Friday, October 1, 2010

Sod BUSSTR Frame Lock













EDIT: I want to add right here at the top since it has been mentioned by some that on the 3rd of Oct. 2010 Howard Viele contacted me after I reached out to him on Facebook where we are both friends. In his contact he granted me permission to do his trademarked three hole pattern on the 8 blades and pocket clips I have like the one shown in this post. Thanks Howard. 
As a youth I always loved my CASE Sod Buster folders. As some of you guys that read here often know I have been making this BUSSTR folder for some time now offering both a liner and frame lock version of it with the frame lock being made from the 'Tac Ti' sheets of textured titanium I get from Tracy at USA knife maker supply. The only difference between this here model and my original is that the original usually had a clip point blade in it like all those shown here in my blog in older posts. For a change of pace I thought it was time to use one of these Soddie blades to see what it would come out like. This here is the first one using one of these blades. SOD Busters are such great knives in the field. They are so good for small game and food prep jobs that its hard not to like them if you are any kind of an outdoorsman at all. 
When my friend Dave at Great Lakes Waterjet suggested I do a Sod Buster blade shape in my BUSSTR folder I wondered to myself why I didn't think of that myself because I loved the idea and as a youth I carried one for  quite a few years going through high school. In my home town back in West Virginia where I grew up the schools still close for the first week of deer season to this day! It makes sense if you knew the area though cause there wouldn't be any teachers to teach school anyhow since they'd all be huntin! :-)  So, you can see why such a portable butcher shop blade like this would be a great friend to a guy like me growing up in the hills where we depended on the meat we bagged each year. I realize these days that you young whipper snappers skip school to go to the video game stores but in my day we skipped to go huntin'. Such was life where I grew up. 
Anyway, with my friend Dave's help I got my blades to use in the SOD Buster shape. Dave cut these patterns out for me from my sheets of 12C27 stainless steel and after I got em back I went to work and Peters Heat treat service did up the blades for me to 60 Rockwell hardness. Shown here are some of the recent folders I've done along side this here new one utilizing one of my Sod Buster blades. Each of these other folders shown with my Soddie is described in other posts. 
If you want to read up on those others just scroll down some and you'll find em. They are all 12C27 for the time being. Come later on I'll have some in S30V and D2 as well as the old stand by ATS34 again but for now I'm using up that 12C27 Sandvik steel and folks seem to be liking that a lot so I figure I'll be sticking with that as long as the feedback remains this positive. You know on paper this stuff is not all that impressive but there is something about it that just flat out works and folks like it! I must admit its won me over about as well as my customers. The stuff is great! 

Oh yeah. The blade on this here textured titanium model folder is 3 and 1/4" and the closed length is 4 and 11/16". Its a tad heavier due to the grind and the fact that the body is 1/8" longer than my Clip point BUSSTR. This one weighs 3.7 ounces. As you can see from looking the slab thickness on this model is just over 1/8" at .135 thickness 6Al-4V titanium for each side. The spacer/stand off in the rear is G10 pinned with 1/8" stainless barrels and T-8 torx screws. The pivot is a 3/16" 416 stainless that takes a T-15 torx driver to tighten or loosen and the pocket clip, also made by me is a .045 titanium mounted with 2-56 screws for T6 torx. As usual thanks for looking and stopping by my little neck of the woods. 


I've added two pictures of this that are winter shots. You can tell because the greenery is gone in the background. These show the new hand rubbed finish and scandi grind once it was completed. The first shots shown are still work in progress pics before the blade and edge were finished out. Just FYI. 



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