Muskrat man, when I bought the razor, I was hoping the if the handles were not tortoise shell that they might be horn, but not to be.
So I spent quite a few hours practicing peening pins and thought I was ready to pin my knife handles. Decided to go without any glue, in the event I screwed something up (quite likely) it would be easier to remove the handles and start again with out as much mess to clean up. Anyway, I took a couple of nervous pees, sat around for awhile thinking about it, and finally gave it a try, cracked the handle on the first pin!
Successfully completed the last three with no cracks, however, as you can see in the pictures, still a little crude. The handles are still about .01" to .015" too thick, so I figured when they were hafted down that the pins would look better. Sorry for the bad pictures, for some reason I can not get my camera to focus properly not matter what I do and got tired of fighting with it.
A couple of thoughts and questions:
- when I watch the video of muskrat man finishing up peening the handles on a GEC sunfish, the pins seem to fit quite loosely in the holes prior to peening. When I drill a hole with the 1/16" bit, the 1/16" brass still fits quite snugly. Could this be a reason for cracking scales as there is not enough room for the pin to expand?
- also, I thought that the fit of the handles to the liners was nice and flat, however, when I pinned the handles, the liners bowed (see the third picture). I can squeeze the back side of the handles/liners flush with very little pressure, however, there is still a bit of a gap on the well side of the knife, which I suppose would not be too noticeable? Moot point anyway, as I have to make at least one new handle to replace the cracked one and that is the side that bowed the worst.
- the holes in the old handles and in the liners are 0.07" (1.8 mm) in diameter. The 0.07" nickel silver pinstock fits perfectly in them. However, I have as of yet been unable to locate any metric drill bits here in Saskatoon (a city of near 300,000 people). A 1/16" drill bit is about 0.008" too small and a 5/64" drill bit is about 0.008" too big. Have one more place to check next week but will likely have to buy an expensive set of metric drill bits to get the one size I currently need.
Dan