My first knife

[Johnny J]

Hopefully guys like Robert Williams and Butch Harner won't laugh themselves into a hernia This is a small utility knife with a nice fat egg-shaped handle, tanto point, dual bevel, left-handed chisel grind.

The knife you see here was made entirely without power tools (unless you count the hand-crank grinder I made from an old bicycle). I cut the blank from an old table saw blade using an abrasive hacksaw. I whittled the handle from an oak branch.

I learned a lot from this project. Here's a short list:

-- Unless you have a water-cooled grinder, don't use old saw blades. They're too hard to drill or file, and nothing is more tedious than grinding hard steel by hand while trying not to ruin the temper. Instead, start with hardenable steel that's in a soft enough state to file, and do your rough profiling while it's soft. Heat-treat it afterward (or send it out to someone with a forge to do it for you).

-- If you don't have a lathe, it's impossible to make a symmetrical handle. Exposed tang construction with slab scales would have been a better design, but I was forced into the hidden-tang design by the impossibility of drilling holes in this steel.

-- An abrasive hacksaw is actually a good way to cut your blank, but you'll want to be able to clean up the rough edges with a file afterward, so again don't use hard steel.

Maybe I'll do some more now that I've been bitten by the bug. After all, winter is coming.