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reswright
3850
Aug 10, 2019
TwoSun Aranea , D2 and G-10
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The Aranea is designed by Caleb Fechner -- although I did read in one place that Michael Etorma of Storm Knives, and lately of Tuyaknife, also worked on this knife. Caleb Fechner has been mentioned in Blades before -- someone brought over a thread from Blade Forums where he went in looking for Kickstart support and the Blade Forum baby boomers decided to take out all their angst about the younger generation on him, told him to sit down suck up listen and maybe in ten years he'd be worth working with and someone would work to build a knife with him. And then maybe he'd be a knifemaker, but he needed to change his whole attitude and yadda yadda. Seriously it was like listening to a bunch of guys unload all the things they wanted to say to their teenage stepsons, but dare not because their wives would beat their ass. That kinda angst. He took it probably a little better than I would have at his age. More to the point, dude went ahead with his plans and now he's got a couple of knives out on the market.
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Broken down it's standard TwoSun for their D2 and G10 builds. KVT ceramic bearings, so basically what you'd find in a Kershaw if it had bearings. A beautifully milled backspacer -- if you wanna know if a knife maker gives a damn about their products, look at how well they machine all their surfaces and not just the ones you can see on the outside of the knife. TwoSun does a good job on the whole knife, and that's one reason they're as good as they are. The Aranea flips pretty well and is a wicked design. If I had one ding I would say that especially on the CF version, the detent ball rides awfully heavy on the tang of the knife -- it flips open fine, but it's doing so in spite of that drag. On the G10 model the ball rides a little lighter. The ergonomics are okay -- in fact they're a little better than they look, given the angularity of the design. But the Aranea excites me a little less than a lot of other TwoSuns do overall, including the Shinobi, another Fechner design which resembles a very long kwaiken flipper. So the reason I broke this knife apart in the first place -- really, the reason I picked it up at all -- was that I've been learning how to dye knife scales and I wanted to see how the orange handles dyed. Generally speaking, curved surface G10 handles like you see on the Bestech Scimitar or the Zinker Dogtooth are easier to dye nicely than ones that are relatively flat. Rounded handles show an even grain, but flat ones often don't show a grain at all. Instead they can look blotchy, especially if the G10 is cheap and was unevenly assembled -- G10 is only as even as it is made, if you're throwing in different thicknesses of fabric layers and you aren't carefully evening out the stack, it can get quite haphazard in a way that you won't notice -- because the surface texture disguises the grain and its flatness hides most of it. So how'd this do?
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It isn't horrible, but the effect of the exposed fiber and the dyed resin is much more of a mottling and less of a grain. It's a lot harder to get likable results when dyeing flat handles, which is something I've figured out just by screwing around and trying stuff out like the happy ass amateur I am. But TwoSuns are shipped via China Post and I'd already ordered this one before I figured out that flat handles don't always dye as nicely as round ones. I almost didn't bother trying this out as result, but the Harnds knives and the Dogtooth took the cherry dye so well that I figured 'what the hell' and gave it a try.
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