All About Pocket Knives

I have learned a lot reading through the topics here and now I am trying to put what I have learned to use. I am attempting to completely disassemble and rebuild an old pocket knife that I literally pulled out of the trash can. It’s an old Sabre Japan stockman that had a broken blade. I am reassembling it with only the main clip blade which is on its own backspring.

My interest in knife building got started when I rehandled an old set of Chicago Cutlery kitchen knives that the original Walnut handles had dried out and become loose on. I made the handles from a block of Snakewood. They came out far better than I expected. I then made a set of steak knives using some Camillus blades I purchased off of ebay. I used Cocobolo for the handles. These also turned out great. I have since rehandled every kitchen knife and utensil in our kitchen that I could get the old handle off of.

This folding knife project has turned out to be much more complicated than I expected. I have more questions now that before I began. Following instructions from this site I was able to disassemble the knife without a problem. I cleaned up all of the parts that I am reusing and made new scales from some scraps of curly maple. How do you attach the pins to the liner? Here is what I did. I beveled the end of the pin that attaches to the liner slightly and tapped it through the handle scale and into the liner until it filled the hole, turned it over and tapped it from the back side to secure it. Since I wasn’t sure I was doing it right so I epoxyed the handle scale to the liner. I am going to sand the pin flush with the handle so the pins will really just be a decoration. I need to work on my peening skills before I attempt to secure the handle with this method..

I roughly shaped the handle before attaching it. I plan to finish the handle once the knife is assembled. What sequence do you follow for the handle?

I did a dry run assembling the rest of the knife. Someone please share the secret of fitting the blade to the pin and backspring without everything going out of whack. The backspring is a lot stronger than I anticipated.

I am ready to attempt the final assembly. Any advice here is appreciated. I am using brass pins. The pins fit snugly in the holes. I plan to make the pins slightly longer than needed and hammer both sides to expand them in the holes in the bolster. I am hoping the same method will work for center pin of the backspring.

I will post pictures of the disaster when I finish.

I had a good chuckle about your whole "rehandled everything I could get the old handle off" comment, I kinda feel like that's how things are around here sometimes

Your on the right path though. I know myself, and likely most of the other folks here use some form of epoxy or adhesive (to each his own) to secure handle scales to the liners prior to putting pins into place. All of the "pinless" knives you see are assembled this way. When I started, most of my pins were "decorative". it was only after getting familiar with them that I really started to use them as an additional way to secure handles. I had this lying around in my illustration folder, this might give some insight on how to use liner pins.

the first is what a peened pin would look like if you had a cross section, the second would be a pin, glued into place, for looks (if you used green glue )


Personally, I work like this, pretend there is glue in this image too



most of my handles are pretty well thinned down and pre-shaped before I ever put a pin in. there's no sense in doing all that peening, risking your handle material, if your just going to grind everything off

I'm not sure I follow your issue with the blade and backspring, but if I take a stab at it, your trying to put the blade pin into place with the spring already in position? My recommendation is to put the blade and it's pivot pin in first, then using vise or the like, compress the backspring until you can slot in it's pin. If I had one apart right now, I'd snap a picture for you to illustrate.

Thanks for taking time to reply. My handle pins are pressed or peened into the liner and epoxyed to the scales. Hybrid method I figured out that it would be easier to put the blade in first and push the spring over in the vise. I had to learn the hard way. I put a point on the last pin to line up the holes.

The knife is together, I hope it stays that way. Everything is tight and the blade feels good. The is almost no side to side play on the blade. You could rattle the blade by shaking the knife before I rebuilt it.

I am in the process of finishing the knife. I have shaped, sanded and stained the scales. I plan to use a thin coat of some poly that is made for table tops and then a couple of coats of wax.

I have been wondering if nickle silver pins are harder than brass. The brass pins sure bend and fold over easily.

Time to look for my next project knife.

Greg

NS is a bit tougher than brass, but that's kind of what makes them nice to work with. try peening stainless pins some day If your having issues bending or folding over pins, you might have them a bit to long to start with. consensus is about 1/2 the diameter of the pin above the surface of whatever your working on. you don't need much sticking out to hammer on.

He is my firs attempt to post a picture on this forum. These are a couple of photos of the completed knife. I should have taken a couple of before pictures. I literally pulled this out of the trash and it looked like it belonged there. It laid in a draw of my tool box for a couple of years. I am fairly satisfied with how it turned out. I learned a lot. The curly maple scales are quite figured but it really doesn't show in the pictures. I skipped using poly and went with a sanding sealer and wax finish. [The blade is tight with no noticeable play. I have it shaving sharp. I plan to put it int to my EDC rotation an see how it holds up.

Nice work! Now you have the bug, you will be looking at knives, thinking how you can make them over. thanks for sharing.

Glenn

nice job, now no broken knife is safe. haha

Thanks for the kind works. I managed to get the bolsters and blade cleaned up quit a bit better. I'll be keeping my eye out for potential project knives.

Great start! Now get busy and show us what else you can whip up! Watch out yard sales - here comes a Cutler!..

D