The Kukri in Summer

Bladite

Bladite

ǝɹnsıǝן ɟo uɐɯǝןʇuǝb
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the other thread reminded me... this has been in the back of my head for a couple weeks, and i kept forgetting...

some of you all mentioned keeping a kuk in the truck/car. how's that work out in the summer? the laha/h-epoxy softens with heat, and the interior of a vehicle can get VERY VERY VERY hot. i imagine hot enough to soften or easily melt that stuff. i know it can melt hot-glue and other thermosettable plastics.

mmm

bladite
 
I never had a problem with it, but western WA is seldom very, very hot, even inside of vehicles. YMMV.

The one and only time that I removed a handle from a tang, it took something like twenty minutes of continuous submergence in boiling water and it still wasn't all that easy to remove. I wouldn't worry too much about the inside of a vehicle unless it's parked on the sunny side of Mercury. ;)
 
Bladite said:
some of you all mentioned keeping a kuk in the truck/car. how's that work out in the summer? the laha/h-epoxy softens with heat, and the interior of a vehicle can get VERY VERY VERY hot. i imagine hot enough to soften or easily melt that stuff.

bladite
Click to expand...

Bladite the laha has a greater melting temp than what is usually found even in a hot car or in a metal toolbox in Phoenix.
My daughter carries her old villager in her steel toolbox the year round, except when I have it to sharpen with no problems at all.:thumbup: ;)
Penny uses it in her landscaping business to cut cactus to where it can be handled with reasonable safety.:eek: :cool: :D
 
Yvsa, at a gun show down in Austin, I picked up a handforged Mexican cactus hook. Looks like an old fashioned billhook, with one large primary hook being a blade, sharpened on the inside edge like a sickle, and a smaller, unsharpened, secondary hook jutting from the spine of the primary blade. Mounted onto an old leaf rake handle, you've got nearly six foot of reach with the thing. You just slip the big hook around the base of the plant, give a smart tug, and the sharp hook blade slices right through. Then you use the smaller unsharpened hook to drag the plant away and put it wherever you want it.

Not that I deal with a lot of cactus, I bought the hook to use in eradicating my arch nemesis, Poison Oak (shudder), from a frequently used campsite. ;)

Sarge
 
This thread should be in the Forum proper, but here's my take on Summer:
If People say the Sun in AZ in a parked locked car with the windows up will not melt the laha, then I got to nod. That's a test, alright.



munk
 
I don,t know if this is Laha or what . Half the summer and fall I have been chopping up this wind downed willow . Partially to practice chopping and to cut it into manageable chunks and partially cause its so much fun . last time was towards the middle of September so it wasn,t too hot , After lopping limbs for a half hour I took the Kukurri and whatever moisture was on it from the inside of the tree and gave it a quick light spray of WD40 . There were no rags so I let the WD dry and sheathed the Kukuuri . I didn,t get to use it for quite a while after that and the blade had many streaks of a black tarry substance on it . It was to my understanding that the blade doesn,t touch anything but wood inside the sheath so I put it down to some kind of reaction between the WD and whatever substances came from inside the Willow .
 
Many people overlook that WD40 is a degreaser. I use it on tool surfaces quite often to remove shipping grease. I have also used it to clean up the excess polishing compounds, and/or Laha around the bolster.

On another note, I think if the car was hot enough to melt the Laha it would be known due to the AWFUL smell recently reported by a forumite.
 
Oops so East meats West (so to speak ) isn,t always a good thing ? Would there be laha for the blade to come into contact with inside the sheath ?
Let me clarify here that this was no great amount of substance this kinda looked like a seies of etching or tempering lines (unclear of term) on the blade . I,ll keep the WD away and start carrying an oiled shoprag in my kit .
 
Something Dan turned me onto is you can heat the handle with a heat gun, remove the handle, scrape off the Laha, and fill the handle with Brownell's Acraglass and aint nothing gonna melt it;)
 
FWIW,

I've never had a problem with the laha softening here in central FL. But I did have a horn-handled AK develop a 1/32" split from bolster to buttcap after just one June day in my son-in-law's truck. This was about two years ago. I repaired it with black epoxy and since have had no further trouble. I'm thinking there might have been an unseen defect in the horn.

gyr
 
hollowdweller said:
Something Dan turned me onto is you can heat the handle with a heat gun, remove the handle, scrape off the Laha, and fill the handle with Brownell's Acraglass and aint nothing gonna melt it;)
Click to expand...


How do you deal with the peened over tang when removing the handle? That sounds like a royal PITA just to replace it with a different adhesive. What conditions would a person be using a khuk under that would require something so heat resistant? I'm a little confused about how to do the project, and totaly stumped as to why in the first place.
 
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