Blonde, French and Horny !!!

No, not Amelie Honore, the missus wouldn't let me play with that in the shed!

I've had this knife blank knocking about for ages and have got as far as cutting out the scale blanks in various materials but always changed my mind.

Anyhow, the tuit finally rolled around and I decided to clad it in some lovely translucent French cowhorn.

I cut and filed the bases as accurately as possible to give a neat fit against the bolsters and ensure that the handle would all fit within the scale blanks. A quick trim around with a Jewellers saw brought everything to within a few mm.











I decided to conceal the pins within the scales, giving the strength benefit but still retaining a cleaner look. The holes were drilled to half the thickness of the scales using the tang as a guide.











After glue up it was on to the rasps to refine and develop the shape.






















Then a fair bit of coarse sanding to smooth out the transitions and fine tune the shape.











Before moving on to finer papers and finally mops and compound.











Off with the tape, a quick clean up and it's job done. I'm not sure why the bolster looks so scratched, it's not perfect but it's nowhere near as bad as it looks. Apart from being a bit smelly at the rasping stage the horn was a lovely material to work with. Now that it's all polished up you can just make out the brass pins through the handle scales.