All About Pocket Knives

It's been a while since I've really done much, but I do still find the time every now and then to get in a quick pocket knife I had this one recently sent to me for some love, it's a XX era case that sat in a hardware store window in the sun...




Now, normally I don't really take on repair work, I don't like working on heirloom type knives, things like that because there is just to much that can go wrong BUT, this is not one of those knives, and the owner asked for something I've been thinking about trying for some time, and was perfectly willing to let me experiment. His request was synthetic handles, some form of Micarta preferably, with jigging and nothing else really fancy (filework, etc) since this was going to be a user. I've been wanting to try out jigging for a while, it's so....tactile to play with, and frankly the jigging you see on most production knives is crap. sharp edges, flakey bone, terrible colors, etc. If you look at the jigged material going onto custom knives from guys like Todd Davison, Tony Bose and Ken Erickson, or the stuff on knives 60 years ago it bears little to no resemblance to the stuff adorning modern slippies.

So, to much text, not enough pictures. This was the end result of a few days of playing around with carbide cutters and some paper micarta:

Dang!!! Adam you can really work magic on a knife. Thanks for showing us your work. This is one of the best things about this site being able to look at top notch work.

NICE! You wouldn't know the material if you hadn't told us. I know from talking to Tony Bose that he jigs his own bone. I'm going to guess those other guys do too. That's why it looks better than the regular production stuff we see all the time. You just can't beat hand craftmanship.

Adam,
GREAT lookin jigging! What a great one that would be to have as a tutorial.....hint, hint..
Mark

Great lookin work Adam. Man I wish I could do that to a knife. ::ENVY::

Awesome work. I like your logo too.

Very nice work Adam.

Ramrod.........................just take your dremel with a narrow wheel and get jiggy with it

Thanks guys.

In this case (ha ha) it was one of the ball shaped cutter heads (two of them actually, one small, one about the size of a pencil eraser) and I just kinda did what felt right. After I had everything looking good and mounted, rounded out and shaped to the knife, I pinned the handles on, then went back and cleaned up the jigging a bit more, and also sculpted the pin heads to match the jigging they sat it. with paper micarta it works really well, if you have your speeds right, you don't leave any fuzz on the cuts (my experiments with linen and canvas were very unspectacular in that regard) I may play with some G10 next to see how that looks, but I don't think I'll get as consistent a finish as with paper micarta.

Thanks for the info Adam. I like the blended pins, pretty cool.

I tried it on paper Micarta and wasn't thrilled with the results. I didn't finish it out all the way though, so maybe it's not a fair statement.

Nice work Adam.
I have been getting together some cutters in preparation of doing some jigging next year.

I agree with Gary that blending the pins into the jigging makes for a very nice & unique look.
I really like the overall effect. Great job!

Thanks for sharing,
Dale

Nice work Adam!!

Very nice work Adam