sheath 2

And here is the inside of the sheath showing the other half of the clip.

The 2 oz leather (it doesn’t have to be 2 oz, it’s what I had on hand) will go over half of the inside. This will cover the metal clip so it doesn’t scratch the knife.

Here I am test fitting the knife. The welts are laid out and adjusted to make sure the knife is snug and doesn’t rattle. A knife that rocks around in a sheath will get dull in a hurry. Just to the right of the sheath you will see a 2 piece rivet, gun metal black in this case, that I will use to rivet the sheath to the leather. Basically, you stick the shank through the hole, snap on the other side and smash it with a hammer. Make sure the shank side is inside the sheath. This way in case the rivet fails, the shank will still be in place to help hold the clip.

The glue up starts. I use Tanners Bond contact cement from Tandy. Contact cement works by gluing both sides you want attached, waiting a few minutes for it to dry to a low tack and then sticking them together. It works amazingly well. This glue will continue to set over the next couple days so well that you will tear the leather before the glue joint comes apart. Here, I am gluing the inside of the sheath where the belt clip will (removed for the moment) and then I will glue the sheath liner. When both have set up, I will put in the clip and stick them together.

You can see both sides have cement applied and are drying to tack set.

The clip has been installed here and riveted. For a little extra hold, you can place some cement on the inside of the clip if you like. The liner is just to the left and will be put on next.

A little fuzzy, but that’s OK. Cemented pieces need to be either pounded or heated to finalize the set up. Here I use a small hammer to pound set it. Light taps are all that’s needed or you will end up putting a lot of dents into the leather on the out side which won’t look very good. You won’t see this in any pictures later but after this liner was attached, I skivved (pronounced sky-vd) the top edge of the liner so it wouldn’t catch the knife tip. Basically, you just shave off the square edge using the sharp knife or skive tool.

The pictures look a little grainy because they have been compressed quite a bit. Here you see the back side of the sheath with the liner in place(underneath). You can see the rivet too.

Here is what the inside looks like so far. The welts are laying on top. I have traced where the welt will go with pencil so I know where to place the cement.

Now I am starting to cement for the welts. Some on the sheath, some on the welts themselves.

Here I use the heat gun to speed things up a bit. Remember, two ways, pounding and heat. In this case though, I’m just using the heat gun on low to speed up the drying of the cement.

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