Leather Handled Puukko

This morning I finished the handle on the Polar blade that I wrote about in the previous post. As my first stacked leather handle, I am quite proud of how it turned out.

The handle is stacked leather with green canvas Micarta spacers and hand-hammered brass. I sanded the handle to shape on my belt sander with a coarse belt and then did the final sanding with 100 grit Aluminum Oxide sand paper while the knife was in my bench vise. After sanding by hand, I dusted off the leather dust and used Bick 4 leather conditioner and a piece of canvas to burnish/polish the leather.
 
The only thing I might change about the knife if I were going to do it again would be the glue type that I used for gluing up the leather. I used Titebond II glue which I have seen recommended in some tutorials on line, however I think I would not have had such pronounced lines between leather pieces if I used an epoxy. I noticed that there is a little darkening of the leather at each junction and I think this might be from the glue interacting with the steel tang of the blade. Anyway... I am overall very pleased.

Stacked Leather Knife Handle

I am working on a stacked leather handle for a Finnish knife blade made by Polar that I bought a while back from Ben's Backwoods. As I have accrued some leather scraps over the summer, it only makes sense to try a stacked leather handle. I just started the project today and I have a few pictures of my progress so far. I am using leather from a tooling belly that I bought at Tandy Leather to make some sheaths from.

Cutting the leather rectangles

Rectangles of leather cut and organized

I used dividers to layout each piece before punching holes

Holes punched and ready to cut slot

Slots were cut with utility knife at first, then a mortising chisel

Leather in place for a test fit