Carbon fiber sheath for knife

Very nice knife and sheath mods. Very impressive weight/function specs.

I love how so much MYOG is stuff that I would buy. In this case I'll take two.

Very nice! Looks good, fits good, and is lightweight to boot.

Colin, I *love* the sheath. Did you use a vacuum setup to mold it or just do it by hand?

You laid this up by hand? Not pre-preg?

One thing though.. What did you do to your poor knife's edge? We need to have a private discussion about sharpening, and why serrations are bad bad bad.. ;)

Awesome work on the sheath.. I think I might need to make you a knife.

Thanks for all of the compliments.

Javan, I layed this up by saturating four small square pieces of carbon cloth (3k 4H satin) with epoxy, stacking them, driving out bubbles with a roller, then folding them over the masked knife. I then massaged the cloth onto the knife to drive out as much air as possible, covered it with PE film, and put it all into a screw press between two sheets of heavy 1/2" thick closed cell foam. When I screwed down the press, the heavy foam "flowed" into the spaces in and around the part, driving out excess resin, consolidating the carbon layers, and simulating the work done by ambient air pressure in a vacuum setup.

You noticed the serrations…I regretted doing that immediately. I find it useful to have a serrated blade, but I should have just added one to my little Leatherman tool and left the blade of this knife alone.

Colin,

Sounds like a good way to do it, the press methodology is similar to doing kydex/concealex sheaths.

I'm serious when I said we should talk about sharpening. There are ways to get a sufficiently toothy(micro-serrated) edge without serrations, that should realistically show serious performance gains over serrations, with good quality steel and HT, in the areas that serrations are usually justified for. It's one of those things you have to do, test, and look at the data for it to defy the "accepted" wisdom, that keeps ruining knife blades with serrations.

There's a reason why historically (thousands of years of edged tool use) that serrations didn't manifest on most knives, and it's not because we suddenly invented the capabilities to put them on. They work great for saws, but you're dealing with larger interfaces and specific tasks. You need large serrations to cut a log, you need tiny tiny serrations to slice a rope.

The pitfall of accepted sharpening wisdom, is the idea that you need a high grit, hair popping edge for knife tasks. That's accurate when cutting super thin pieces of sashimi, it's inaccurate when you're fraying dyneema cord. Stopping with a 3000, or even 1000 grit stone or paper(depending on use), will show you massive gains when undertaking the latter.

Good news is, you've got plenty of meat and the cuts aren't deep. You may have taken a year off this knife's life if you take the edge down past the serrations, but that'll still leave decades of service.

I was already quite impressed with the blade/handle post you put up a short while ago and it got me excited to do something similar (going to ask my lady for one as a bday gift in 3 months)

Adding the carbon sheath is pretty awesome. I'm a big "carbon geek" (I've got a lot of cycling gear in carbon…stuff is amazing) and have been looking for excuses for order a sheet or two of it and make some molds…adding this to the list now.

I like how you dimpled it to grasp the knife…..clever idea!