Another day, another knife in need of some love. This one a wee knife made by Joel Delorme.
The scales on this are a spalted wood. Spalted is, essentially, rot. Part of one of the scales was too rotten to last well. This problem can be overcome with correctly stabilised wood that has had resin pulled through it, but in this case that type of wood had not been used.
It was decided that the new handle would be spalted wood again, but this time properly treated wood. This piece is some Spalted Birch, flown all the way over from Denmark especially for this job.
The old handle off - it snapped quite easily! This just shows to me that spalted wood does need to be treated right. I don't blame joel for this choice as I've used Splalted wood just soaked in oil before as well but have since changed my view after playing around. The colours and shapes are so unique but that comes at a cost.
While the handle is off, may as well give the blade a bit of a clean up.....
The deeper pits were left as a sign of character and history but the surface rust was removed.
The plan for handle position!
I want to keep the 'eye' of the tree runnign through but also maximise the amount of black lines shwoing at the rear. There will be only the two bolts showing still, giving as much canvas to the wood as possible.
The handle bolts and necessary bits. Notice the step to the bolts. These are Corby bolts and are designed to lock the handle on where straight pins would only prevent againt sideways force.
The stepped hole ready on the right, the hole on the left has just had the pilot hole - each hole is drilled twice so eight drilling operations for two bolts!
I decided to add a third hole in the middle of the blade tang. Corresponding divots were then drilled into each handle scale. These only go a little way in. The idea is that they will give a bigger area for the glue to sit in, further adding to the holding of the scales.
Finally for this session, the front of the scales were shaped to the finished curve. This has to happen before gluing as there's no way to get to this area afterwards without interfering with the blade.
Part of the old handle sat on top...
