Making a Marking Knife

About 4 or 5 years ago (who can remember those kind of details) I bought 4 marking knife blades from Hock Tools I bought 2 of the 1/4" marking knives and 2 of the 3/4" blades. I kind of sharpened them up and put them back in the package. After giving one of the 3/4" blades to a friend. He has probably used them the same as me. (Never)

On February 7, 2009 the Mason Dixon Woodworking Club is having a "Hand Cut Dovetail Class" So I figured that this would be a good time to find the blades and use them. They were in the top drawer of my workbench. (Great Planning).

Now i started to think what kind of scales that I wanted to put on them. I went looking for my exotic pen blank box. I got sidetracked by an unopened box that hadn't been opened since my move 3 years ago. Inside was a box of Snakeskin Wood. Cut-off pieces from someone else's shop. They were selling their scrap.



I picked through the box and came up with a few possibilities.



I guess the harvester of the Snakeskin wood logs cuts off all of the sapwood, so they don't have to ship wood that no one wants. There must be a lot of splitting in the logs because the pieces I've got is representative of that.

I then realized that I had another package of Snakeskin wood. So in all of the years I've had it, I never got the two packages together. So this was the time.



It had some longer pieces. I only needed about 9" of wood 4 1/2 on each side of the blade.



So I made my selection.

The scales for the 3/4" knife were about 3/8" thick and the 1/4" size is about 1/4" square.

I took the larger piece and cut it to size and I drilled 3/16" holes to match the holes in the blade. I put a brass rod through the pieces to keep them aligned for glueing.



I wiped all pieces down with Lacquer Thinner to remove all of the oils. I then used Epoxy glue to glue every thing together. I put the block in the vise to clamp it.



After Lunch I took the knife out of it's clamp.



I then started to sand the block on a power sander then hand sanding. I used the Beall wood polishing system to put on the gloss. There is no finish on the wood just polishing and waxing.



While I working on this knife the smaller one was in the clamps.



I then did the sanding and polishing on it.



The handle looks a little strange, but is comfortable to hold.

I've not yet put the brass rivets in the larger knife because I want to do a little more finishing to size and remove some of the fine scratches that appeared in the buffing process.

I super sharpened the marking knives using my Sharpening Station

I'm ready to goto class, at least on the marking knife process.