I
promised myself that I would complete the mule I picked up at the Blade Show a
couple years ago.
Mules
are sharpened, but unfinished knives from Spyderco. Specifically:
“…Sample knife used for in-house performance testing. Traditionally, they are made to the exact same pattern and specifications, but feature a different blade steel or heat treatment protocol. This keeps all the performance characteristics of the knife identical except for a single variable, allowing an excellent basis for objective, scientific performance-based testing."
It
gives prospective knife makers a chance to try their hand at customization. Spyderco makes several copies of each set of
variables. I suspect that gives them
experience in working with that combination of geometries, hardness and
steel.
When
I bought my Swick 3, I was told that some of the previous mules came with
sheaths, but mine didn’t. Also I had no
choice in steels and frankly, neither do you.
When a specific lot of steel is sold out, they are gone for good!
Equally unfortunately, Spyderco currently only offers only one fixed blade pattern.
 |
| Stolen from Armslist but this is a Swick 3 |
Equally unfortunately, Spyderco currently only offers only one fixed blade pattern.
Here’s
a link to this interesting project.
I
wanted synthetic handle material. Having
never tried to make a handle, I opted for pieces of a blue composite
material. While I was thrilled to score
two potential nice grips, I was crushed to discover later they might be too
small, depending on how clever I was.
I
couldn’t get them to work, so the following year I purchased two slabs of
exotic hard wood. I carefully drew
pencil lines on the dark brown wood and took it to my bandsaw. From there it was relatively easy to turn
them into scrap wood.
Fortunately
I had several pieces of a nice mahogany.
I pressed them into service and after a little bandsaw work (much improved
over the first run at this,) I had two blocky potential grips. I decided not to use pins, but to the epoxy
each future grip to the metal frame and a pine wood spacer. The Swick’s handle is a steel frame and I
didn’t want to fill that space with epoxy.
Since
this is an on-the-cheap project, I used whatever epoxy I had on hand and that
turned out to be J-B Weld 12 hour cure epoxy. I taped the blade to protect
myself (Safety First!) and cut the pine spacer out on a jig saw and mixed my
epoxy. I actually prefer the 12 hour
cure, as it gives me time to correct mistakes and the longer cure time creates
stronger bonds and I’m all about handle strength.
The
next day I started sanding with finer and finer grits. I was inspired by a knife I saw at Shadow Tech
Knives. John used a 2000 grit paper and
worked the wood into something wonderful.
It was so smooth and silky, I’m still not sure why I didn’t buy it when
I saw it.
I
like the polished look of the wood, but I wanted some protective coating. My wife had a special food grade supplement
that can also be used to treat wood finishes on wood salad bowls. It contains flax seed oil which sounds better
than linseed oil and a vitamin E component.
Vitamin E contains a group of compounds called tocotrienols, that like
flax seed oil, have double bounds between carbon atoms.
The
upshot of this impromptu chemistry lesson is that double bonds can break and
reform to form a solid finish. I wiped
the handle down, left it in the shade a little to let the oils soak in and put
it in the sun. Well, those energetic
solar photons did their job, opened up the double bonds and the oil formed a
nice dry finish.
