A friend at work passed out some Damascus bladed knife kits at work for us to put together and other than having watched 87,000 episodes of Forged in Fire I have no knife making experience.  The blades are completed, ground, sharpened, dipped to bring out the blade pattern, and the hilt is drilled for a handle.  The kit came with bone for the handle, assorted cross pins, and some thin sturdy sheets that I believe are meant to mount under the bone handles.

My question is this; I bought a set of Micarta slabs to make the grips and would like to know if I can mount the slabs directly to the blade using the epoxy I purchased or do I have to use the thin shim like material between the blade and handle slab?  The epoxy I chose is G/Flex.  Thanks.

This is the knife kit:




This is the black/blue handle material I chose:

I have mounted micarta directly onto the blade.  Make sure to degrease and rough up the area where you will epoxy the handle scales onto the knife.  

Make sure to check the hardness of the blade before you mount up the handle scales.  Many of the Damascus knife kits are sold with soft blades because they are easier to grind.   It would really suck to do all the work mounting the handle scales only to learn that your blade was not properly hardened.  

Many epoxies work just fine...one I have had really good success with is Marine-Tex.  It is impervious to solvents so the epoxy won't soften if it comes into contact with things like gas, oil, gun cleaning solvents etc.  You can buy Marine-Tex at most large hardware stores.

Yeah . I epoxy and pin. With nice scales like you have a colored spacer might accent it nicely

This. Spacer is just an accent. I generally don’t use them as it’s more work but they can really look great if the color combination is right

Thanks for the advice everyone!

If you wanted to make it REAL fancy, you could go with ivory/white micarta scales, with scrimshaw. Many years ago my dad used to do custom pistol and knife grips, (and bolo ties) and because of my art background, I did scrimshaw on them. I also scrimshawed on a sperm whale tooth that my dad had. I have no clue who ended-up with that, but I wish it was mine! I've been ponderimg ordering knife blanks and doing custom grips and scrimshaw again.

Anyways... good for you OP. Enjoy!