#4: W&B The Celebrated Hollow Ground
Here is the original:
http://i767.photobucket.com/albums/x...pse075ba1d.jpg
http://i767.photobucket.com/albums/x...ps9072cae6.jpg
Not bad, but there was some tarnish and pitting. The scales were in pretty good shape, but I wanted to try making some out of all the stabilized burled and spalted wood my son has for making knives. (I kept the original horn ones for possible future use).
Here is what I came up with:
http://i767.photobucket.com/albums/x...psveehobmo.jpg
http://i767.photobucket.com/albums/x...psx6uovs5z.jpg
The scales are some sort of burled, spalted wood I get as cutoffs from a friend who is a custom wood-worker. I'm not sure on this one, other than that it's an American hardwood that we had stabilized for knife handle blanks. After cutting it out and splitting it, I used the grinders to rough-thickness and profile/contour it before hand-sanding up through the grits, then polishing with white compound. On this one, I tried to do a little more radiusing/contouring of edges, and just left some of the natural pits and voids alone (though CA and epoxy finishing are on my list to learn!).
The blade: Since I wanted to retain as much of the stamping as possible, I only did some light buffing on the greaseless compounds at 400 and 600, then hand-sanded up through the grits to 2000 wet-dry before a final buff on white compound and fabuluster, as well as a final polishing with Mother's. Definitely not mirror, but it actually looks better in person than these crappy i-phone pics.
Wedge and Pinning: This is my first wedge (thanks to encouragement from Pixelfixed and others). I thought brass would look good with these scales (and happened to have a small piece laying around!). I glued it to one side of the scales, then spent quite a long time trying to shape it before putting it all together with hex screws. The fit is not perfect, but after reading everything I could find about wedge-fitting, I'll take it for a first one, and hope for continued improvement:
http://i767.photobucket.com/albums/x...psh08z3udn.jpg
As I was concerned that the whole house of cards would come crashing down if I removed the hex screw and tried to pin this mess up, I just tightened them up over double washers and buffed them shiny. The pivot end got the same double-stacked brass washers and hex-screw, with internal brass washers. It is tight all through its arc, and closes exactly centered in the scales, so there's that.
http://i767.photobucket.com/albums/x...psm22t2tru.jpg
http://i767.photobucket.com/albums/x...psxt5echqe.jpg
I plan to go hone this now, and will report back on the shave.
It was good to know that I can do a wedge (sort of). I'm still curious how some of you guys seem to get near-mirror finishes and keep the stamping so sharp. Maybe I should try for more of a satin look? Thanks for looking, and please bring on the constructive criticism! Aaron
