Wrapping Handles

[balrog]

I have a few old blades that I came across the other day. I would like to try and wrap the handles with some type of cord.

Are there any resources of different techniques of finishing the handles with say paracord, rayskin/hamon/flat cord in the japanese style?

What techniques/materials do you use when doing an epoxy soaked cord wrap.?

I saw some knives with hilts using a turks head knot and a japanese style wrap over rayskin. I would like to give that a try.

Thanks for you help. Anybody here in Hawaii that knows how to do this and is willing to show me?

 

[Burchtree]

You can glean a lot of info off of this page: http://pages.prodigy.net/tlbuck/tsuka/tsuka.htm

This page is hard to read, but has excellent pics:
http://www.n-p-s.net/tukamaki1.htm

And for the turk's head knot: http://www.northnet.org/ropeworks/archive/turkhed.html

When you treat the handle you can use 30-minute epoxy that will give it that "glossy" look, or superglue that soaks in, but may break down with use or moisture and will possibly turn white on you when applying it. I use an epoxy recommended to me by a great Japanese-style knifemaker, David Dempsey, called West Systems. Soaks in like superglue, protects like epoxy.

Good luck and enjoy.

 

[nwknight]

Do a websearch for tsuka-maki, japanese for cord wrapping, I found much more info then with typing cord wrap.

and here are a couple good ones the second has 50 different styles

tsuka

tsuka

Hope these help

 

[ddavelarsen]

Great stuff! The pics on the second site are very dark and it's hard to see what's going on in most of them. I downloaded the ones that looked most interesting, and in Photoshop tweaked the brightness and contrast, which really helped. I saw stuff there I would not have imagined! Way cool. Thanks,