Well, I received a custom order for a Pride design knife, so I have to put the Talon on hold for a little while. I'm actually really excited for this build, so this should be a fun knife to make. With all the extra time I had in the shop over the holidays, I was able to make some great progress. Here's what's been going on.
My client specified raindrop pattern timascus for the scales, spacer, and pocket clip. This is pretty cool stuff and I'm looking forward to working with it. The liners will be titanium as well and the blade is CPM 154. I already had this blade profiled and heat treated so I'm ahead of the game.
My phone's battery died, so I didn't get any pics of building the main parts. Here are the parts laid out on my trusty carpet square on the workbench.
Here is the knife assembled for the first time. I really love the Pride design. It's everything that a pocket knife should be.
I really wanted to add some pizzazz to these scales. I took a long look at the timascus and realized that the raindrop pattern looked kind of like a night's sky full of stars. I decided to go with that idea and make a constellation pattern on the scales by drilling holes in some crisscrossing arcs. I'll connect the dots later on. The pic shows the scales after the holes have been drilled.
Here are the scales after being contoured and polished up to 600 grit. They look kind of cool right now but after they get carved, the constellation dots should make more sense.
I got curious and had to see what it looked like all assembled. I'm liking it!
Here is the knife with the dot connections carved in. It's supposed to be three crossing curves, integrating the scale screws. I think it gives the knife a unique look that will compliment the raindrop pattern once the timascus is anodized.
Here is one of the liners getting the jewel pattern ground in. I'm using this new mini pallet that I made a couple weeks ago, and it worked perfectly.
Both liners have been jeweled.
Time to give heat anodizing the timascus a try.
It took more heat than I thought, but it turned out really cool. I has some blue, purple an some gold colors in it. The cell phone pic doesn't do it justice.
And here are the scales all finished up. Again, the cell phone pics just don't capture the beauty of this material. I also think the constellation motif fits right in.
Here's the knife with the lock bar cut in and fitted to the back of the tang for a perfect lock up.
And here's a final pic of the progress made on this knife. And yet again, these pics just don't show off how beautiful this knife is. It looks kind of "blaw" in this photo, but be assured that it looks amazing in person. I'll be sure to take some high-quality pics of this knife once it's done. So far, so good. I hope that my client approves. He gave me the artistic freedom to add whatever embellishments that I deemed appropriate.
Thanks for following along with me on this build. Next time I will be grinding the blade and adding a few more embellishments to punch up the wow factor. Until next time, have a happy new year!
- Brandant Robinson