Jeweling and Cutting the Lock

I made a little progress on the Bobcat knife this last weekend that I would like to share with you.  The knife is getting very close to completion, with only a few more details left before it's done.  Here are some progress photos of the Bobcat build.

Here is my setup for jeweling the insides of my liners.  I install a felt cylinder in the chuck of my drill press.  I coat the face of the liner that will be jeweled with valve grinding compound that I picked up at my local auto supply store.  I have a piece of paper towel on top of a plywood base to keep the drill press table clean.

I manually locate each swirl and lower the drill press spindle and let it grind for a few seconds before moving on to the next swirl.  I overlap the swirls until the whole liner has been jeweled.

Here's a picture of the completed liners.  It's a very subtle detail that is kind of hard to see inside a finished knife, but I think that it's definitely worth the effort.

Time to cut the lock.  I've shown how I locate the lock face before by coloring in the area with a marker and scratching a line where the lock will contact the blade tang.  Here you can see the liner clamped into my drill press vise and a thin cutoff wheel mounted in the drill press.  I manually slide the vise across the table and into the cutoff wheel and guide it along the scribed line.

Here is the liner after the lock has been cut in.  It's a simple process that produces great results.

Here is the completed lock.  At this point I have filed back the face of the lock until it engages with the tang at just the right angle and depth.  I have also located and installed the ceramic detent ball with a corresponding hole in the blade tang and bent the lock out to preload the lock spring.  I've shown this process before, and since I didn't get any pics of this step, you can refer pack to previous posts on earlier builds.

Here's a new setup for me.  I did some research online and found how a lot of makers will at a layer of carbide to the lock face to eliminate any "sticking" of their locks.  I have had that problem in the past, so I did some deeper digging to find out more about the process.  The commercially available carbidizers are relatively expensive and were out of my price range, but as I continued to research, I found that some used a very simple alternative approach with good success.  Using my shop-built electro etcher as a power supply and a vibratory etcher that I purchased at the local hardware store for $20.00, I built my own makeshift carbidizer.  I installed an old carbide cutter in place of the etching point which will be the source of the carbide.  By attaching the positive lead from my etcher to the carbide tip and the negative lead to the liner, I was able to lay down a thin layer of carbide to the lock face.  Worked like a charm and absolutely no lock sticking!  A simple and low-cost solution.  It's amazing the information you can find on the internet.

The last thing I did in the shop was to add my mark to the finished blade.  I've shown this process several times, but here is a photo of the end results.  I like it!

I should get this knife completed next weekend without too much difficulty.  Thanks for following along with me on this build.

-  Brandant Robinson