MERINO IN A CLOTHES WASHER & CLEANING G10

During BETA testing of a MERINO FM (due to be released in 2025), I was informed that the knife was so comfortable to carry that they forgot to take it out of thier pocket and the knife got run through the laundry.  

Personally I found this quite exciting because this is exactly the sort of thing you want to have happen durning BETA testing.  It is not the sort of situation that is normally considered during the initial design, but it is something that has a high probabiliity of happening in the lifespan of the knife.  

The good news is that the knife functioned perfectly fine after its tumble in the washer and dryer.  The only thing that happened to it is that the G10 scales developed a black/blue hue to them.  The BETA tester was pretty bummed because they really liked the color combo.  The picture below shows a production MERINO FM next to the G10 scale of the BETA test model that when through the wash.  You can see how the G10 got stained.  

With MERINO I have tried to focus on having good color combos and so I made the MERINO out of materials that I thought would be easy to clean. Now I would get a chance to see how easy it would be to clean up the G10 and get it back to a new looking knife.

G10 is primarily glass therefore it has issues with retaining color.  Because of this G10 is quite durable, strong and (I hoped) easy to clean. 

Basic washing with water really didn't do to much so I then got out some "Bar keepers friend" which is a light abbrassive cleaning solution which is designed for cleaning glass, ceramic and other hard surfaces.  A few seconds of rubbing that onto the surface was enough to completely clean the G10. I used a toothbrush to get into the reccesses in the handle.  I then did a light coating of WD40 on the outside to help refresh the color a bit, (mineral oil, ballistic oil or other light oils will also do the trick). Below is the production MERINO FM with clean scales, next to the back dirty G10 scale and finally the now clean (was dirty) G10.