Thread: Thoughts on Walnut?

What do you guys think about walnut wood for scales?

I'm not sure yet myself.
I started on a new set, the wife suggested I try the walnut (she seems to be my adviser on these things). It seems rather soft! It's not stabilized, and While working on it, I'm afraid of it splitting (as I'm cutting it). The more I work on it, it feels like balsa or bass wood.

However, it cuts and sands like butter! Which I'm not complaining about.

I'm hoping that with liner's and several coats of Truoil and wax at the end I should be fine.

SO? What do you guys think about the 'stuff'. Is there something I should consider or anticipate? Should I scrap the set now before I waste my time? Will they always be this soft and susceptible to damage?



C utz

Truoil won't help. I'd use liners and a CA finish if I were you.

You can buy wood hardener that you apply with a brush. You saturate and let the piece dry. It won't leave a ton of build up on your scales, but you will have to sand off small bits of excess before finishing. After that, a good number of truoil coats or CA and you should be good.

Walnut, especially the burl, can fracture along grain lines. The hardener will help with that.

You could also apply multiple coats of the hot stuff (low viscosity) CA, allowing it to soak in, instead of the wood hardener. The trouble is, soaking it completely in CA will make any sanding after that a bit slow, since CA is very hard.

Good luck,

Hm.

Well, it's not 'burl' walnut, but I wish it was.

Where do you guys recommend to get wood hardener, and what brand?

Right now, I'm too gung-ho to work on these scales, so I'm going to go ahead with them and cross my finger's. I'm hoping that glueing the wood to brass liner's will help prevent any splitting. We'll see. If anything 'bad' happens, well, I was warned.

C utz

OK!
SO, I FINALLY finishied these walnut scales. What a pain in the ass they were! Talk about bad luck from the start! The materials split through out the entire process...what I mean by that is, due to my unexplainable missfortune with T-88 epoxy, I had to reglue the brass and wood, brass and blue liner for each scale, as I was sanding. Seems Gorilla glue works good for me

Anyway, I also treated them with Minwax wood hardener. These are the first set of scales that I inlayed a shield in (the black horn scales I had shown previous was actually the second attempt...it's been that long since I got back to this first set). Sanded them down to 8K (I know excessive), treated them 4x's with TruOil (buffed with 4K & 8K inbetween each coat), finally coated in renaissance wax and buffed with the 8K polish paper.....

These are the scales to replace the horn scales I 'blew out' in the microwave (remember that post?).

Well, here is my dilema....I think these scales are too nice for the blade! What do I do now?!

C utz

Lovely work Chris. I'm sure some other blades will be arriving shortly Next time you play around with liners, try using a flexible auto-body part epoxy. That stuff worked like a charm for me.

Laminating is a good way of creating very strong sections of timber.

You'd want a centre lamination, and then one face laminate either side to stabalize it.

you could have ebony in the middle then some sweet timber on the outer laminates. Could look quite slick. I like the little inlay by the way. A nice touch of class!

top grade European walnut was used for rifle stocks because it will cut with or against the grain without any trouble and it dose carve like a block of butter
that is all I know ,weather it is suitable for razor scales ,time will tell I guess
Kind regards Peter

I've been using walnut for a while now. Never had any splitting problems but then again I guess it depends on how it's cured etc..I use thin sheet and brass liners usually though.

Gary