Mojo Micarta Golok Handle
They say that you can believe anything these days as long as you don’t believe it’s the truth and that everyone will support your quest for the truth as long as you don’t claim to find it.
In my ongoing quest for the perfect bushcraft machete I think I’m getting there. I don’t want to say I have arrived at the perfect machete for fear of upsetting everyone. Let’s just say that I’m planning to camp here for a while.
Last week I took my modified Tramontina golok out for a test drive and it did really well. I had gone out there with a cord wrap in the inlet handle area that I knew wasn’t going to work well in the field. I ended up removing it mid day and covering up the sharp edges of the wood with duct tape to save my hand. The machete worked so well that I had to come up with a permanent solution for the handle.
I decided to go out on a limb and try an experimental technique (for me at least), micarta wrap. I used 24 hour epoxy resin and a pair of old rip-stop woodland BDU’s. These were a pair that I had used for years and wore out. I had used them on a 10 day canoe trip in Algonquin Park that I took with my wife and countless other trips. Once they got replaced they were used for a while by students on many trips here in Brazil. In short there was a lot of good mojo in those pants. Due to catastrophic crotch failure they finally got retired. I’ve been planning to make micarta out of them for a long time.
I covered the inlet portion of the wood with a thin coat of epoxy and then started to wind the cloth around it in @1/2 inch strips, covering it with a thin coat of epoxy as I went. Once the winding was higher than the wood all around I let it set for 48 hours. Yesterday I took a file to it to lower it flush with the wood and sanded it to 220 grit. A top coat of superglue and a 320 grit sanding was all it took to finish.
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So here it is, my mojo micarta wrap modified Tramontina Golok. Consider me officially “chuffed”.
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Close up detail. I like that you can see it was made from rip-stop.
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In the sheath. I’ll be doing this again.
Mac
