Spyderco Siren without the lanyard hole

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patrickguignot

Joined
Sep 10, 2015
Messages
515
I really like the Spyderco Siren but one recurrent critic is the blade to handle ratio.
And it's true the handle is a bit long. How can we improve this?
ijSFx5g.png


I don't use lanyards so for me the lanyard hole is useless. There is no metallic liners, only G10, so what if I hand sand the back of the handle to remove the lanyard hole and reduce a little bit the length of the handle ?
So I take out 120 grit and 600 grit sandpapers and 20 minutes later I have a cool Siren :

j8ebWlN.jpg


vnjaXno.jpg


Now the blade to handle ratio is better :

Ucle0Dp.jpg


Comparison with a PM2 and a large Sebenza 21 :

6ZAXJwp.jpg


It's really easy to do and it's an advantage of linerless knives. You can customize them ;)
 
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Really dig the vision, and I respect the guts it takes to modify your knife. Sometimes, when you're halfway through a project you wonder if you've made a mistake. At least that happens to me. I usually find the way back to my original plan, though, and often times it turns out better than imagined.

I hope you're happy with it. I, too, like to make my knives my own.
 
Nice job! Looks factory fresh.

You would love a friend of mine. He buys inexpensive knives that he sees offer promise for a design he has in mind, and then grinds and sands off everything that doesn't suit his vision. That includes the blade!

He as missed on a couple, but done very well with some others. When he grinds through liners (all the time!) he will remove the scales after he is satisfied with his work and put a couple of drops of epoxy to glue scales to liners if he thinks he needs to.

Robert
 
Looks good. I'd sand that g10 just a tad. It's really grippy. Maybe just the clip side. You can also put a tiny chamfer on that unlock button. GJ :thumbsup:
 
Nice work! Great option for folks that don't think they'll ever use the lanyard hole.

That said, doesn't quite have the same look to my eye, and obviously they can't sell the knife without a lanyard hole given the design purpose. Still though, nice work!
 
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patrickguignot said:
I really like the Spyderco Siren but one recurrent critic is the blade to handle ratio.
And it's true the handle is a bit long. How can we improve this?
ijSFx5g.png


I don't use lanyards so for me the lanyard hole is useless. There is no metallic liners, only G10, so what if I hand sand the back of the handle to remove the lanyard hole and reduce a little bit the length of the handle ?
So I take out 120 grit and 600 grit sandpapers and 20 minutes later I have a cool Siren :

j8ebWlN.jpg


vnjaXno.jpg


Now the blade to handle ratio is better :

Ucle0Dp.jpg


Comparison with a PM2 and a large Sebenza 21 :

6ZAXJwp.jpg


It's really easy to do and it's an advantage of linerless knives. You can customize them ;)
Click to expand...
Very nice work. It looks way better than a factory siren.
 
Nice work Patrick! A little background on the Siren design. That knife is my interpretation of a folding waterway. The handle shape on both knives is designed to accommodate some very specific and functional grips. The handle was designed to fit the hand (in a myriad of grips) and the blade was sized to fit the task at hand. I’ve been around the forums awhile and I knew when I was designing it that there would be some that would complain of the blade to handle ratio but I wasn’t willing to give it what I knew would be a more aesthetically pleasing form at the expense of functionality. (Sometimes you have to be willing to put function above everything else). I also felt very confident that those who prioritized function over everything else would appreciate the integrity of the design. I reckon if every designer put form first then Spyderco wouldn’t even exist as a company.

Regarding regrinding it to make it the way you like, I 100% approve! Sal Glesser is probably my favorite knife designer and I can’t tell you how many of his designs I have modified one way or another to better suit my liking. I don’t think that bothers him any more than it bothers me to see someone tweaking or modifying my vision. The Stretch is a great example. I love the knife but hate the extreme drop point. I modify mine to straighten the spine out and find it a much more functional and aesthetically pleasing knife. The thing is though, the knife was designed that way for a reason. It was made for skinning and caping without puncturing the hide. The point is, Sal didn’t “design the knife wrong”, he designed it just right for its purpose. I just have a little different purpose than the intended use so I modify the 5% I don’t like and leave the other 95% that I love alone.
 
Thanks for the additional context Lance, appreciate all the details. For my own usage/carry, i feel like the OP's mod is less aesthetic/form and more function for my use case which is random EDC tasks in humid/wet/sweaty environment and i think there will be other people who appreciate larger blade with as small of a handle as possible as well as deeper carry for ease of EDC. IMO the OP's mode would, in my usecase(not all), makes it a much better knife for me. It's less about how the handle looks ratio-wise and more about the overall size of the handle. I know it might sound trivial, but that additional handle poking out of the pocket may mean a difference between choosing to carry this knife vs not. I've personally made that choice when trying to carry when going to a "less permissive" environment surrounded by suburb sheeples.
 
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Surfingringo said:
I wasn’t willing to give it what I knew would be a more aesthetically pleasing form at the expense of functionality. (Sometimes you have to be willing to put function above everything else).
Click to expand...

Thanks for the comment Lance. I understand the knife was designed like this for a specific goal and I respect your vision of a folding Waterway. And as I wrote in the initial post, I really like the Siren.
But, like I insta9ves , for my personal usage I prefer a deeper carry and better blade to handle ratio. So it was not a modification made to have a "more aesthetically pleasing form". I just modified the knife to better suit my needs :)
 
How much of that nasty G10-dust do you get from manually sanding? I've got a G10 handle I need to sand down to get better access to the lock.
 
insta9ves said:
Thanks for the additional context Lance, appreciate all the details. For my own usage/carry, i feel like the OP's mod is less aesthetic/form and more function for my use case which is random EDC tasks in humid/wet/sweaty environment and i think there will be other people who appreciate larger blade with as small of a handle as possible as well as deeper carry for ease of EDC. IMO the OP's mode would, in my usecase(not all), makes it a much better knife for me. It's less about how the handle looks ratio-wise and more about the overall size of the handle. I know it might sound trivial, but that additional handle poking out of the pocket may mean a difference between choosing to carry this knife vs not. I've personally made that choice when trying to carry when going to a "less permissive" environment surrounded by suburb sheeples.
Click to expand...

I hear ya loud and clear. Everyone has a different perspective on what is practical and useful. Some want a thick blunt tip that is strong and robust and others want a fine and pointy tip that is adept and puncturing and detail cuts. Some want a large hand-filling grip and others want something that takes up less room in the pocket. I guess when I say I prioritized functionality I was referring to functionality in actual use. That doesn’t mean that I ignored things like comfort of carry. I did my best actually to keep the closed footprint as small as possible to make the knife comfortable to carry in pocket and waistband. But ultimately my priority was to make the knife work well in hand. I stand by my belief that most people who give the knife a chance in actual use will come to appreciate some of those design characteristics that might look odd at first glance.
 
craytab said:
It's got to have a lanyard hole somewhere. I'm not sure where else it would go.
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I always like seeing the loop built into the backspacer, which allows for a lanyard without sacrificing clip placement and handle size. Same result as the Sebenza's lanyard plug, but integrated into the backspacer. I think there's enough room in the Siren's backspacer to fit the lanyard.
 
patrickguignot said:
Thanks for the comment Lance. I understand the knife was designed like this for a specific goal and I respect your vision of a folding Waterway. And as I wrote in the initial post, I really like the Siren.
But, like I insta9ves , for my personal usage I prefer a deeper carry and better blade to handle ratio. So it was not a modification made to have a "more aesthetically pleasing form". I just modified the knife to better suit my needs :)
Click to expand...

Roger that, and I’m glad you did! I even hope that your mod will encourage others to have fun and make the knife their own. Nice work!
 
I had a little NAA Guardian .32. Neat little gun but kind of slick. I thought I’d stipple it.

Got a punch and a hammer. Stared at it. Thought about it. Stared at it some more.

That first “whack” took forever...

Then, I was committed, it was easy. Worked out great.
 
Rykjeklut said:
How much of that nasty G10-dust do you get from manually sanding? I've got a G10 handle I need to sand down to get better access to the lock.
Click to expand...

The 20 minutes hand sanding generated a fair amount of G10 dust so I used a mask (one of the reusable anti-COVID masks distributed to the population of my city here in France).
The risk exposure is short but I heard G10 dust is nasty so it's better to wear a mask.
 
patrickguignot said:
The 20 minutes hand sanding generated a fair amount of G10 dust so I used a mask (one of the reusable anti-COVID masks distributed to the population of my city here in France).
The risk exposure is short but I heard G10 dust is nasty so it's better to wear a mask.
Click to expand...

I modded other knives(mostly cold steel since they use linerless G-10) and i always do wet grinding since I didn’t want the dust to go anywhere. I sit in front of a bucket of water, grind-rinse-grind-rinse until i got the shape i wanted. I actually use coarse and medium sharpening stone(the cheap homedepot type) for the initial grinding and only use sandpaper for finishing
 
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