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Tutorials - How to Achieve Better Results Using Leather in Handles
With this method you avoid some issues that arise when you use a leather / metal combination as a spacer. This process gets the leather to aquire a better hardness, estability and impermeability while also allowing a better finish.

When you sand and polish the metal parts that sandwiched leather pieces, these metal layers get hot and transmit that heat to the leather strips, which gets contracted, resulting in an end piece with the metal and leather parts at a different level. You can feel and see the difference, and it's not the proper finish I'd like my customers to get on their knives.

I've been doing this for over a year now, with excellent results.

Strip of leather (8" x 1 1/4" x 3/16"), plastic bag to contain the leather and resin and about 50 grams or prepared polyester resin. This ammount will be more than enough to impregnate this piece. (Picture 1)

Leather strip and resin already inside the plastic bag (if anyone's wondering, bag thickness is 60 microns) (Picture 2)

After pressing the bag to get rid of the extra air inside, I tie the bag to close it. (Picture 3)

Getting the bag inside the pressure chamber. (Picture 4)
You can read more about it on this Tutorial: Polyester Resin Impregnation II

Closing it. (Picture 5)

This time I use pressured air. This means that I put 120lb/inch for 15 minutes to the hermetically closed tube / pressure chamber. (Pictures 6 and 7)

Once I get the bag from the pressure chamber, I open it to get the leather strip out (resin doesn't get glued to the polyethylene bag) (Picture 8)

Tutorials - How to Achieve Better Results Using Leather in Handles   Tutorials - How to Achieve Better Results Using Leather in Handles   Tutorials - How to Achieve Better Results Using Leather in Handles   Tutorials - How to Achieve Better Results Using Leather in Handles   Tutorials - How to Achieve Better Results Using Leather in Handles   Tutorials - How to Achieve Better Results Using Leather in Handles   Tutorials - How to Achieve Better Results Using Leather in Handles   Tutorials - How to Achieve Better Results Using Leather in Handles
Picture 1   Picture 2   Picture 3   Picture 4   Picture 5   Picture 6   Picture 7   Picture 8

Then I remove the extra resin in gel-like state from the leather. (Pictures 9 and 10)

After cutting to size and drilling them, I use the leather as spacer material directly on the knife. (Pictures 11, 12 and 13)

Tutorials - How to Achieve Better Results Using Leather in Handles   Tutorials - How to Achieve Better Results Using Leather in Handles   Tutorials - How to Achieve Better Results Using Leather in Handles   Tutorials - How to Achieve Better Results Using Leather in Handles   Tutorials - How to Achieve Better Results Using Leather in Handles   AES Custom Knives   AES Custom Knives   AES Custom Knives
Picture 9   Picture 10   Picture 11   Picture 12   Picture 13            
Finished Knife and Fork Set
Cable Damascus Knife and Fork Table Set   Cable Damascus Knife and Fork Table Set   Cable Damascus Knife and Fork Table Set   Cable Damascus Knife and Fork Table Set   Cable Damascus Knife and Fork Table Set   Cable Damascus Knife and Fork Table Set   AES Custom Knives   AES Custom Knives
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