Adventures in Fancy-Shank Making

I recently order a knife kit, from knifekits.com (of all places). While I got materials for making a sheath as well, this is only about making the handle. My friend Jared helped me out with it (we used his shop) and was a tremendous asset, and not only because he took almost all the pictures, which is something I almost always forget to do.

Here's the blade that I started with (I taped the blade to make handling it safer):


The material I chose for the handle was G10, which is interesting stuff. Here's my initial layout using masking tape:

The G10 comes with a "protective layer" covering the textured side. That's what peeling up there.

Cutting out the rough pieces with a band saw:


Handle bits are rough cut, ready to take the protective layer (no, not the masking tape) off:


Using the drill press to make holes for screw sets:


Once that's done, the rough handles can be attached to the blade for shaping and sanding:


The bulk of the sanding was done with a belt sander:


The dremmel was used for the getting in to those "hard to reach" areas.


The handle pieces where then taken off the blade and screwed together in order to make the blade-facing sides symmetrical and nice.


Sandpapered it all to get a nice finish. These are the nearly completed handles:


Finished product!


All in all, I think this came out super bad-ass! There's some more fine sanding to do (and Jared hooked me up with some sandypaper) and there's a few places where I took just a little too much material off, but those are mostly hard to spot. Jared's review of the process was "unadulterated success" which I completely agree with.

Prepare for the Worst; Expect the Best

Boy Scouts taught me to "Be Prepared." I find this excellent advice. Naturally, you can't prepare for everything. Nobody can. However, you can prepare for problems and issues that are likely to arise.

Typically, when looking into "disaster" preparation, most everybody (with any common sense anyway) will tell you to prep for the most possible thing first. Hint: Zombies are not the most possible disaster, no mater where you live. In my region, one of the most possible problems would be a blizzard. This basically means I have to have a way to keep warm in the home or car if I lose electricity. Sure I can plan for losing water, gas and sewer too, but those are a lot less likely.

There are other non-natural disasters to prepare for too. Like unemployement. Many people I know have been out of a job for months, if not years. This is much harder to prepare for, but I'll leave that advice for other places.

The problem with all this prepping when you get fixated on it. You worry so much about "impending doom and gloom" that you look for it everywhere. Any little bit of even slightly bad news is an omen to the impending apocalypse! Fear and paranoia take over and start making decisions for you. This is bad. That's not to say "throw caution to the wind" and go do whatever you want, but don't only focus on the bad things.

Prep for things because it's the prudent thing to do, not out of some irrational fear of the government, zombies or your neighbor trying to steal your magic beans. At the same time as all this prepping, remember to live your life. There's no point in surviving catastrophies if you've got no reason to live. Do the things you enjoy, spend time with the people you love and make sure you have something to fight for when the aliens show up.