We will now interrupt the regular scheduled program for this good old boys micro podcast. On this micro podcast episode today, I wanted to talk a little bit about handle finishing uh holistically. Now, there are a lot of different ways to finish out handle material, and it really depends on the material type itself. But what I've always found has been very helpful in maintaining consistent symmetrical finishes of handles is layout. All right. When you have your scales on your blade, or when you are pre-grinding them to maybe get to about the 80% finish stage before you actually glue them up, the easiest way I've found to get symmetry is to lay out lines to help guide your grind. Now, in lieu of setting up layout lines, you can follow some rudimentary procedures which I've found to be pretty easy in that you will initially take a forty-five degree angle off the scales on all sides, and and then you will round off the corners until you get a radius. Alright. Now, obviously, if you have bolsters, it changes the dynamic a little bit because you want to really grind your bolsters almost to shape before you start your handle material, because the difference in hardness will uh skew the the finish. It'll actually dip it, uh you know, dip your finish close to where the bolster and the handle material connect. All right. So initially, uh, if you're doing a non-bolstered handle material uh or a non-bolstered knife, uh, you will finish the front of the scales that butt up to the Ricasso first, and you'll take them all the way up to whatever your desired finishes. Then if you attach the scales to the tang, then what you can do is grind them flush to the spine and to the handle, so the entire tang, and then 45 them to the spine, and then knock off those corners. Um, I am not really um preferential on rounded rounded tangs. So I know that some guys will slack belt uh in order to get the radius they're looking for, but then they'll also hit the tang uh pretty hard and round it over. And it feels pretty good, but if your transition from it's from scale material to the to the tang itself is fairly spot on, then you won't actually feel that uh differentiator in your in your hand uh when you're holding the knife. What you'll do though is establish a really flat, sleek look on the tang and have a very well-radiused scale material or handle uh that feels really good in the hand, right? So when it comes to finishes on handle material, you know, obviously you have your uh your satin finishes, your media blasted finishes, your semi-gloss and and gloss finishes. And really the the preference is up to you based on the look of the knife and what you're trying to achieve with the the overall finish holistically. But um I always uh start off with a grit pattern uh that produces the kind of symmetry and the kind of radius that I'm looking for in the handle, and then I will go on to finishing sandpapers. So what I would consider finishing sandpapers are anything 400 grit or higher. Uh for Makartas, I'll usually go up to 2000 plus grit, depending on the type of Makarta and how soft it is. Uh for desert ironwood and some other wood materials, I'll usually go um 800 to 1,000 and buff. Um, everything I do if I'm doing a even a satin or a semi-gloss will always get a buff, but it depends on the pressure uh that you put on whether you uh take it up to a gloss finish or not from a satin, uh, in my experience. Now uh slip joints and pocket knives in general have a little bit different dynamic because you have a very thin liner and maybe a uh 316 piece of of handle material itself. When you are when you're putting on natural materials that you want to keep a texture on, uh and you're not doing like jigging on this on the liner itself, you want to thin from the back side your materials until it matches uh the approximate radius of your bolsters if you have those, or the general contour of the knife. Now, sometimes when you're you doing like a uh a shadow pattern, it's a little bit easier to thin that material because you don't have to worry about the relationship between the front bolster or the bare bolster and the stag or mammoth or um jig bone, all right. But you'll always relieve material from the back side and fit it up. Uh, I would never recommend with slip joints doing the bolsters and handle material um roughing out together because not only is there a lot of heat that's generated from the metal um because it's so thin uh on both on bolsters with liners, but also again you have that factor of unequal hardnesses. So you really need to uh you really need to contour the bolsters first and then fit up your handle material. So I would get almost to my final finish on bolsters and then uh attach my handle material and and finish from there. But uh those are some ideas. Now layout uh layout lines can be achieved a few different ways. I know that some people have really steady hands and can use pencils or some uh surface markers, so something that doesn't uh penetrate deeply into the into the material itself. Um, but what I've found is a a height gauge where you can very lightly scribe the lines, or a pencil and uh and a height gauge fixture where you have some some way to lay out the line on the material where you can see it, but um it's you know easily uh easily grindable or or you can wipe it off. Those are pretty easy. So uh and what I mean by laying out on on the handle material is you typically want to have everything radiious. Um square square handle material and square boxy knives do not really look very pleasing to the eye, and they're not really um they're not really great to handle. Uh a lot of that is because the square the square edges will actually create hot spots in your palms and fingers the more that you use it. And so the radius uh radius is a natural uh a natural inclination of the hand. If you if you hold the position or uh in your hand of of a knife that you would be carrying, you can see that for the most part your hand represents either a slight triangular form or round. And what you want to do is try to mimic that on your handle material because that's the most comfortable design out there. Now there's something to be said for uh palm swells and other form factors that not only do they look attractive, but they can feel really great to the individual. The problem is, as a custom knife maker, is that we tend to make knives that are functional in our hands. And that's particularly difficult for me because I have large fat hands. So everything that I hold is larger and it doesn't really conform to the same uh the same form factors that maybe a female would need to use or somebody who has smaller hands or skinnier hands, right? So when you're doing palm swells uh and other contouring that are really like geometry, like specific geometry of the wielder, uh you're going to limit the comfortability factor of that knife to um less people, is kind of what I'm saying. So whenever you're doing palm swells or contouring, you can take a pencil and even a straight edge and mimic those lines and structures on both sides of the knife so that way you can grind approximately the same on either side. Now remember the last 10% of any knife is usually hand sanding and tweaking, all right? And there are a lot of things that you can set up on a grinder as far as your rough finishing that you can fix and tweak in hand sanding. And depending on the handle material itself, uh it could be easier or more difficult. For instance, typically makardas, natural wood materials, uh carbons, and things like that are fairly easy to shape with sandpaper or some small files. It gets a little bit more complicated when you're dealing with things like desert ironwood or ringed gidge because they're pretty hard. Uh their Jenka uh scale is pretty high up there. When you're dealing with handle material that is hard, the easiest way I can recommend to get it to the form factor that you're looking for is to rough out on your power tools as much as possible. So if you're doing it on a 2x72 or other type of belt grinders, get it close, but don't finish it out with that because uh typically, let's just say for Desert Ireland, I will profile that and I will rough grind it on approximately a 24 grit belt, uh 24 to 36. The problem is that on material that you're going to be smoothing out, the grit will dig pretty deeply into that material. So you want to get it to like 90% and then hand sand the rest. But the difficulty is that in Desert Ironwood and Ring Gidge, for instance, the hand sanding process can be pretty arduous. So I will go from the grinder to files, and then from files to a rough grit, usually about a 100 grit, and then I will work up the grits from there and get it to where it needs to be for buffing. Let's talk a minute about polishing. Now, there are lots of ways to polish a knife, and it doesn't all have to be on a buffer. However, a buffer makes it fairly easy to buff handle material out, and between grits, especially, check to make sure that you don't have any errant lower grit marks on your handle material. The one warning I will give you is that buffers are incredibly dangerous. Um, oftentimes, people who have buffers in their shops will have them not contained by some box or some catchment of some sort to not allow the blade to fling back at you. So be very careful. Hold it very uh hold the material very firmly and make sure that when you're buffing the knife, when it's completed and has the handle material on it, that you're being very sure-footed or sure-handed in this case, when you're buffing. Um, when it comes to compounds, obviously you have different micron compounds that you can put on your contact wheels in your buffer that will help to uh polish it up and produce certain types of finishes. The most popular in jewelry making and in handle material is probably black rouge and green rouge. But if you're dealing with lighter materials or you want to go to a higher gloss buff, you'll want to look at things like white compounds or pink compounds. I get a pink buffing compound from Texas Farrier Supply that's really good. And I forget what the micron count is, but I will clean my wheel off and scrape it, and then I will apply the compound, and I can do I can do polishes on very light materials without imparting a bunch of the darkened compound uh back into the knife material itself. Um it becomes a little bit complicated to get high gloss finishes on let's just say white like bone micarta if you have a bunch of metal shavings or dirty compound that can get into the very minute uh surface uh divots and pox and things like that, the porosity of the material itself. So you want to be careful because you got if you get it dirty, you have to wash it out with acetone if you can, and then you have to buff again, and it's a vicious cycle. Uh so make sure that your contact wheels are very, very clean and you're using a white or pink compound when buffing uh those types. Now, when it's darker, you don't have to worry as much, but I would still be careful on anything that is not black or a natural material that buffs very effectively on making sure you're using a clean wheel. It takes not that long uh to get a rake and rake across the buff uh buffing wheel if you can and prep that surface and then lightly apply compound and don't use a heavy touch on it. Uh, those are some just helpful tips I thought you guys might like. If you have any questions, obviously, uh reach out. And this is another Good Old Blades Micro Podcast.