Thread: My first knife

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.

Nice. I know what you mean about the handle, I just did something similar for a brush(try to post more this weedend).

I like that!

nice start
i made a few file knives back when i first stated so i knwo all about the hard steel thing

you have been bitten by the bug so get ready to have fun and remember jsut try to get a little better with every knife (i have been workign at this for near 10 years now )

The real question is: Did you have fun?
And: how functional is it?

If the answers are a) Yes and b) very then who cares what it looks like? It's your first! It's supposed to be bad (I know mine was).

-- 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.

I don't think it's impossible.....just very hard.

Not a bad effort. Wait until you decide to make a large bowie knife without power tools and handsand to a mirror finish. Now that'll test your patience. It did for me anyway. Keep up the interest, have fun and don't be afraid to experiment. There isn't much out there in knife land that hasn't already been done before, but there are probably a few things that still need to be re-discovered.


Mick