My wood handled BK-11

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FullMetalJoe

Joined
Jun 11, 2011
Messages
11
Hi everyone, I recently finished adding some wood scales to my BK-11 and thought I'd share.

bk11e.jpg


The wood is from a 100+ year old oak which was growing next to the church I grew up attending. Unfortunately, the tree was damaged during a recent storm, and was cut down shortly thereafter. I processed the wood with hand tools to get a rough shape, and finished shaping with a belt sander.

The scales aren't a perfect fit, but they're pretty close and are quite comfy. An unexpected benefit was the change in balance on the knife. It now balances in the finger groove directly behind the guard, which I'm finding is much to my liking. After fitting the scales, the knife's finish was pretty messed up, so I masked off the wood and shot it with some flat OD green paint.The wood and green look kinda strange, but it's no too bad.

Also, this is a first post from a loooong time lurker.:D
 
agreed, they look really nice

any chance for a spine shot to see how thick the handles are...
 
Thanks for the kind words. The spine shot is below, as requested. The scales are around 1/4'' thick. The one on the left slightly less, the one on the right is slightly more.

bk112.jpg
 
Nice job, I made wood scales for mine also. I used scrap Oak window molding so they are tapered and thin. Yours look very comfortable.
I would like to give Osage orange and Honey locust a try just because I like that wood.
 
Welcome! Great looking handles you've made there. I really like the fact that they're not made from just any old stock, you're handles have history!
 
ok as someone who just on a whim ordered a few cheap wood scale blanks to try my hand, i have a big how to question since i have no clue, how do you install/use pins in the handles? When planning for making this leap into scale making, the biggest obstacle that i can think of is the countersunk hex holes for the nuts, so the pins seems like a god idea, only i don tknow how they work, how your would install them, or even what to use or where to find it. So welcome again, nice mod, now help a brother out :D
 
Flexxx said:
Looks good, would even look better if you stripped the coating....
Click to expand...

You're probably right. I may do this eventually. I'm still kind of antsy about the whole exposed carbon steel thing.

As far as the brass pins, I had been reading up in the knifemaker's forums about them, because I had no clue how they worked either. Basically, everything is held together by 2 part epoxy. There's epoxy holding the scales to the tang directly and the pins were pretty well coated in it before they were inserted. As per the suggestions I found, I used an epoxy that took 24 hours to fully cure. After assembling everything, I clamped it for a day or so, and it's been pretty solid ever since.

The pins I used are 3/16" diameter brass round stock. I used 3/16" because it will fit in the existing holes. You can usually find this kind of thing with the welding materials at home improvement stores.

Murphnuge said:
I really like the fact that they're not made from just any old stock, you're handles have history!
Click to expand...

Yep, this was one of the things that spurred me to finally do this project. It took more work to turn raw wood into scales, but it was worth it.
 
Did you form the scales before attaching them or did you grind em down mounted to the knife? My project is going to be on the big boys so I think that i can get them shaped pretty well first, then epoxy and pin them. But again ive never done this before so I could be way off base
 
I rough shaped them off the knife, then put them on the knife without epoxy to shape them to the tang's edges, then took them off and ran the pins through without the knife to shape the other parts.
 
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