Much hard-stolen time away from what I'm supposed to be doing (landscaping) wasted, trying to make scales. I am getting better, though; I can make one in about a half-hour, now, after about ten attempts. The next-to-the-last one I was just putting the teensiest of touch-ups on the finger relief and caught the wrong edge on the router and tore the bottom out. My technique is now to cut and rough sand the top and bottom edges to closely match the steel, using four 1/8 drill bits for pins, and then routing out the finger notch and using the roller on the belt-sander to notch the front to match curve of the blade. then I CAREFULLY saw the piece in half and and sand the sawn side flat. this ordinarily wouldn't work because I don't have two matching scales, but the wood is so fine grained it doesn't seem to show.
I broke my own rule and fine-sanded to match with the blank in place, because I had already nicked the steel on the bottom. Since this is as basic as possible, I'm going to pin w/ brass (I think I have some brazing rod, if not I have lots of old welding rod) or (horrors) buy something shiny if they have it at the Home Depot. Charlton recommends epoxy without pins, so if I can get the scales close enough to the steel without drilling to pin, I'm going to build the next one with just glue. He claims it's as strong as solder, and if it doesn't stick, I can drill and pin it later without damaging the blank.
No comments:
Post a Comment