How To “Tekoa” friction folder WIP (Pic heavy)

Joined
Nov 26, 2014
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90
Well, I decided to do a proper WIP for my first friction folder. I have had an unbelievable amount of fun making this knife so far. I’ve made about 100 or so fixed blades, but this is my first true folder and it’s been a joy. I’ve made this one for me too which makes it even more special. Thank you for checking it out. I’ll post a lot of pictures and hopefully my explanations will make sense to you. If not, post up a comment and I’ll be more than happy to answer any questions you may have.

So here we are, in the following pictures you can see my steps for laying out my template on the 1084 blade steel and the black G10 handle material. You can also see the materials I have chosen for this knife, 1/8th black G10 with .030” toxic green liners and a black/gray layered G10 back spacer. The last picture in this post is crucial throughout knife making and metal working in general —> debur, debur, debur!

This is the (almost) finished product
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cutting to a workable length
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Deburr those edges!
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Pretty simple stuff so far but we all start here!

scribed a .250” radius here as a guide for my open and closed swing.
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Time to head over to my mini mill to start the pivot pin and stop pin drilling.
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Always remember to center drill first. It’ll keep your drills from walking off your center point. Also choke up on them (endmills too) on the shank as much as you can. Just makes things more rigid.
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For my pivot is chose a .1875” size. To drill the hole, I started with my center drill, then 1/8, .183 and last with a HSS .1875. Before drilling with the final drill, I chamfered the hole one more time with the center drill just to take extra precaution and give the .1875 drill a good lead in.
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I followed pretty much the same procedure for the stop pin hole, except I only needed to go up to a 1/8 size drill. I used carbide too to make sure it didn’t walk at all, even after center drilling. Also, I drilled the open and close stop pin locations FSR enough away from their actual final positions so as to be able to dial them in by hand later on in the build process.
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Remember to always countersink those holes!
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Next step is to drill out those cosmetic holes in the tang. No purpose for them other than look. The location for these aren’t nearly as crucial as the pivot and stop pin holes so I just went straight at these with a .183 carbide drill. Carbide will not walk like HSS.
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I also took the time to drill some relief holes around the radius I scribed. This will make cutting and grinding around that radius a lot less of a headache later.
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deburr! Deburr! Deburr! Always.
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Time to rough profile on the bandsaw. Pretty straight forward.
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Next is getting the handle material epoxied. The following are those pictures. I use my scribe to scratch the mess out of the mating sides. This gives the epoxy something to bite to. Gotta smooth those burrs off afterwards, even on G10.
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I spray clean with brake cleaner and let air dry.
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Epoxy, clamp, wait and allow to cure.
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Time to profile on my wee lil’ 2x42. Works like a champ with some modifications.
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Lines up nicely with the template.
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Bluing the edge and bevels again to scribe guidelines for grinding.
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Yeah most of them aren't working for me either.
 
So the handles scales and liners have cured, now its time to get them looking more like a handle. I make sure they’re good and smooth for this part.
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A tiny little dab will do ya. And I mean tiny! I use 2 small dots of superglue to press the mating sides together. This allows for an excellent fit and finish when drilling and shaping.
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The scale sandwich.
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Rough profiled on the bandsaw
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Using my center finder to find center on my center punched location.
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.125”, .183” and .1875” pivot hole drills.
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.3125” endmill for counterboring to accommodate the pivot pin head.
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Same on the other side for the pivot screw.
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Drilled the stop pin hole with the carbide .125” drill. You can also see my counterbore here.
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Yeah, it's a shame since you are putting a lot of effort in the step by step guide. I checked in Firefox as well but same thing.
 
The pictures are stored on iCloud. I moderate on another forum and we often see problems with photos failing to display when they are stored on general cloud storage. I don't use iCloud or Google for photos, too much hassle getting them to display on 3rd party sites. The reasons seem to change over time. Often it is due to permissions, the default is for photos to be private, then for them to be viewable only on the hosting site, not from 3rd party sites.
 
The pictures are stored on iCloud. I moderate on another forum and we often see problems with photos failing to display when they are stored on general cloud storage. I don't use iCloud or Google for photos, too much hassle getting them to display on 3rd party sites. The reasons seem to change over time. Often it is due to permissions, the default is for photos to be private, then for them to be viewable only on the hosting site, not from 3rd party sites.
Thanks for the helpful info. Can you recommend a good (free) hosting site that’s pretty user friendly to use? Thanks
 
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