Brian Dougherty

It's the internet way. It tends to bring out the worst in all of us. You are far better behaved than most.

I meant to mention that I agree on this! A slip-joint isn't going to benefit much from such trickery anyway. I'm pretty "Old school" at heart, and am not interested in the tacti-cool look. I appreciate a good liner lock, but if I ever make one it'll look like the old fashioned slip joints I have been making this summer.

This where I'll have to stop for tonight...

There, that's better I've been using bushings since the 2nd one. It allows me to use a nickel silver pin so that it will disappear into the bolster. It also makes the final assembly less dependant on how the pin is peened. I've been playing with the thickness tolerance. Leaving the bushings half a thou thicker than the blade seems to be a minimum. At 1.5 thou you can feel quite a bit of blade wobble. This one is right at a thou over right now. Of course, how hard I peen the pin still has an effect. This bushing is bearing bronze, but I have made some in A2 so that I could harden them. Not enough time for me to be able to tell if there is a longevity difference yet.

I've got a bit of work to do there yet. You can see that I have quite a bit of blade clearance, but I ended up taking off too much of the kick. (NOt sure how that happened) The action is good, but a little mushy at full close because of the long slightly convex surface of the blade that rest against the spring. I'm leaning towards grinding a bit of a concavity in that surface to get back to two points resting against the spring. That's prototyping for ya...

A little more progress. Mostly down to the final handle shaping and finish work on all the parts now.

I say 'Go for it'

The liners are mild steel about 0.050" thick. I still need to sand off the mill scale.

Made a bit more progress yesterday. Heat treatment is done, and the action is tuned. I'll probably get the bolsters soldered on and maybe epoxy the scales in place today.

Err, I meant 3/32... ...need coffee this afternoon.

Thanks Josh. The pins are a calculated risk, and I have the same concerns as you. The pin along the spring side is 5/32 as is the one at the butt end that also holds the spring in place. The other pins will only hold the scales in place, but to keep a symmetrical appearance, I used the same size pin. We'll see how it goes with the prototype. I knew they were close, but somehow I let them slip even closer to the edges than I intended. I'm not sure how that happened, but here is really plenty of room to move them in a bit. The blade stop is left long in the pattern intentionally. The way I have been assembling these requires some hand fitting of the spring and the blade. Once I pin the spring in place with the preload set, I grind down the stop to get the closure I am looking for. It does make the drawing look a bit wonky because of the overlap, but I knew what I meant

HCL will etch the surface, but it doesn't seem to blacken the faster etching steel very much so I use the Ferric Chloride like most people. One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is that after Ferric, a long soak in instant coffee can bump up the contrast quite a bit.

Wow, Rob, those are great.

Ok, so roughed out a few parts to prototype one of these. The spring is still oversized so I can grind it to match the scales, but I think I'm going to like it. I'll report back when it gets further along.

Playing guitar is one of the few things I have wanted to do that I simply can't get any good at. I am tone deaf, and have zero rhythm, but still try play every now and then. However I do love guitars. My tortoises are named Tony and Angus. If you listen to my kind of music, then you know what guitar I have in the den