German hunting trousse, part II

Some German hunting knives and other equipment of the period with non-ferrous hardware had applied flanges and I wasted much time debating with myself about whether this was something I wanted to try.  In the end I decided it would be too easy to screw up.

I stained, thinned down and shaped the ash scales, then finished them with linseed oil.  The oil, unfortunately, brought out the wood grain strongly, and I don't think anyone giving these grips a close look in person would mistake them for antler.  A better choice than ash might be holly, plain maple, or even light-colored poplar, although knifemakers seem to consider poplar a poor choice due to its softness (it's said to dent much too easily unless saturated in stabilizer).

In the meanwhile there were also the washers to make.  Judging from photos of antiques, the smaller pieces of a hunting trousse most often had one highly-domed rivet or a pin set with a pair of washers at the top of the tang and simple pins for the rest, while the cleaver would usually have its scales attached entirely with domed rivets or washers.  Since I can't get solid nickel silver rivets that are just right, the heads have to be attached separately.  Radovan Geist suggested using upholstery tacks with the pins cut off and holes drilled in the middle, which he used on his amazing 17th-century Jagdmesser earlier this year, but previous experience has shown that I'm no good at keeping circular metal objects from spinning while drilling the middle.  Kellam Knives also sells premade rivet heads which would be perfect for this use; it's just that two each of them on the knife, fork and bodkin plus up to ten for the cleaver would come to almost $56 and I didn't want to spend that much.

Instead, I fabricated some washers from a half-inch strip of 14-gauge nickel silver.  First I marked off half-inch segments, then knocked a dent in the middle of each with a nail, to act as a pilot hole.

 The blackened end of the strip was from my attempt to anneal it.  This doesn't work with nickel silver like it does with brass.

The holes were drilled thusly:  I set the nickel strip on a board and hammered escutcheon pins into the wood around it so that the pin shafts prevented the strip from spinning around and the heads would keep it from flipping outward.  This worked well enough, but for some reason I couldn't keep the holes centered:  Almost all of them wound up to one side - the same side, no matter how I tried to correct the drill's angle.  This is one of the many, many times I regret not having space or money for a drill press.

After cutting the washer blanks into octagons, I soldered two of them onto the ends of a scrap of brass rod, then used a stone Dremel bit to grind them round and slightly domed (for which reason it was important to get the thickest nickel stock I could find).  At first I used low-temperature solder paste, but this proved too weak, and the washers broke free while being ground.  I tried again with silver solder, which worked, although it has its own drawback in that the solder is so strong that I could only remove the washers from the rod by re-melting the solder.  I heated the washers with a blowtorch while holding the rod with a pair of heavy pliers.  When the washers were red-hot, I grabbed another pair of pliers in my other hand to quickly pry them off.

After further cleanup with files and then polishing, the washers were ready to attach.  I set the scales with epoxy and nickel silver pins in the usual fashion.  Because nickel silver doesn't anneal (or at least I haven't yet figured out how to do so), the kind of plastic deformation involved in peening the pins is, well, harder.  Still, it's not a huge undertaking.

Setting the pins causes some metallic discoloration of the surrounding wood where the hammer hits it, which I have to then sand, brush the sawdust off of, and oil one more time.  The pin with the washers at the end was by far the easiest one to set, which makes me wonder why all such knives didn't have washers on all the pins.

I haven't made a sheath for this knife.  If all goes well, it'll wind up not as a belt knife but carried in a cleaver sheath side pocket alongside its siblings.