I have used Tru-Oil on a single handle. It was hard maple with a little curl, used Majestic Maple finish to color the wood and enhance the figure. The Tru-Oil is to be used sparingly. If used too heavily it will build up a hard coat on the wood. I cut a soft drink can off about an inch or so up from the bottom, turned it over and used the depression as follows. Started with a 3 or 4 drops of Pure Gum Spirits Turpentine and a drop of Tru-Oil, mixed together and dipped a finger tip into it and applied to the wood and rubbed it in; allowed to dry for (see comment at end) (it was summer at the time!); repeat the process till the mixture was used up; next cycle reduced the number of drops of turpentine to 2 or 3, etc.. I repeated this process of reducing the turpentine till it was eliminated. If I thought the Tru-Oil was building up on the surface of the wood, I used 0000 steel wool wet with the Tru-Oil till the layer was removed. Use it gently as you want to remove the build up and not cut through into the wood. At some point I decided enough was enough and stopped.
The handle was on a knife gifted to my youngest daughter as a birthday present last summer. She was home over the holidays and brought the knife back for its 6 month/24,000 mile checkup. During the interim, the knife made a trip to Laos, spent about 40 days in the field, received a complete dunking in the local river/stream, got rained on, etc.. The handle did not show any signs of water absorption, no swelling, etc.. All I did was get out the 0000 steel wool and the Tru-Oil, just a drop on the finger tip, rub on the handle and gently rubbed with the steel wool to get the dirt and grime off the handle. Did that a couple of times and it was good to go. I decided to use Tru-Oil as it is readily available from gun stores, sporting good stores and Wal-Mart in the US in the event she needed to perform maintenance on the handle.
Oh, now that I have had a few minutes to think.. initially I let the handle dry about 12 hours between applications. When I got down to the end, I used a 24 hour drying cycle. The turpentine thinned the oil and permitted it to soak in. Later, getting close to full strength, it tends to just sit on the wood. The turpentine will off gas for several days, which may be why I used that timing cycle.
And, yes, it was a very nice finish on the handle.
