u/Ren_Kaos

This was my first major woodworking project and also my first handle scales.

They say experience is the best teacher and I certainly made enough mistakes to learn plenty. I bought a vacuum chamber, toaster oven, cactus juice and I had a dream.

I had 8 pairs of blanks of differing types of maple; quilted, curly, and burl. I baked them for over a day at 220 to evaporate any latent moister, I let them cool and then left them stabilizing for about a day and then soak for about a day and guess what happened! They all floated right back to the top. Okay, let’s try again! This time I left them with the vacuum running for 4 days straight but I was still getting bubbles. Said whatever and let them soak for another 4 days. This time 6 of my 16 scales stayed on the bottom. I decided I didn’t want to wait any longer and threw them all in my toaster over to cure. When I checked on them about half had warped. The curly flame maple kept its shape and was one of the three pairs that sank so I decided to use those.

I took them to my work (machine shop) and used our drill press and belt sander to make my holes and rough out the shape. Then back home. Glue up was messy and for whatever reason, despite using the original handle as a guide my holes were off just enough that I had to work to get my corby’s into the tang. Unfortunately my corby counterbore left my hole so tight I had to deadblow my bolts into the wood. I didn’t notice but when I was trying to get the bottom corby seated properly it popped out of the tang and the copper ending up deforming against the steel. Grabbed some pliers and with epoxy everywhere I crushed the female threaded part of the bolt back into shape enough to fit into the tang hole. It was able to thread together maybe one rotation at least but it’s mostly just held together with epoxy. Used my dremel with a cut off to take down the bolts. Dang copper is heat conductive! Burnt my finger on the other side of the one I was cutting.

Shaping the handle was done mostly by hand because I couldn’t find the rest of my dremel attachments and don’t own a belt sander. At the 11th hour I found one 120grit drum and boy did that make everything go faster. Locked the dremel in my vice and used it like a spindle sander to shape the edges. Came back and did final profiling by hand again. Took it up to 2000 grit as that’s all I could find locally. I already had a buffing wheel so I used that with no compound and that did okay. Unfortunately the knife got ripped out of my hands and thrown against the concrete floor. 🤦🏼 oh well, can’t do anything about that now. Then I got the idea to try and coat it in a deep pour resin I have. Big mistake. Ended up with bubbles, despite it looking mostly good and decided to take it all the way back down to the wood. Resanded up to 2000 and this time I bought some white compound and buffed it to a nice shiny finish. Followed it up with a coating of danish oil that I let soak in overnight and buffed out with my silk pj’s. Took it back to work and sharpened it with 220 grit on the belt sander and then to the leather strop wheel.

Overall very happy with how it turned out and now that I’ve made so many dumb mistakes, my next one will be much smoother!

Happy crafting everyone!

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