Scale Swap Question

[jdw]

I have not really been into swapping scales. It has never made sense to me to remove perfectly functional scales on an already expensive knife. I now have a few knives that I would like custom scales on for a change up though. My question is this, what knife would you consider the hardest to do a scale swap on and which is the easiest? For those of you who did the scale swap on the Watu, was that particularly difficult? Any tips in general? Thanks again.

[JuPaul]

I swap scales a lot, and I think the biggest pain to swap is the Manix because getting the cbbl and spring back into place is a pain. Getting the lockbar back into place on Seki backlocks can also be tricky, but imo there's a pretty easy way. The biggest pain on many other models (pm2/para3 especially) is removing the lanyard tube. But again, there are tricks and tools to make that a lot easier.

My suggestion is to watch disassembly vids on youtube several times before you do it. Nick Shabazz has great ones on lots of spydie models.

[SG89]

I find comp locks to be the easiest to disassemble bc you can do one scale swap at a time and you don't have to completely disassemble the whole knife.

[ladybug93]

the manix is a challenge, but not really too bad. imo, the hardest part is dealing with the lanyard tubes.

[bbturbodad]

For those of you who did the scale swap on the Watu, was that particularly difficult? Any tips in general? Thanks again.

The Watu is as simple as it gets for the reason Spydergirl88 mentioned, just swap one side at a time, no need to fully disassemble.

[Cambertree]

The frn Dragonfly was a pain, because my Koa wood scales from Cuscadi didn’t have a D-shaped pivot hole in them.

I won’t be doing that again.

There’s some easy tricks for reassembling the lockbacks, as Julia said.

Compression locks are fairly easy to fit with aftermarket scales, if you are careful with the flared lanyard tube.

[foofie]

One other factor - some older knives might have a bit too much loctite. This will make it hard to loosen and swap scales for a different reason. I think this peaked 2-3 years ago?
My Watu had barely any loctite - easy to dissassemble. Definitely worth getting some nice torx drivers though.

[foofie]

The D-holes make things much easier. On the Watu, the clip side liners have D-holes where the pivot, clip, and stand-offs attach. This makes things really easy to loosen.

edit - just re-read my post. It seems almost family un-friendly :o

[Abyss_Fish]

I do a ton of fixing up of knives so I like to consider myself a mild disassembly expert. Maybe I should make another post...

Seki lockbacks bigger than the delica are torture. Taichung comp locks are a little complicated and the tolerances are really tight, but it's not to difficult once you get the hang of it. Golden lockbacks are simpler than seki ones and the spring tension tends to be lower so they're not bad at all. Ball bearing locks take maybe a little more goofing around, but since it's literally just fitting that one piece next to the blade it's really easy once you've done it once or twice. Framelocks and linerlocks are braindead easy. The scales on my Spyderco fixed blades don't uh, come off? Can't speak for golden comp locks since I've never taken one apart.

Any of them of course, with some experience, aren't too bad. You can take the scales off one by one and just make sure everything is in place, you can zip tie the lockbar open on the seki models if you're only doing a bladeswap, etc etc etc. If you aren't confident in taking apart something I would just not do it, or start on the cheapest model. It's super easy to mess up some of the internals on these knives.

[The Deacon]

Hardest to swap would be a pinned all stainless midlock, like this Mariner.

Easiest would be something like this Centofante Memory that has a single screwed on blob for a scale.

Next easiest would be an all screw construction liner lock with full liners on both sides, and either no lanyard hole or an unlined lanyard hole.