"If You Call This Adventure, I'm Glad I Didn't Send You For Help

The promised adventure awaits.
Below, the brainwave I had for laying out and assembling a pattern rather than laboriously carving the whole thing out of wood. I've said before, I'm lazy.

At the upper right we become reacquainted with our friend from the post previous, the "Custom Skull & Bones Knife Set w/ Knuckle Guard", on sale now - Five Bucks Off!
At the bottom is the genuine, Stone knife and, in the upper left, a generic, Mcnary pattern.
That's the stuff I moved around on the desktop to see how I could cobble this together.
Of all the ready-made finger-loop sets I could come up with, the McNary was closest to the layout of the original so my plan became to glue the existing skull onto a McNary casting and go from there.
Back to the CC (Chinese Crap); If you've read the copy on this incredible bargain of a knife then you already know that it comes apart into two (!!!!) useless knives.
That made the decapitation of - let's call him "Skully" - far easier.
Next up - to the left - Skully does his Oliver Cromwell thing, his head on the pommel of a casting rather than a pole.
As you can see the McNary casting has lost weight.
Skully however, he needs some bulk. Comparing him with Stone's skull (No, not his real skull!) I found that his brain-case is woefully undersized.
What that means in a larger sense I don't know.
In the here-and-now, it meant Skully needed some extra meat on his head, stat.
Okay, Skully's head... you notice it looks... different.
Well, it had a coat of some kind of clear, polymer coating that Bondo (product endorsement "Bondo - The Molder's Friend") would've never stuck to.
In my universe, stubborn things like unwanted paint/varnish, things stuck to the bottom of skillets, that mess in the back seat, are dealt with by the simple application of heat. I burn them off (kidding about the car seat).
With Skully perched on top of the vise I gently played the torch about his melon to burn this crap off.
It seemed rather stubborn. It was just starting to smoke when a huge crack appeared in Skully's cranium and I realized that Skully was naught but a gelatinous blob of semi-molten... pot-metal, zamac, pewter.
Whatever it was, the coating of plastic that I'd been burning off, suddenly became the only thing holding old Skully together and keeping me from being the owner of two mutilated CC knife-like-objects (KLO).
Skully wasn't happy. Ingrate. I saved his ass... head.
He's not real thrilled in this next either.
Cromwell's head was never subjected to this level of indignity. Skully looks like he's been coated with pink frosting.
Doesn't he look yummy?
Take it up with the Bondo (product endorsement) folks, Skully.
Okay, Skully got a few more cute pink outfits slathered-on, then sanded-off until the Bondo got a bit thick for stability so, the whole thing got recast in aluminum which meant that the whole thing was one homogeneous material (Sorry, Skully) and that it therefore wouldn't break apart while I beat on it further.
Processes were repeated. Mistakes were made.
Below, the evidence of same:
Before the tedious bit, the "proof-of-concept" prototype - AKA I'm sick of messing with this handle. I want a blade on it.
On the left, cast onto a bolo blade that had quench-cracked.

The furthest upper-right of the three casting-patterns, the one with the most pink on it, is the last we see of Skully.
Building up the back of his head took two more tries.
Also, the finger loops on the Stone knife are really fat - they're representing a cobra - so they needed lots of Bondo as well.
Now, notice that the third pattern is painted OD. I did that just to fuck with Skully - like the pink thing.
Actually, it's a real pain to see detail with aluminum contrasting with Bondo and making it all the same color solves the problem.

Now, on a related subject, Eugene Stone made, during the war, his "personal" knife - a Stone knife but with no knuckle guard.
You can buy a "reinterpretation" of it here.
It's kind of scary but not in a - "Oh God I hope he doesn't get me" - kind of way.
More of a - "I hope he doesn't sit down next to me on the bus" - way.
Seriously, the skull looks like a Mexican wrestler.
Mine however looks like James Carvile with a mohawk (just a refection - but not a bad idea for the knife or for Jim).