Glue gun Archives · Thedyslexiccraftsman

One of the way I decorate my knives handles is by using ,what they call in the trade, a mosaic pins. It mechanically secure the wooden handle to the metal blade. And, it also served as decorative element.

I build my own mosaic pins by: first insert the main (3mm) brass pin through the wood and the blade tang. Then I insert brass tube on both sides of the handle, making sure the main pin sits dead in the centre of the tube. And finally I insert narrower pines around the main pin. Needless to say that I use epoxy glue the to secure and bond everything together.

I leave the pin assembly to protrude some 4mm above the handle surface and, eventually I grind it levelled with the wood.

I use my belt sander (link to post on how to build it ) for shaping the handle. during that process, the brass pin reach high temperature. If I use ordinary epoxy glue, because of the high heat, the epoxy losing is integrity and obviously its ability to bind together the mosaic pins element and the pin to the handle .

So instead of using standard epoxy I tried to use epoxy that design specifically to resist heat.

The epoxy that I used is two components epoxy, the main component is the body of the glue and the second is the accelerator part. You form the glue by combining the two elements together, in a ratio according to the manufacturer.

As mention above, the dispensing of the glue components need to be very accurate, and there are proprietary glue-gun, design for that.

At the moment I am in a stage of knives making where I trying to cut expenses. So I set about to build my own gun. It is primitive but after some experiment I found that it does the trick, and dispense the glue evenly, according to the rate ratio of the two glue components.

I won’t explain step by step how I built it instead I will put some more photos, so you can see the general idea of the construction.