The BladeForums.com 2024 Traditional Knife is ready to order! See this thread for details:
https://www.bladeforums.com/threads/bladeforums-2024-traditional-knife.2003187/
Price is $300 $250 ea (shipped within CONUS). If you live outside the US, I will contact you after your order for extra shipping charges.
Order here: https://www.bladeforums.com/help/2024-traditional/ - Order as many as you like, we have plenty.
aproy1101 said:How do you make the brass fit so well Sarge? What kind of epoxy do you use?
QUOTE]
If you mean like the brass spacer on your sgian dubh, here's the drill;
-Using drill, needle files, etc., get your hole in your handle material so the tang of your blade inserts nearly all the way (gap left should be slightly less than the thickness of brass you'll be using for a spacer)
-Take a hunk of brass of the appropriate size, and use a series of drilled holes, connected by filing with needle files, to form a slotted hole the tang fits snugly in
-Test fit everything together, don't worry about having excess brass sticking out everywhere, we'll deal with that later, just make sure the brass shoulders up square on the blade, and that the handle end isn't off square causing a visible gap, if it is, square it up so everything joins tight
-Once satisfied with proper fit, glue everything up with a good two part epoxy like Devcon (I now use the five minute stuff, but recommend the 30 minute set time for guys starting out). Now go eat dinner, walk the dog, etc. and leave the durn knife alone until the epoxy sets up good.
-At this point the knife looks sort of like a train wreck, no worries, put the blade in the padded jaws of a vice with the handle pointing up, then take a good coping saw and cut away the excess brass until your spacer is fairly flush with the handle. HINT: don't bother trying to cut curves, make straight cuts and you'll go from a square/rectangle, to a hexagon, to an octagon, by snipping off the little wedge shaped bits
- Finish up with a file (see they've other uses besides knife blades) and some sandpaper of progressively finer grit
Heat treat? Put the blade in the oven (on BAKE) and start out around 300 degrees for twenty minutes or so. At that point raise the temp to 350-375 for another 15 minutes. You'll probably need to get up to around 415-425 for the final heat (10-15 mins). Watch the color closely at that point, what you want is dark straw yellow. How to describe that? Well you know the yellow color of a standard lager beer like Budweiser? That's a fair approximation of light straw yellow. Dark straw yellow would be darker and browner, like a good amber ale. Beyond that (i.e. at higher temps) you'll get bronze, then purple, then blue. Bronze is okay for a tool that's going to see rough duty, purple is pretty much spring temper, good for throwing knives and such, but blue ain't much good for nothing.
Once the blade turns dark straw yellow, just turn off the oven, prop the oven door open slightly, and let the thing cool down on it's own. Slow cooling, like the slow, gradual, heating, not only softens the steel, it helps toughen it by relieving internal stresses
Git 'r done hoss, it's Friday and I'm about to go scare me up some beer, that talk of lagers and ales got me thirsty.
Sarge