Knife Making

Knife Making

Well Knife Assembling anyway. I had a friend come over the other day and I noticed that he was wearing a fixed blade knife. This got me thinking about how practical it would be around the vineyard to have a fixed blade knife. I have always wanted to make a knife so I figured that this was an opportunity to give it a try. 

So I bought some components and decided I would give it a try to see if I would like it. 

 Here are my components, I decided to buy the blade pre-shaped. I just want to give this knife making thing a try and this seemed to be the easiest. I bought some zebra wood scales and found a nice mosaic pin to round it off. 

 First I sanded the surfaces of the scales to make sure they were flat. Then paired them up and marked out the outline of the blade where I wanted it. Then center punched one of the pin holes. 

 Here are the scales in the drill press getting the first hole drilled. 

Then I put a pin in the hole to insure that everything stayed in the same place and drilled the next hole. I repeated this for  the third hole as well. 

 After a good scuffing up I cleaned everything with acetone prior to bonding the parts together. 

 Everything was glued together with epoxy, clamped, and set aside to dry. 

Then I started shaping the scales. I could not resist sanding down the mosaic pins first. Here you can see the first mosaic pin sanded flush with the scale. 

Here is the knife after shaping. I went through a few iterations before I found a shape that felt good in my hands. This is what I finally decided on.

Here it is after a few coats of oil on the handles. Next I will have to make a leather sheath for it. I will add that to the blog when I have completed it.

This was a fun little project that did not require any specialized tools, I can see why people get into knife building.