What Color is Green Micarta?

Gollnick,
The handles on the balisong you posted appear to be green pakawood, not micarta.

Tom
 
Nope. That's Micarta. It is a great bit of it with a lot of character. Like I said, Micarta is a name for a broad class of materials. Depending on what it's made from, it can be almost a solid color to almost wood-like grain.
 
Step back for a moment to your high school or college art class. "Green" is not a primary color and thus, is inevitably a blend of other pigments. Although color control on pigments used in resins is pretty good, it is not perfect, so if the same plant or individual mixes another batch using the same forumla, is will likely have some variation, no matter how minor. The differences could be quite significant.

One source of further confusion over Green Micarta is the fact that "Black" micarta is never truly black. Rather, it is a blend of other colors that contribute to its blackness. Blacks - in all walks of color - tend toward either a purple-base or a green-base color. Thus, I have seen many black canvas micarta-scaled knives mis-identified as "green canvas micarta". I have not seen the same problem with paper or linen micarta, so it is the near-white "canvas" thread that makes the true base color of the "black" more evident.

The easiest way to tell is to get a real "green" micarta and do a comparison (like the Lone Wolf Micarta, which is a pretty clear example of a classic "green".).

Here is a pic of my "green" Cobra. (Photo not by me).
 

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Originally posted by patrickb
Alan, can you post a picture or a link to your Duncan?
Click to expand...

oops, sorry Alan, I just realized I'd asked you for a photo of the Duncan a couple of weeks ago and you indicated then that you didn't have a digicam yet. As I was typing I had that Deja Vu feeling...now I know why. I'll stop stalking you now :)

Best,

-pb
 
Originally posted by patrickb
oops, sorry Alan, I just realized I'd asked you for a photo of the Duncan a couple of weeks ago and you indicated then that you didn't have a digicam yet. As I was typing I had that Deja Vu feeling...now I know why. I'll stop stalking you now :)

Best,

-pb
Click to expand...
what's your e-mail, patrick? i'll send you some shots of it before i polished the blade. i asked someone at work to take some shots of it, but i'm not posting them for the whole board, only because i could've taken better shots myself. also, i think it looks better now that i brought the satin finish to a finer polish & changed the direction of the polish by hand-rubbing with some finer grit.
 
Architect, in painting, green is not primary color, which are cyan, magenta and yellow. The mix of all primary color is black.

However, as i recall, in lighting, Red, Green and Blue are the primary color ... the mix of all primary color is white ..
 
Here's another 3" bali I recently picked up with nice green micarta. Very nice Jade green.

1040.jpg
 
Architect, in painting, green is not primary color, which are cyan, magenta and yellow. The mix of all primary color is black.

However, as i recall, in lighting, Red, Green and Blue are the primary color ... the mix of all primary color is white ..
Click to expand...

Light can enter the eye in two ways: transmissive and reflective. Transmissive light comes from a source directly to the eye. It may pass through some object such as air or glass but it is basically a direct path from the source to the eye. Reflective bounces off of some object. When you read from a computer monitor, that is transmissive. When you read from a piece of paper, that is reflective. The computer monitor can form text for you by transmitting different colors from different pixels. The paper can form text by reflecting different colors from different parts of the paper. The transmissive system works by adding colors. The reflective system works by taking colors away.

That's the key. Transmissive systems are additive. Reflective systems are subtractive.

A color system is a set of "primary colors" which can be mixed together to form any color. There are literally an infinite number of color systems possible. But, all color systems break down into two major types: transmissive and reflective.

There are three major color systems in use in the world today. Most reflective applications use YCMB, yellow, cyan, magenta, black. In this system, black is the total absence of yellow, cyan, and magenta, so it's possible to reduce it to YCM. Most full-color printing is YCMB.

A lot of transmissive applications are RGBW, red, green, blue, white. But white is an equal combintation of red, green, and blue, so the system can be simplifed to RGB. Your computer monitor is RGB.

There is another popular transmissive system YCrCb which is used in television. Y is brightness and Cr and Cb are X-Y coordinates that determine color. There's a chart you can buy that shows what the color should be for every combination of Cr and Cb. This system is used for television. Black-and-white sets ignore Cr and Cb and only use Y. A black-and-white-only transmitter just holds Cr and Cb at fixed levels. In this way, color broadcasts are compatible with black-and-white sets and black-and-white broadcasts are compatible with color sets.
 
Tonyccw,
Good looking Balisong, and that micarta is really dark green. Very nice.

Tom
 
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