All About Pocket Knives

I began this knife rehab a few months ago, and finalized it today. I am not as happy with it as I had hoped, all due to the nature of Moose Antler as a handle material.
It is a 1974 Case 6265 SAB folding hunter that had been badly abused.

Here are the "before" pics: I removed the broken blade, cleaned up a lot of rust and pitting on the clip blade, and put Moose antler slabs on it. There was only a thin layer of hard antler, so the pith showed through in places. I thought that I could seal it before buffing and make it okay, but even sanding put black particles in the pith. I tried hand sanding and sealing the pith with CA glue, but black crud built up no matter what I tried. So, lesson learned on trying Moose as an alternative.
Still, it looks better now than it did! I can always go back and rehandle it in something else later, but for now I consider it finished. I even made a leather half-sized belt sheath that holds it pretty well, and practiced up on some lanyard knots to complete the ensemble!

As Chris says, doesn't look too shabby. A big improvement, and you have gained some very useful knowledge on the difficulties of moose antler.

Looks good and now a useable knife

Very nice rehab Reverand! I'm not saying that I would use moose antler all the time, but it sure gives that knife a lot of character. I don't think you mentioned it, but that blade looks much better (and a lot larger) with a nice, straight cutting edge.

Thanks for the positive comments. This knife looks better in pictures than it does in hand.
Still, I may experiment with Moose again in the future, perhaps on something smaller, and may try experiments with stabilizing it first.

royal0014 wrote: ↑Tue Mar 28, 2023 6:06 am Doesn't look too shabby to me !

How about a well shot so we can see how thick the slabs are ....

Here is that well shot (slightly out of focus. Sorry!) Not much thicker than original.
I thinned them down on the back side trying to get rid of most of the pith. They came from the same piece of antler that I split down the center with a hacksaw.

Very cool!!!

Very informative post. You should be proud of your work.

Bob

Looks good to me Rev.

Impressive rehandle to me! Horn and antler are hard to work with and I’d say you did a great job for the first moose antler rehandle.

Rev., i for one love it. I like the look a whole lot better than some of the stag I see that is mostly white. This moose antler now has an aged/patina look to it that looks good to me. I bet the pith looked a lot less porous with the sanding build up. We try for that when refinishing a gun stock.

I don’t know that it would look good on a smaller knife. But in<Ike it in that hunter.

Fairly recently, I would have written off a knife that looked like that. Not anymore. I hope that one day Ill be able to do half as good a job. You did great with both the knife and the lanyard!

Very nice work!