My attemp at "Micarta"

J

jtvinny

Joined
May 12, 2007
Messages
27
micarta.jpg

I ground on the top side a little to see what it would reveal
micarta1.jpg

This is the bottom so the digitized pattern you see is actually through the material.

Well I have been reading around the forums lately and found somebody that is going to lead me through the process of making my first knife and sheath. I saw that link on homemade micarta (wouldn't that be mycarta?) and thought that it didn't look too hard. It would be a great way to add my personal touch to my first knife so I decided to give it a try.

The cloth I used is some ACU material that bought off ebay a year and a half ago because it was just something I just had to have- needless to say I have not done anything with it since. So... I cut some strips of that along with some green canvas and a strip of 1/4" mesquite I had laying around. I was like a kid on the night before Christmas waiting for it to cure. I wanted to take it out of the clamps and cut into it to see what it was going to look like.

I forgot what it was like to work with resin, so I was taking my time making sure all the strips were perfectly alligned. I started to notice that i was now smelling fumes that I previously did not. Wait, is this starting to feel warm... why is it all clumping up like this? Well I hope I got it clamped up fast enough. I guess time will tell when I cut it down to size.

I do have a couple of questions-
What to you grind this with?
How to finish it? Wax? Just polish it?

I used Bondo resin with as close to the required amount of hardener that I could count (144 drops for 12 oz.). It turned out to be almost twice as much as I needed for 21 strips of 2 1/2" X 12" cloth
 
you can slow the reaction time down by working in a cooler area and by cutting down on the hardner. If you had put in 1/2 the required hardner the stuff would have still gone off. Just slower and it would get just as hard. Just takes longer.
 
In the case of Bondo, I think you are right about the hardened being more of a catalyst than and ingredient. In most other resins, especially epoxies, the two parts have a very exact ratio. If you change it you will not get the proper results. It is an old fallacy to add more of the part B, which is called hardener, in hopes of speeding up the cure time (or the reverse to slow it.). This will give you poor results. Other than using a resin with a cure time matched to the job, temperature is the way to control pot life in resins. Cooling it down before mixing and keeping the pot cool while laminating will give you a lot of extra time. When the laminating is done, let it warm up to room temp and use a heat lamp to accelerate the cure.
Epoxies like SYSTEM 3 and WEST SYSTEMS can be purchased with a great range in cure time. For a project like home made mycarta (Micarta is a brand name ,and shouldn't be used) use the slowest cure you can get. Some have several hours of pot time. The other thing is to go for as clear a resin as possible. You can tint it to get a color match for the cloth, but the material is what you want to see, not the resin. I don't know about Bondo.....seems like the wrong stuff for this job??? Try some System 3 clear coating resin from Woodcraft or another supplier. It is water clear, very low viscosity, and penetrates well.
Stacy
 
correct when using the polyster type resins the hardner is a catalyst and the ratio is not important. If it is a true epoxie and the ratio is something like 50/50 that must be kept at near the correct ratio.
 
To get your pattern to come through better try a peice of black construction paper between layer on digitized cloth.
 
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