Taylors Eye Witness 1000 gets a new outfit!

Hey all, I got this blade on ebay a while back, the blade is in its initial stages of some hand sanding i am doing, but in the mean time I wanted to get some scales on her!

The scales blanks were ripped out of Bradford Pear. We had the tree come down in our yard a while back, but kept all the wood for the winter's fire place, and now this! I picked a nice branch, popped it in the vice and ripped the blanks with a hand saw. I drew the pattern out and traced it twice onto a single blank. I would have liked to use two side-by-side blanks so the grain matched up, but the contours of the wood were severe enough that the blank's weren't great matches even separated by the width of the saw blade and sanding smooth. You can only see one side of the razor at a time anyway!

Shaping was interesting, I broke my coping saw blade, so I used a dremel to rough out the shapes, and I mean really rough, like two rectangles. It just wasn't precise enough for me to risk trying to cut by the lines I had drawn. I quickly learned how useful my rasps and files were and got them shaped nicely until they were reasonably close, and then glued them together.

The rest of the work was still completely by hand, with a sandpaper progression running up to 600 grit I think, glassy smooth surface on the wood!

The pins were interesting and again in my impatience I found a nice nail for some pins. A little work with the hack saw and there I was! I also found that the pivot in this razor is really large, there was a small bolt in it previously, and I didn't want to deal with bushings or anything for more "elegant" pins.

So simple it is, no washers, just pins and smooth wood. I actually like the larger pin heads and I was able to peen them pretty much flat into the scale. For a finish I have been rubbing in some wax, letting it absorb in and then another, leaving a nice satin finish that is very smooth. These will probably be temporary but I needed a second razor to be usable incase I need to send one out to be honed!

Here it is!

http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e5...s/DSC_1067.jpg
http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e5...s/DSC_1079.jpg
http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e5...s/DSC_1065.jpg
http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e5...s/DSC_1071.jpg
http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e5...s/DSC_1078.jpg
http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e5...s/DSC_1074.jpg
http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e5...s/DSC_1077.jpg