off, and it did what it supposed too. It took all of 5 minutes to get all the paint off before I rinsed it off and dried it.

Today...I just wanted to work on the hawk head itself. We were expecting rain so I didn't want to start sanding and painting the haft just yet.

I broke out the Dremel and some 220 grit sanding drums and went to work trying to see what kind of finish I could bring out in this hunk of steel. Then I took some 400 grit sandpaper and rubbed it by hand to kind of smooth it out a bit. One side isn't to bad, but the other is pitted pretty bad, so what I might do is leave it as is and polish it up to as nice a luster as I can. The polish will make it shine but the pitting will still give it a somewhat rustic appearance...and I can live with that.

Here are a few pics of what I was able to accomplish today...

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Johnny Numbers
Looking good. To be honest the pitting side will give it a rustic look in my opinion. Keep the updates coming.
 
Thanks man.

I think my next task will be to try my hand at a convex grind. It's probably a good idea to sharpen this thing before I polish it.
 
dogstar said:
Don't worry about it. My frontier hawk has the same problem, about 60% of the handle contacts the head. It uses fine; in fact it is my favorite chopper. When you use the hawk, the head will seat itself better, so don't worry about getting a perfect fit.
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Thanks bud. I actually came up with a pretty decent solution. I put the head in place, traced it, removed it, and painted layers of wood glue on, letting each layer dry before doing another. Then I sanded it down until the head had a nice solid purchase. Then I SMASHED a bunch of dry pine today and seated the head quite nicely, heh.


Johnny Numbers said:
One side isn't to bad, but the other is pitted pretty bad, so what I might do is leave it as is and polish it up to as nice a luster as I can.
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I was working on mine today with a palm sander and frickin' 60 grit, and still couldn't get all the texture off, so I'm doing the same thing... leaving it and calling it 'rustic' heh.
 
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[/IMG] This is a sheath that I made for my trailhawk. The paterns I made are to the right. The main purpose is just to protect my hunting pack and contents when storing it inside.
 
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