French Miner's Pocket Knife Part 4: Finished

Putting everything together is a lot of fun and also a bit nervewrecking as I have spent quite some hours on this one.

 The spine is now flush with the handle and sanded smooth. Putting the blade on it requires putting tension on the spring (the spine) so that the blade can be locked open or closed. The last thing to do construction wise is to hammer the pins down. As it turned out I left the pins too long and bent the pins. Very disappointing but this is a lesson to remember for next time!
Now all there is left to do is coat the knife with linseed oil and it's done! The oil does a lot, it gives the grey-light color of the ashw ood a deep brown orange shine.
Later I sharpened the blade as well, it's pretty sharp. Really pleased with the result and will sure continue making some other french knives. Thanks for watching and enjoy the final shots of this knife.

French Miner's Pocket Knife Part 3

The wood has cured to the stainless steel parts, now I have to shape the wood. I used a grinding disk and hand viles. The grinding disk goes fast but it burns the wood so I use it to begin with and finish with the hand viles. At a certain point you get closer to the metal parts and the two start to merge together. I then drill holes for the metal pins and I can now begin to test fit it together to see how the overall shape will turn out. It's still too thick, more wood has to be removed for it to fit nice and comfortably in my hand.

When I get close to the final shape I wet the wood and grain will show up and protrude, you let it dry and sand off the fibers that are sticking out for a smoother finish. From now on I can just use sandpaper. I'm not worried about the top part, the spine of teh knife, it will probably need some viling to get the metal spine to sit flush with the handle pieces.

In the next part we will put everything together and finish the knife with a coat of linseed oil.