i have heard of people laying gold, silver, platinum and the like into the blade hilts for what they called a vintage design, how would one go about doing such with these soft metals without scaring the design?:confused:

Inlay is a process of graving the lines to be filled and driving the inlay material into them.

You need to make the graven lines wider at the bottom than the top so the inlay can't come out. The inlay also needs to be soft enough to pein itself in the groove.

There is of course a world more than that to it but that's the gist.

Frosty

There is a series of books by David Darom (I have four of them. He keeps putting out more books) where just about every two pages of each book is a different knifemaker discussing a technique they use. These books have spectacular photographs of a lot of remarkable inlay and other detail work. So far the books I have by this author are:
- Custom Knifemaking
- Custom Folding Knives
- The Great Collections
- Custom Fixed Blade Knives

Of course the other wonderful books are too many to list here. The emphasis of this author, according to one book's forward, is to have very high quality photographs. And in that I believe he succeeded! Great books for inspiration.

its also worth studying traditional Japanese metalworking, one of the foremost English speaking practitioners is Ford Hallam (Cape Town SA)