Stefan's Excellent Handles and a question.

Love your work
I've been making Japanese Style knives in San Mai and some in all Damascus. So far I have bought in a few handles from Dicks tools, fairly basic but comfortable. I swapped a couple of old blades for a disc sander recently and have been playing with some 25mm stock. I've come to a nice shape which will suit my knives much better than the ones from Dicks. They will only be one bit of wood for now, but now i've got it nailed i'll get some fancy burl woods.
My question is do you find a lathe necessary for making up 2 piece and more elaborate handles, for the joins? I make mokume as well so would be nice to work up to some nice 2 wood handles with Mokume spacers, for the more special blades.
Thanks
Will

Hi Will, thanks! There are certainly differrent ways to make these handles. I don't have a lathe, i shape them on a belt sander. Not sure how a lathe would work with a metal and wood combo? If you look at the forum, there are basically two different methods that people use here as far as I see: one is to use one piece and turn or sand away some material at the tip so that you can use horn or another wood like a collar that will be slipped over it - sorry, I have a hard time describing it better. But there is an example in a current thread on Oivind's Carter knife, a handle made by Harald. Another way is to just glue the different pieces together. Both have pros and cons, and both should be stable once you have the handle on the knife. However, if you use metal pieces, just gluing pieces may no be enough, you should stabilize the handle from the inside, wood and metal bonds are weaker than wood-wood bonds. Not sure if that helps?

Stefan

Another method is to drill all of the parts length wise and thread them on a dowel.

It does help allot, thanks. I was thinking of a lathe to make a tight join on the collar or tennon working the pieces in square form on a 4 jaw chuck, a friction joint with a little glue and the collar material, do the slot, then work the shape of the whole block. I can see that there are more ways I could do it.