All About Pocket Knives

I love the "Process" threads here. It's what got me into customizing, and I love to see how people work I've been wanting to do one myself for a while now, but I always forget to get pictures while I'm working. Well, I made a point to really try this time, so here we go:


51OT, some nicks out of the blade, a some discoloration on the blade, and banged up handles and bolsters. Sitting next to it is a block of stabilized spalted Hackberry I got special for this project I do love my oddly patterned woods


Disassembled knife. I use the "razor blade" method to split the pins and disassemble the knife.


The inside of one of the liners after I cleaned off all the "gunk" with acetone. These will be cleaned up and smoothed out once I get the wood mounted


Wood has been bookmatched, and the outside of the liners have been cleaned up and sanded with 80 grit, then wiped down with acetone to remove any grease or residue. The glueable surface of the wood has been roughed up with 80 grit as well.


Glued up, rough shaped block, ready for some more work. I switched over to Loctite's Sumo glue a few knives ago. So far I'm VERY pleased with it's performace. It's at least as good as gorilla glue, and foams not nearly as much.


A bit of time on the sander, and a quick trip to the drill press, and the handles have been shaped to (almost) the liners. I'm still quite a bit thick, but this is the first glance at what will eventually be I'll post some more tomorrow night.

Nice job so far Adam.
I was amazed when I took my first 51OT apart.
One of the easiest knives I have worked on.
It just looks intimidating because of the size & scarcity of them.

I do like that spalted Hackberry!
What is a hackberry? I don’t think we have them in Oregon.
Great looking wood none the less!

I can’t wait to see what it looks like when you finish it.

Dale

Thank you for the step by step show.

Very nice looking wood...

I hope you polish the brass linners before you put the knife together.... Perhaps you can clean up the sides of the spring too. So when you take a photo of her with the blade 1/2 open. The springs are nice and shinney too.

Very nice Adam ! Can't wait to see more

Thanks for the comments guys

Hackberry, according to Wikipedia, is any of 60 or so species of deciduous trees. Mostly ornamental, but some can get pretty large, very drought tolerant, and one of the most flexible species of wood. Supposedly grows all over, but I don't know that I've ever seen one out in the woods Stabilized wood all works the same anyways, regardless of it's natural properties, I just pick what looks right.

I fully intend to polish the liners before I reassemble. It does, in my opinion, make a difference in operation. As for the spring, that's what I worked on tonight


I usually wrap my springs, or in this case, lockbar in blue tape and make my layout marks on that. This particular knife is great to work on, the lockbar is THICK steel! I decided to do a new pattern for me, It's just basic round file stuff, but I think it looks alright.


I left the "hump" on the lockbar bare, and did a little tail filework past the hump. If you haven't' guessed by looking at all my other stuff, I perfer simpler filework.

I also worked on the blade itself tonight. Hand rubbing hollow grinds is not enjoyable, let me tell ya. My fingers feel like I smacked em with a hammer right now, but I'm at 320 grit. I'll work it tomorrow through 600, and be done with it if I like how it looks

More to come!

That's my favorite Schrade pattern.Looking good!Can't wait to see it finished up!

I fully intend to polish the liners before I reassemble. It does, in my opinion, make a difference in operation. As for the spring, that's what I worked on tonight

Good for you. The sides of the spring show when you take a photo of her with the blades 1/2 open or so. To me when people for get to clean or polish that part the ladys look like they have dirty shoes.

Your comming along very well. Thanks for showing some steps too.

It's looking great so far. Thanks for the process photos, very helpful



Michael

Hi guys, sorry about the delay. I've been a bit under the weather this week, and the sillieness associated with Nyquil and sudafed does not make for a fun time to play with anything sharp or pointy Let me bring you all up to speed.


I believe someone asked for some polished liners? Aside from getting the liners all flattened out and shiny, I spent some time on the blade itself


this is at 240 grit. I spent alot of time there, as with most factory finish blades from Schrade, they have these annoying little vertical grind marks you have to get out. but it's coming along....


400 grit finish. it's a crappy picture, but it looks better in person, I assure you

The next step, then, is to start rough assembly. We start with getting the Pivot into place.

I've got a decent little swell going on that end. Now I don't have the spacers stuck in with the blade in this pic, but I used a .005 on one side, and a .004 on the other side of the blade. I like my fit to be kinda tight.


and that finishes up the pivot, all peened into place now. the action on it is perfect. I gave it a few extra taps with the spacers out, just to fix a bit of play when open.

My next step was to slip the rest of the pins in place, and peen them down as well. Again, I got carried away and didn't get a picture for you guys This always happens, you know? Anyways. Some time on the sander at 50/80/180 brings us to a "rolling chassis"


some much thinner handles, from the rear


and from the side. Questions you may have:

Why are the handles shiny? easy. I've noticed with this wood I have little voids that appear when I sand with the rougher grits. As I get to finer grits, I have a tendency to run a thin coat of CA over the handles and let them sit for a while. I use Zap a Gap, so it's thin enough that it seeps into anything I've opened up. It's a bit of extra work to sand the majority of it off with the next grit, but It's worth it in my opinion.

Why is the pivot a different color? Again, easy question. When I disassembled this, the pivot was a different color too. Either the original pivot had a vastly different rate of oxidation than the NS used on the bolsters, or it wasn't a NS pin. Either way, once I started digging through my pile of pins, I couldn't find any NS in 1/8, so I used stainless. It will look a bit different when polished, but I'm really OK with it. I'd prefer the stronger pivot anyways I think.

Hopefully I'll have a finished product to show before the end of the weekend!

looking good Adam, I really like the wood and the 51's lend thierselves to be modified I did one a long time ago in desert ironwood burl. The original pivot pins in all thier lockbacks were SS for strength, actually, most modern knives they made without the swinden key construction used SS pins, all the lockbacks, and the 123 series are some that come to mind. I'd like to do up another one of those some day, I always liked the big wide drop point blade, one that would look good mirror polished I think.

Looking great!
Keep up the good work!

Dale

That wood is BEAUTIFUL You are going to make have to hunt down one of those knives Nice Work!!

Ok, I lied a bit, I did some work last night, caught up on my posting this morning, and spent this amazingly nice day outside on the deck playing with sandpaper

After some with the buffer, we end up with a finished product. Here you go guys, thanks for all your comments along the way I'm really happy with how this one came out. As a pattern, the 51OT is an wonderfully built knife. Simple, robust, and very well put together. Working on knives like this makes me very sad that Schrade is no more. I have a feeling I'm not going to be able to leave this one in the display case

You know a customized knife is successful when the people looking at it want to put it in their own pocket.

Adam my friend,
you have achieved success with this knife!

Dale

Beautiful work and some awesome wood. Spalted Hackberry, that looks fantastic. I really enjoy using and seeing knives with spalted woods - looks great!

adam, that's a really fine lookin piece. i was able to type this through the timely use of a drool bucket!

AWESOME work Adam

Adam that is fantastic work. Thanks for the step by step photos. That Hackberry looks great, it is a fairly common wood here in southwest TN. That filework looks just terrific, I enjoy the simple yet stunning design.

Beautiful work there You have me looking for a decent priced 51 to work on now.

Supper job well done.

Hackberry they possess the most bending tolerance of all species of wood. It is also very pollution tolerant, as it thrives in the smog and dirty water runoff of cities.

That knife is just STUNNING! And thanks for the play-by-play on the work!

Great job!!

These step by step, insider reports are my favourite threads.
Thanks for taking the time to share.
The fact that you miss a picture here or there shows the effort it must take to stop work in order to photograph.

Edgewise wrote:The fact that you miss a picture here or there shows the effort it must take to stop work in order to photograph.

You are right on the money with that observation.
I get so focused on what I am doing that it is difficult to remember to stop & take a picture of each step.

Dale

That is simply AMAZING!

I was trolling Ebay last night and saw two knives that were pretty nice except for broken scales.

I'm not registered on Ebay and wouldn't be able to do anything about the scales anyhow.

I can sure see getting some of you to do some custom stuff once my new job starts paying off.