THIS KNIFE IS SOLD
Handle Finish
The handle on the knife above was finished with a Cyanoacrylate adhesive, better known as Super Glue. Super Glue has been used for finishing wood for quite some time. It is especially popular with wood turners. The more I research it, the more I am sold on it as a finish for un-stablizied wood handles. The first coat penetrates the wood and seals it, while subsequent coats fill the pores. If done properly, the wood will take on an amazing luster after multiple coats, sandings, and final polish. Prior to using Super Glue I was using Tru-Oil. On oily woods like cocobolo, bocote, and ironwood, Tru-Oil takes forever to dry. It would also take a month of Sundays to fill the pores of a porous wood like wenge with Tru-Oil.
Blade Magazine Knife Tests
This month's Blade magazine has an interesting knife test created by knife maker Warren Osborne. Twelve known knife makers made the same knife, but used different steels. The steels were some of the new and popular powdered metals. The knives were all sharpened by the same person, given the same bevel, then given to a wild game processor for testing. The tester used the knives to skin deer and kept track of the number of deer skinned until the cutting edge needed to be touched-up.
The three top performing steels (CPM M4, CPM S90V, CPM 110V) skinned between 8 and 15 deer before needing touch-up. Unfortunately, these steels are hard on the maker and extremely difficult to resharpen. CPM 154 was tied for third place with eight deer and is user friendly. From there the number of deer skinned progressively went down to a total of 3 before touch-up was required.
I think this type of test has more validity than many of the knife tests published. I would recommend picking up the August 14' Blade magazine for more detail.
For an explanation of the powdered metal process, here is a link to Crucible's website: http://www.crucibleservice.com/eselector/general/generalpart3.html
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