Z-Max & Z-Wear with Zebrawood Scales
Posted: Tue Mar 08, 2022 12:32 am
I was lucky enough to get Z-Max and Z-Wear mules and had the bright idea to follow the Z theme and make myself some Zebrawood scales. It turned out to be a lot of work, and they're far from perfect, but I'm happy to have something unique that I made and I'm not afraid to use. Now, I should say I'm not much of a woodworker and this was a lot of learning on my part, so go easy on me. I just like coming up with ideas and challenging myself.
Other people have described making handles a lot better than I can (which was a big help to me), so I'll just touch on some unique challenges I had. First was that I stabilized the zebrawood myself, to make it stronger. This meant also buying a vacuum chamber, vacuum pump, and resin. It took about a week submerged in Cactus Juice, under vacuum, to saturate the resin, and they were baked to harden the resin.
Another major challenge was while gluing and pinning the scales. I used some epoxy I thought would be good (BSI), but it set way too fast and ended up being too brittle. I learned this when I tried pinning the scales in place by peening brass rod. Unfortunately the scales ended up cracking and came loose while doing this and that's where the project almost ended. In an attempt to salvage things, I researched and moved to G-Flex epoxy, which was much better for me. I was able to fix the cracks, clean everything back up, and re-epoxy everything again. I also changed to using corby bolts to avoid the shock forces from peening that led to the cracks before.
Things went fairly smoothly from there with some belt grinder, dremel, and a mind-numbing amount of hand sanding, although I got a touch aggressive with the belt grinder on a couple of the corby bolts.
There are also some horizontal striations that look like scratches, but you can't feel them they don't sand out, so maybe that's an artifact of the wood somehow.
So now I can finally get to using these knives the way I want, albeit a bit later than intended. But I think I'll be happy to avoid sanding again for a good while. Thanks for reading.
Other people have described making handles a lot better than I can (which was a big help to me), so I'll just touch on some unique challenges I had. First was that I stabilized the zebrawood myself, to make it stronger. This meant also buying a vacuum chamber, vacuum pump, and resin. It took about a week submerged in Cactus Juice, under vacuum, to saturate the resin, and they were baked to harden the resin.
Another major challenge was while gluing and pinning the scales. I used some epoxy I thought would be good (BSI), but it set way too fast and ended up being too brittle. I learned this when I tried pinning the scales in place by peening brass rod. Unfortunately the scales ended up cracking and came loose while doing this and that's where the project almost ended. In an attempt to salvage things, I researched and moved to G-Flex epoxy, which was much better for me. I was able to fix the cracks, clean everything back up, and re-epoxy everything again. I also changed to using corby bolts to avoid the shock forces from peening that led to the cracks before.
Things went fairly smoothly from there with some belt grinder, dremel, and a mind-numbing amount of hand sanding, although I got a touch aggressive with the belt grinder on a couple of the corby bolts.
There are also some horizontal striations that look like scratches, but you can't feel them they don't sand out, so maybe that's an artifact of the wood somehow.So now I can finally get to using these knives the way I want, albeit a bit later than intended. But I think I'll be happy to avoid sanding again for a good while. Thanks for reading.
