I suppose I should preface all this with the fact that Breezy12 is my older brother. I got most of my initial knowledge of knife usage, care, and maintenance from him. A fairly common weekend occurrence for years has been me heading over to his place and us having a dram (or several) of scotch and cleaning/sharpening various members of our respective collections.
I've been a Leatherman fan for years. I can recall pouring over the little fold up catalog that came with my first Leatherman for hours, planning how I would obtain them all and in what order. (None of the various plans have worked out completely... yet :-P)
So, the major inspiration for this was Metropolicity's Black Tide mod. I can't imagine mine will end up looking as nice as his, but it's a good mark to shoot for, I'd say. This is just Mark I of an ongoing project, and I will be updating this post as I go.
I started with a new Wave platform. I currently carry a TTi, but I've always preferred the Wave to the Charge models. I may be slightly biased by the fact that my first Leatherman was an original Wave I got for Boy Scouts, but I actually do prefer the styling of the Wave over the Charge. Titanium handles are nice, but I actually still prefer the look and feel of the Wave. It's been a constant debate with myself ever since I got my TTi, whether or not to swap the blades over to a new Wave I'd picked up at one of the warehouse sales at the Leatherman factory. Anyway, it was a no brainer to slap the pliers from a Rebar into my Wave, so I picked up a spare Rebar and got to work.
Getting the pliers off the Rebar was tricky, but thanks to some help and a brilliant idea from Breezy, it wasn't as horrible as I thought it might be starting off. It was a huge help having him hold the Rebar giving me a stable, vertical base to work on. Also his idea to use a Squirt on one side really helped since it kept my hands at different heights from the Rebar.
After that, the Wave wasn't too tricky. Then got everything put together with only a few minor mishaps.
As you can see, it's a solid start, but there's still a lot of work to be done. The first order of business is to get it to close all the way. Still debating on what to do there, but I'm probably going to grind down the scissors handle with a Dremel.
Next order of business is to get a donor Charge and swap out the blades.
After that, who knows? Like I said, I'm just getting started.
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