Thread: Wooden Scales

I just went back through my photos and it looks like all of the knives (w/wood) and boxes pictured were finished with oil.

The simplest oil to use is just mineral oil. I use it to refresh the appearance of some wood handles (like my razor) and on synthetic materials like G10. A better oil for wood would be tung oil or danish oil. These oils penetrate the wood and harden it from the inside. I've heard that vegetable oils (like olive) can turn rancid, so I avoid them.

The trick to a good oil finishes is wood selection and surface preparation. The wood has to be durable and perfectly finished before the oil is applied. You are relying on the durability of the natural wood and any finish defects will be accentuated by the oil. The easiest woods to prepare this way are the extremely hard woods (rosewoods, ebonies, ironwood, and so on), so I'll talk about them first. I start by shaping on 60 and 100 grit paper. The contours should be perfect before you leave 100x. After that, it comes down to removing the scratches from the previous grits. Sand at 220 then 360x wet/dry paper until there are no lower-grit scratches visible. After that, I switch to 3M finishing paper. This paper has a cloth-like texture and uniform Al2O3 abrasive grit. It is available from 400x to 8000x (1-micron). A good progression is 400, 1200, 4000, 8000 (optional). Then I simply wipe the wood down with a little oil and in five minutes buff the excess with a cloth.

Woods with more open grain (i.e. walnut) will absorb more oil and take a little experimentation to figure out what shows the figure best.

Phillip