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.
Here is my latest Mule project. Over a year ago, I bought a chunk of rosewood burl from a dealer. I wanted to try processing and cutting some slabs from a raw burl myself. Hoo, boy - I really didn't know what I was getting in for!Even though the burl was dried when I got it (don't know the actual moisture content), I decided not to have it stabilized since rosewood is so oily to begin with. So I let it acclimatize in my shop for a while then cut it into oversize scale slabs. Then things started to get frustrating... the slabs twisted, warped, and developed hairline cracks. I kept them clamped down tightly for almost a year to let them get a bit less "lively". Then a few weeks back, I took them out, trimmed them up and put a blue G10 liner on the back side. I used a ton of West System epoxy so that the slabs would be partially encased in the adhesive for a while - and then clamped them back down for a few weeks. When I took them out and trimmed them up - they appeared pretty solid. So far - so good.
The drilling, shaping, and contouring were the second part of the adventure. This rosewood burl had to be the single most unforgiving wood that I've ever used in my life. Period. It split and chipped, eyes popped out, pithy parts (mostly in the lighter portions) tore out, the oily dark wood clogged my files and stained the lighter wood. Argh. What a battle. I finally wrestled it into shape and I had to figure out how to finish the material.
This started the third part of the adventure. The burl was full of voids (as well as little chips of rock and dirt) and pith and even though it was sanded out to 800 grit, it was still really gnarly. I'm not a big fan of CA glue as a finish, but I decided that this was the time to break it out. So I coated the scales with a couple of thin coats of the thinnest CA I had, sanding down to 1000 grit between each coat. After this was finished, I topped it off with about 10 thin coats of TruOil with a finish sanding out to 2500 grit. Then I attacked it with the buffer and some white rouge. Still not perfect... but the beauty of the swirling grain emerged like I hoped.
TedP
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My newly acquired SB Endura. Found some carbon fiber scales for it, just waiting on my light weight parts kit so I can install the black back spacer, the grey one doesn't look so great.
I also did a little work bringing out the patina on the SB edge, a little stone ground mustard made some nice swirls. It shows up a lot darker in person, I couldn't quite get the lighting right in these shots.
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