All About Pocket Knives

The weather wasn't good today but managed to make a run over to the knife guy. He was in the process of patching some knives. He had an old Napanoch knife with a crack on the handle. He used the Dremel to open the crack up and then daubed super glue and leather dye to fill it in. He did this in layers and it set up fast without getting gummy. He said gel type super glues will not work. I'll post what he was using. I hope I can get these pictures where they go and I'll add some comments on them. The first knife was a Boker with no shield. Filled in and the cross was added. Second pics are from a knife broken out at the rocker pin.

Part 2.

The glue he was using and a pick bone Russell that was repaired.

The handles on this knife were made from auto body fiberglass.

Repaired scout knife. At top right.

This is the Case, green bone camper I thought he did a killer job on. This was ebay 230890860622. I bought it and gave it to him for the knife he did for me. You can go look at the before pic on this.

This should come up in completed items. The pic is too small if I try to save it and post here. 230890860622I item number:

Nice looking repairs.

Here ya go:
Did you replace the bail?

Thank you for posting that. He sure did replace the bail and made it a pretty straight knife.

Yeah Man, he did a great job on the knife. Give it a big

Nice job on those so is it glue ,dry , dye , glue ,dry, dye ,,,,,,,and so on for the small repairs [ cracks etc. ] will the dye stick to the top of the glue in layers like that ?

I'm not an expert on this but that is what he was doing. Putting the dye and glue on in layers. It was drying fast and the dye seemed to stick fine. He also mentioned that he mashes up old bone handles into a powder like and uses that as a filler on bigger places. He said that made the patch stronger.

Cool ! i`ve been using ground bone with super glue , and i believe it helps now just gotta get the dyeing rite , is he using water based or solvent base colors ?

wiseguy wrote:Cool ! i`ve been using ground bone with super glue , and i believe it helps now just gotta get the dyeing rite , is he using water based or solvent base colors ?

While I don't know what he uses, I've had very good luck with the leather dyes available from Jantz Knife Supply.

What Bob is right. He was using the Fiebings like you get from Jantz. That is just the base though. If you are trying to match a light brown handle chances are the light brown dye won't be a perfect match. You have to add things or dilute to get a color match and that is the key. When I was in the knife repair shop in KY I saw they were using Mecuricome ,Methialade, Iodine, Potassium Perm., and other things to get the color match they needed. I think a lot of trial and error on scrap bone goes into a good repair. They all say the darker the color is the easier it is to match. Also I noticed that Minwax wood hardener was used, but maybe that was just to stabilize the patch? There are a lot of good threads on here about dyeing natural bone. Which is a similar process. Patching bone is like trying to match a spot on the living room wall where the paint is 5 years old. A bit tricky to blend it in.

I was over to this guy's place today and he showed me this old knife that he patched both sides on. If you notice the initials E S are on the shield. Anyone have any idea of what that means? He thinks it was a salesman's sample knife and the intitials were put on it to avoid getting it mixed with other knives. Any other ideas or comments?