Mora #106 knives' scabbards

inspired by other sloyd knife makers, like Reid Schwarz, i made some scabbards for my freshly handled Mora 106 knives. wood on hand for this kind of scabbard was ash, very springy but prone to splitting. wood is a good material to remember as a spring!

the operation involves relieving 1/2 of the knife using whatever means necessary on two pieces of wood, gluing together and then shaping the end result to your fancy. for me, i'm not interested in wearing these scabbards off my hip, but more to protect the blades.

you then glue the two sides together and then shape them to your fancy. the

fresh Mora #106 knife blades with shop made handles!

this is the knife blank you get from morakniv. i ground up a little bit of the blade edge so that it was separated from the hilt of the handles on my bench grinder.

I forgot to take action shots of the handles getting glued up. it's a "clam shell" construction, where you have two halves of the handle, and route out the knife bolt into one side. I traced with a pencil and used a chisel and a small router plane to get the blade to fit snug on one side. i dont think it has to fit super perfect because i used epoxy with glass fibers mixed into it. in my experience this bonds metal to wood pretty well. I did abrade the knife bolt and clean it up with mineral spirits before assembly.

I used two woods here: padouk, and afromosia. i had some random offcuts in the bits box and these both have interlocked grain which would do well as knife handles i think

my patternmaker's vice was so wonderful. it held the work beautifully and i was able to use stop cuts and chisels, and saw rasps to refine the profiles.

I ended up using my small japanese block plane to achieve the bevel on the handle edges, along with a spoke shave. the padouk was more well behaved, the afromosia was quite wild and so i had to resort to sandpaper/scrapers to refine the facets.

I finally used an old beater chisel to clean up the epoxy squeeze-out at the hilt.

can't wait to put these babies to use. next weekend's project is to build wooden scabbards for them...

updating shop handtool storage ii

my new hand tool storage, a chest of drawers that perches on the caster rails of this improvised cart/desk. there are shell pulls on the front edge of the top which makes it a breeze to reposition this chest wherever the task is. it's very usable, and i'm looking forward to putting it through its paces for oncoming projects. I already have one small project under the belt which gave me some assurance.

I made loop drawer pulls from pine offcuts that i roughed out on the machines in batch, but then applied my sloyd knife to give them a hand friendly faceted surface. I then painted them a dark grayish purple. they will be attached with 1" #8 brass skrews, going right through the front. it's okay, i'm okay with that.

the color choices are a little different. i'm very much colorblind, and from an early age i would mix any colors with gray/black/white to mute them. didn't even know why i was doing it but i think the process was a way to bridge the gap with the color perceiving world. i've always liked this effect because it tends to quiet the colors. here, i decided to start with a light band of white and progress green towards the bottom, and purple to the top. i can only imagine it looks kind of odd to folks who see color in a more subjective way.