Fancy fancy knife

A "spare parts" project. I've had a kit-built Scottish dirk hanging around my house for the last 16 years or so.  I was never very satisfied with it, and a few years ago, after I deciding I wanted to add a sax (not the musical kind) to my collection, I settled on using the dirk blade rather than spending more money on a new one.

This is largely a fantasy knife, although its pommel is based loosely on the Nijmegen sax.  The hilt is inspired by the Thorvaldr's Sax by Matthew Berry and one created by Petr Florianek.  It has a mahogany grip and holly spacers finished with linseed oil.  Admittedly, the mahogany is wrong for something meant to look Northern or Western European, but it's what I had on-hand; same with the yellow brass (I believe ancient brasses were more reddish).

Since I didn't have confidence in my ability to replicate the same carving in mirror four times, I instead gave it four different animals, a horse, wolf, hart and boar.  The lower two brass plates were sand-cast knife guards, while the upper two are fabricated from bar stock.

The pommel cap is fabricated from Crazy Crow stock, which seems to have a lower zinc content and grinds into an almost floury powder.  I etched it with a bird of prey using ferric chloride.  The top end of the tang is round and threaded; historical saxes would have rectangular ones that the hilt parts fitted tightly to.  The pommel is prevented from rotating by a pair of long escutcheon pins that extend through both plates and into the grip.  I ground a pair of pits into the bottom of the pommel cap to make space for the pin heads, then silver-soldered the cap onto the upper plate.  The pommel button is a ground-down steel nut.  The hilt is assembled with pitch glue.

The sheath is 7/8-ounce veg tan, stitched with heavy linen cord, stained with walnut dye, and finished with neatsfoot oil and beeswax.  The dragon is sort of a mix of Migration-period designs (with teeth cribbed directly from the Sutton Hoo shield ornament) with those painted by Professor Tolkien.  At the top of the sheath is a heart and flower taken from northern German folk art, translated into knotwork.

I'm delighted with how the homemade walnut dye worked with this project.  Even after filtering, it contains fine sediments which settle into the tooling crevices, making it a natural version of a commercial leather antique gel.   However, if I were using it on an un-tooled surface, I would want to use several applications to produce a darker stain, as the smooth leather here isn't a whole lot darker than it would be with just oil and wax.

I'm less delighted with the suspension tabs; specifically, setting the pins with a small hammer and anvil resulted in the tabs becoming badly dinged-up.  I'm not sure whether I should try re-polishing them.

Once all the projects for Plataea 2022 are done, I might add a belt and companion knife to go with this one.