I bought a few Swamp Rat full flat grind Infi Ratmandus recently.
Anyone familiar with Busse family knives knows Infi is their proprietary "stainless" super alloy and they are sold without sheaths. Swamp Rat is their value line and they usually make the Ratmandu with a different steel and a sabre grind. This flavor is a bit special.
It's a nice knife and I went with Maroon canvas micarta handle scales and the BIG DC double cut finish on the blade. The handle was a no cost option, the blade finish was a step up from the standard coating but less expensive than a satin finish. The edge is ok but it can be a whole lot better if it's thinned, convexed and sharpened to a better than razor level. It is on the larger size for a "bushcraft" knife and it can fill that role but with it's full tang and tube riveted micarta handle, it could cut down a large tree if you had enough time. It is very general purpose and a nice size unless you know you are going to have to cut down trees (I would want larger for that).
Such a nice knife deserves a nice sheath but I'm cheap. Sheaths made for this knife run from about $40 for a simple leather pouch sheath or lower end kydex to $100+ for nicer custom leather or kydex. Having a few sheaths to buy, I wanted to use generic leather pouch sheaths and a technique called boning or wet forming to give them a custom fit.
My first step was to find a low cost generic pouch sheath that is close enough in size.
I found one on Etsy that is a "dangler" style sheath from BPS Knives. They are inexpensive and come from Ukraine but they fit the knife almost perfectly with good retention right away.
But good retention is still not a custom fit so I went looking for boning videos on YouTube. I found a few using the technique I was familiar with but found something new. Some people are using food vacuum sealers to form their leather sheaths around their knives.
That looked cool but I didn't want to buy a vacuum sealer to do a few sheaths.
Shortly after that, I found my solution: Ziploc Vacuum Sous Vide.
It's a Ziploc bag with a vacuum valve and a seperate manual vacuum pump. I bought mine from Bed Bath and Beyond.
I mixed up the techniques I saw on YouTube and did this:
Moisten the portions of leather to be molded with warm water, not quite enough to saturate the leather but enough to soften it considerably.
Insert the knife in the sheath and begin the molding by pinching the leather around the handle scales.
Put the wet sheath (with knife) in to the vacuum bag, make sure the dangler portion is going to lay flat and then vacuum out the air.
"Bone" the sheath through the vacuum bag with a tool that has a rounded point. I used the end of an old toothbrush after I filed and sanded it to get a nice smooth point that wouldn't score the leather or cut/tear the vacuum bag.
I heated the sheath through the vacuum bag with a heat gun. This would release some water vapor from the sheath and decrease the vacuum in the bag so I would pump more air out after heating.
After more boning, heating and vacuum pumping, I left it for a while, then pumped some more a few times. A few hours later I heated it and pumped again.
Finally I took the sheath and knife out of the vacuum bag, took the knife out of the sheath and now I'm going to allow the sheath to dry for a day or two. The drying may let the sheath shrink a bit and harden it in its new shape.
The sheath has taken the shape of the handle pretty well. It should go from good retention to a click-in level of retention, almost like kydex.
The best part is it was cheap. With shipping the sheaths are about $15 each and the Ziploc Vacuum Sous Vide kit was about $8. I bought one smaller sheath which didn't fit (bottom) for about $12 but even with the sheath that doesn't fit, I'm still $5 under buying one custom fit pouch sheath (not a dangler) that probably fits about as well as my $15 sheath before vacuum wet molding.
I have more to do so the price per sheath is going to drop to about $20, I just have to wait for them to get here from Ukraine.
I wanted to share because I'm happy with my sheath and the technique might be helpful to any other cheapskates in a similar situation.
Anyone familiar with Busse family knives knows Infi is their proprietary "stainless" super alloy and they are sold without sheaths. Swamp Rat is their value line and they usually make the Ratmandu with a different steel and a sabre grind. This flavor is a bit special.
It's a nice knife and I went with Maroon canvas micarta handle scales and the BIG DC double cut finish on the blade. The handle was a no cost option, the blade finish was a step up from the standard coating but less expensive than a satin finish. The edge is ok but it can be a whole lot better if it's thinned, convexed and sharpened to a better than razor level. It is on the larger size for a "bushcraft" knife and it can fill that role but with it's full tang and tube riveted micarta handle, it could cut down a large tree if you had enough time. It is very general purpose and a nice size unless you know you are going to have to cut down trees (I would want larger for that).
Such a nice knife deserves a nice sheath but I'm cheap. Sheaths made for this knife run from about $40 for a simple leather pouch sheath or lower end kydex to $100+ for nicer custom leather or kydex. Having a few sheaths to buy, I wanted to use generic leather pouch sheaths and a technique called boning or wet forming to give them a custom fit.
My first step was to find a low cost generic pouch sheath that is close enough in size.
I found one on Etsy that is a "dangler" style sheath from BPS Knives. They are inexpensive and come from Ukraine but they fit the knife almost perfectly with good retention right away.
But good retention is still not a custom fit so I went looking for boning videos on YouTube. I found a few using the technique I was familiar with but found something new. Some people are using food vacuum sealers to form their leather sheaths around their knives.
That looked cool but I didn't want to buy a vacuum sealer to do a few sheaths.
Shortly after that, I found my solution: Ziploc Vacuum Sous Vide.
It's a Ziploc bag with a vacuum valve and a seperate manual vacuum pump. I bought mine from Bed Bath and Beyond.
I mixed up the techniques I saw on YouTube and did this:
Moisten the portions of leather to be molded with warm water, not quite enough to saturate the leather but enough to soften it considerably.
Insert the knife in the sheath and begin the molding by pinching the leather around the handle scales.
Put the wet sheath (with knife) in to the vacuum bag, make sure the dangler portion is going to lay flat and then vacuum out the air.
"Bone" the sheath through the vacuum bag with a tool that has a rounded point. I used the end of an old toothbrush after I filed and sanded it to get a nice smooth point that wouldn't score the leather or cut/tear the vacuum bag.
I heated the sheath through the vacuum bag with a heat gun. This would release some water vapor from the sheath and decrease the vacuum in the bag so I would pump more air out after heating.
After more boning, heating and vacuum pumping, I left it for a while, then pumped some more a few times. A few hours later I heated it and pumped again.
Finally I took the sheath and knife out of the vacuum bag, took the knife out of the sheath and now I'm going to allow the sheath to dry for a day or two. The drying may let the sheath shrink a bit and harden it in its new shape.
The sheath has taken the shape of the handle pretty well. It should go from good retention to a click-in level of retention, almost like kydex.
The best part is it was cheap. With shipping the sheaths are about $15 each and the Ziploc Vacuum Sous Vide kit was about $8. I bought one smaller sheath which didn't fit (bottom) for about $12 but even with the sheath that doesn't fit, I'm still $5 under buying one custom fit pouch sheath (not a dangler) that probably fits about as well as my $15 sheath before vacuum wet molding.
I have more to do so the price per sheath is going to drop to about $20, I just have to wait for them to get here from Ukraine.
I wanted to share because I'm happy with my sheath and the technique might be helpful to any other cheapskates in a similar situation.
