Hickory handle finishing

[Rangerdave]

I made a knife from a file and the handle from a hickory hammer handle. Would like suggestions on finish. I would like to darken the hickory a little and have thought using linseed oil or tongue oil. I want it to be kind of rustic looking. Anyone have a suggestion or other idea? It is not perfect as I want but for the first one I think it's ok. If I can figure out the pic situation I will post some. Getting errors for some reason.
Thanks
RD

[clinton]

You need to re-size photos now. I was finally able to figure this out with the advise from David Einhorn given in another post. My pictures were around 90kb 100x75 pixels worked for me

[Rich Hale]

You can actually use shoe and leather dye. My choice if dark walnut watco oil from hardware or big box store. Watco is a final fish so a few coats will make a nice finish. With dye you will need a final finish. Which ever you choose try it on scraps pieces,

[son_of_bluegrass]

Linseed oil dries faster than tung oil generally. Real tung oil isn't easy to find here in the States. Most of what has tung oil on the label is "tung oil finish" and has various varnish components and may or may not contain tung oil.
For my personal knives (including some of pecan which is a cousin of hickory and often sold as hickory) I tend to use either linseed oil or linseed oil/beeswax mix. I sometimes spend a couple months putting the oil on waiting for that coat to cure then putting another coat on until I've built up 10 or 15 coats. I use raw linseed oil that takes longer to cure than boiled linseed oil.
Hickory tends to be rather dense and doesn't take all dyes well. Test on scrap first to see if you like what you get. Some dyes will fade with exposure to UV light (many of the water based leather dyes and some of the oil based ones will). The metal based dyes tend to be color fast but may come with health issues. Read and follow any safety warnings on the dye if you go that route. (I'm using dye for both dye and stain even though they aren't the same.)

ron

[Rangerdave]

Thanks for the advise. I bought boiled linseed oil today and am going to give that a try. It amazes me how much you need to learn to do everything that goes with an an vil/blades. Seems you open one door and it opens 10 more of new and oh my how do I do thats. I really wish I would have started this interest 20 plus years ago. I would be so much closer to where I wish I was now. Never to old to start and learn new but patients is a virtue and that is the hard part right???

RD

[ThomasPowers]

That's a pretty modern concept: historically the fellow hammering out the blade didn't polish it or hilt it or make a scabbard for it. Different shops would do that stuff each one specializing. Save for out on the frontier when there was only *1* guy---but people usually bought blades premade from back east anyway.