One of my favorite blacksmithing books is called "Swedish Blacksmithing" by Noren and Enander (highly recommend this book if you're starting out). It has numerous chapters on all kinds of applications of traditional Swedish blacksmithing, be it starting out and preparing your shop all the way to forging damascus and other advanced applications. I originally bought this book solely for the chapter on ax making but have come to regard it as close as a religious text when curious about a technique. Within the pages there is a chapter on knife making with a Swedish design. It's an interesting chapter, laying out the technique of forging a "U" shape in some mild steel approximately .25 to .125 inches thick by 1 or 1.5 inches wide, and laying a hard piece of steel into the fold and forge welding it together, to have a knife that has a hard cutting edge but being able to use the mild for more of the body and shape. I was running low on carbon steel at the time, so I grabbed the last little three inch piece of a jackhammer bit I had left and decided to give it a whirl. For someone who's not entirely adept at forge welding, I was moderately pleased with how it turned out. I kept a bladesmith's advice I met recently in mind: "When you think it's welded... weld it three more times". I started to shape the blade, and decided I wanted to make a hunter/skinner style knife close to a puukko.
I started to grind and clean up the knife when the weld line started to show. I was enthused, no, I was fanatic once I saw it. Granted, I had some cold shunts and other blemishes along my weld lines, but the blade is solid.
I wanted this blade to look old and have a story, so I left many of the hammer blows, bumps, and bruises in the blade. I went with a bevel style where the whole blade is one plane, not a flat surface that moves down to a bevel. I had a pretty nice heat treat on the blade despite how nerve racking it was to do. Our gas forge wasn't hooked up due to some remodeling in our shop, so I had to temper the blade over the coal forge. I had never done that before but I achieved a nice straw color. It was well into the polish stage that I was very shocked with my creation so far. It was sharp. Holy sweet mother of Mary it was sharp. My polishing technique is a 3x2in balsa wood block that I attach emery cloth to the bottom with a rubber band. It gives me a flat surface and something nice to hold on to while polishing. I was deep into what I was doing one night polishing away on the blade and clearly not taking my time. My patience was thin and I was anxious to finish polishing the blade. I was swiping back and forth entirely too fast and the block slipped off the edge of the blade, and I rammed my hand backwards to continue the polishing, only to jab the tip of the blade (which was even sharper than what I realized) through my thumb nail. Immediately I was furious with myself and my lack of care, concern, and control. Too bad I didn't learn my lesson and I did the same thing 5 minutes later except twice as bad, drawing much more blood and much more foul language. Needless to say, I quit for the night.
The handle was something I was stuck on for a while. I didn't know what I wanted to do with it. I thought about a stag handle, but I did not have any large scale antler to my disposal. I decided to go with some poplar that had a green look to it. I hand carved the handle and left the carving chisel marks on the handle surface. I liked the look of it and the feel of it even better. I put about 6 coats of boiled linseed oil on the handle and topped it off with a heavy coat of Tru Oil Gunstock finish to lock in the moisture.
The spacer was originally from some pretty thin copper plate, but it just didn't have the look I wanted, So Wayne found me some thicker (approx. 1/8in) copper pipe and we flattened it out. After cutting out the design with the hacksaw, I had to get the hole for the tang drilled and filed to shape. What a tedious process! I was filing away with a little rat tail file for close to 2 hours. Note to self: buy a tip that can do this for my Dremel. I then tried to file some fancy designs onto the edges of the spacer... it didn't work out like I wanted since I didn't have a small enough file to do so. But oh well, live and you learn, right?
I finished off the project with a nice folded leather sheath made of vegetable tanned leather. Can't wait to get a deer this year (or next) and see how well it works. My left arm can vouch for it's sharpness as it has considerably less hair left than my right.
Cheers!
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