Question re. Jade as a handle material

RogerP

RogerP

Joined
Feb 28, 2002
Messages
13,348
Greetings all,

Anyone familiar with the use of Jade as a handle material for a knife? I'm not much familiar with the stuff except for one or two items of my wife's jewelry, but I have come across it occasionally on a knife. My questions:

1) Is it a stable material - i.e. - something that won't shrink in response to changes in climate?

2) Is it brittle (my wife seems to treat her stuff pretty gently)?

3) Is it soft - prone to scratching?

I'm not considering it for a using knife - rather something for my collection - but I'm curious about any limitations.

Many thanks,

Roger
 
Some good links there, but I think more people than just I would appreciate your personal input Laredo7mm, rather htan just links. We all know that you've used it recently, and in the application that concerns us. And at least as importnat, if not more so, made a beautiful piece with it. :) So give us some of your own input from personal experience
 
Well, unfortunately, you all know just about as much as i do. Except for the fact that steel is a 5 on the Mohr scale, diamond is 10, and nephrite jade is 6.5, however, it is not a linear scale from what i understand. So there is not any good way to interpolate how hard it actually is unless you know the polynomial function.

Besides that, I like green, so I picked jade.:D

Ok, on a serious note, the stuff is not that bad to work. You need a diamond saw to cut it and diamond coring bits to put the hole in it. A diamond grinding wheel would work very well for shaping it, but i used silicon carbide belts instead, because diamond grinding wheels are dang expensive. I burned up about 20 SC belts shaping the two handle pieces. 14 of those were either 40 or 120 grit.

I used 240 and 320 on the grinder and then hand sanded up to 1500 grit, still no shine. I buffed with black emory cake and then with the white stuff. Came out with a satin finish. Used Briwax to get the final gloss.

Other than that, I can't add much more. I spent probably about 10 hours on the two jade pieces to get them to what you see now.

Hope that helps.
 
not sure of what is required to work with Jade but this image has a couple of knives I have with Jade handles.

2casteelmullinjadeNL0216multim.JPG



as a test of another site I have recently found that allow uploads and links the above image will be duplicated. I'm hoping to get an idea as to how long the image will remain. It is not a site that one can go to and view images so as far as I can tell the urls have to be saved somewhere. Thankfully, Yankee Clipper III allows for this quite easily.

2casteelmullinjadeNL0216multim.JPG
 
Thanks to all. Laredo7mm - that cable fighter of yours is just terrific!

Cheers,

RogerP
 
When I was a kid a man Mr Salm, had a Chinese appel jade carving, about 3/8ths inches thick, 6' high, 4' wide. It very intricate and beautiful and was said to be worth thousands $. His favorite joke was to speak of its value and beauty then hand it to the man or woman he was talking to and let go of it just before the recipant got a grip on it, letting it drop to the floor, sometimes cement. It rang like a bell and never broke.
I have a stone age knife that was worked by abrading it against something, it must have taken a lot of time but it is beautiful.
I have tried to chip jade and it does not chip. I strongly believe that none of us would live long enough to see any shrinkage.
 
Hey, Murray,

I can host any pictures you want for an unlimited period. Just let me know and I'll get yout the information.

Gabe
 
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