Rehandle! cold steel black bear bowie machete

[Chris Pierce]

Hey guys. I haven't really been around much for the past few years. But I had an unplanned week off from work so I decided to play around with a knife I had recently ordered.
This is my first honest attempt at a rehandle. I may either rework it or replace the handle again at a later date. And I am still planning on stripping the blade and maybe making a new sheath to match.
Anyway, I thought some of you might find my little project interesting. The handle is made from an old hard wood drawer face, the pins are made from cut nails. The leather came from an old gun belt.
So with out further ado, pictures of the finished product (no before pictures though! :/ )

And some pictures of the process,
Until this point I was presuming that the tang was going to be square-ish in shape, without really following the shape of the handle, I was wrong.



I was really surprised to see that the guard is three dimensional and welded.

My new Mora did a lot of the carving on this job. It really earned its keep.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and post up some more shots when I finish removing the coating from the blade. I'll probably go ahead and put some kind of patina on the blade too.

 

[Chris Pierce]

For some reason I'm not seeing the pictures that I posted. Maybe I need help..... :/

 

[FortyTwoBlades]

I'm not even seeing the image code when quoting your post. It's just totally absent.

 

[Chris Pierce]

I'm currently uploading the pictures on a new imgur account. But I dug around in the tech help section here and came up with a possible temporary fix for photo bucket pictures, so I'm going to try that now.

 

[Chris Pierce]

Fixed it!

 

[FortyTwoBlades]

Very nice! I figured it'd have a solid steel guard under the plastic, as they did that with the Smatchet.

 

[Bladegunner]

Nice work, I have done a couple handles lately myself.

 

[Mick P]

THAT is not nice work. THAT is freaking amazing. What a great job. Now I want one.

 

[45Shooter]

Man, what a pain in the ass that handle is to get off! I just did it and eventually had to take a heat gun to it to soften up the plastic. That helped quite a bit. Kinda wished they just used the usual kraton - a razor blade and that comes right off.

 

[noviomagus]

It's just fine the way it is with the polypropylene. Tough is good. Kraton handle on a large blade, no thank you.
No blisters with the smooth polypropylene handle when doing some chopping .

Though the above pics shows quite some transformation of the Black Bear Bowie machete.
Very impressive. Looks like a museum piece from the civil war era. Well a bit new, and the black coating... but still.
Very very nice.

 

[gunfixrjoe]

Very nice! I rehandled a Cold Steel Roach Belly recently and it was plenty of fun