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Rehydrate leather disk handle

S

sqeezeatrigger

Joined
Mar 7, 2015
Messages
13
Hello, As the title says, what is the best way to rejuvenate the handle on an old Kabar skinner? The leather disks are dry and have shrunk a little making them loose. I have googled till my head hurts--too many answers,most contradict each other!! Thanks for any help!
 
Don't use mineral oil, use neatsfoot oil or obenaufs leather oil
mineral oil degrades leather.
 
Mineral oil degrades leather

I'd suggest obenauf's leather oil, put a coat, and let it soak in the sunshine.
repeat every couple of days until it's nice and supple.

don't soak it in the oil, too much at once will be hard on the leather.
 
This isn't a direct answer to your question, but I've worked on several knives with leather-washer handles (including Kabars) that had shrunk and gotten loose. In some cases I just replaced the entire handle by making new washers, but in other cases the owners wanted to keep the old handle, so what I did was make an aluminum spacer the same shape as one of the leather washers, left one end of the tang hole in the aluminum spacer open, and pushed/lightly hammered the aluminum spacer in between two of the leather washers to tighten the handle up. Basically, the finished aluminum spacer looks like a big "C".

The thickness of the aluminum used to make the spacer depends on how much of a gap needs to be filled between the leather washers to tighten the handle.
 
I've fixed leather handles where the washers were shrunken and loose with neatsfoot oil and it worked well. I finished with beeswax melted and brushed on, then heated with a hair dryer to harden things up a bit. Neatsfoot oil *compound* contains mineral oil so get pure neatsfoot oil.

http://www.leatherhouse.com/wissen/haerten.php
 
Ive used baseball glove oil spray and after a few days good ol shoe polish. Ive seen my dad repair breaks in individual leather sections with fine shredded rawhide and super glue mixture. I saw it work.
 
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