Month: October 2019

The Bowies I made till now were with wide recurved blade design. I like the form a lot but I saw a lot of knifemakers doing a very slim design for their Bowie blades. I also wanted to make a bigger knife to see how far I can go. The main challenge is not grinding a bigger blade into shape but the size of my forge and the containment of the heat treatment oil.

While I planned the new knife, my friend Joe asked me to make another knife for him. This time I should do it completely free as I like and put as much into the knife as I want. When working with and for Joe he always gives me complete creative freedom, but this time I also suggested the knife model. That was perfect timing.

I showed him the draft and he liked it. So I started with the project and got the shape into the steel. I was totally amazed when I held the rough blade in my hand for the first time. The ergonomy of the handle was on point. I don’t know if I have a good sense of handles or it is pure luck. But I like how I can grip the handle with the full fist or put the thumb on the back on the spine of the blade and up to the thumb stop.

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I showed Joe pictures of the progress and I felt how he began to love the blade after he just liked it at first. He told me he would love to have a green handle. I had seen nice colored wood at a german online dealer for knife makers. And I showed him the exact piece of stabilized green poplar burl. That stuff looks like jade marble. He liked it and so I ordered it.

The piece of wood looked even better when you see it live – but it made me very nervous to cut the wood into halves. The knife would have a full tang so I needed two parts. I have had some problems getting perfect straight cuts on my bandsaw before. I practiced with some pieces of wood – and it went much better than expected. So I cut the stabilized wood in half and sanded it perfectly flat on a piece of sandpaper that lay flat on my workbench.

The wood left neon green wood dust everywhere – even more, when I started shaping the handle. My workshop looked like an alien landing zone with all the green stuff around. Good, I got my respirator.

As always I left the handle a bit thicker. A big knife like the Longbow needs a handle you can grip on.

The blade is polished to a mirror finish – and I don’t know why but this went pretty good this time. Usually, I have a tough time getting all the scratches out of the wood but this went pretty easy this time.

Until now I worked on one knife at a time but I always strive to find the best way for me to work on my projects. Working on one knife at a time meant, for example, to fire up the forge to heat treat just a single knife, it would be much more efficient to harden more knives at a time. Or to carve out the blanks for multiple knives at a time instead of just one and then have to switch tools and so on.

On the other hand, I want to keep the passion I put in every single project – Concentrating on the details that make every single knife unique. To make sure I do not loose this I will allow myself to jump between the projects and push on the parts of the single projects that I am most motivated in.

Currently, I have 4 knife projects in parallel active. I am working on the “Longbow” Bowie knife, another Kukri III, a new Tigershark hunting knife and the PB skinner but with a thicker blade. I started all blades at the same time but now the Longbow is finished for etching and I have a beautiful piece of stabilized wood for it here. All other blades are heat treated and ready to be cleaned up. Only the skinner is already partly ground clean from the filthy remains of the hardening oil.