Who or how to repair leather grommet handles?

[ret_marine2003]

I am looking for a person who likes to make repairs or information on how to do it myself.

I have a friend who ruined the leather washers on a part of his LC-14 tool handle (Think Woodsmans Pal). He brought this back from Korea and would like to have it repaired.

The handle needs about fine inches of material replaced.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

[RG Coburn]

A friend has a Navy marked Kabar,where the stacked leather was replaced by plastic stacked "washers". Think plastic,like they make cutting boards out of.Cut to rough general shape,once stacked,ground and formed down to a comfortable grip.

[yovinny]

I've done a few and they can be quite a PITA to get done.

First the pommel need's to come off the end of the handle, which can be an adventure all in itself.
While some pommels screw or are pinned on and some have a recessed nut and are easy to remove, some are swedged or peened on and require a jig for pressing off.
The screwed on ones or those with a recessed nut are the best, as they not only are easy to remove but can be tightened later to keep the handle tight as the leather shrinks.
The peened on ones are the worst and usually require milling out the peened area and then pressing the pommel off.
They also require some creative work and a slight shortening to be able to be reassembled.
Once the pommel is off, the rest of the handle should be easy to remove.

To replace the handle in stacked leather, the first step is to make the leather washers.
This usually requires cutting out pieces of leather and then punching a tang size hole through them and usually requires making a punch and die to duplicate the size of the tang cut-out.

Assembly is accomplished using leather glue between each washer and a press is also required to compress them down on the tang next to each other and then hold them in place while the glue dries.

After that replace the pommel and shape the handle on you'r belt sander and you'r done.

Sometimes the handle cant be sanded to shape on the knife, so the leather washers need to be pre-assembled and compressed onto a tang sized piece of metal and shaped on the belt sander before hand.
Then they can be transfered and glued one by one to the tang.

Hope this helped.
Cheers, YV