Knives for L & S

I made a few knives recently my best friend and her fiance.
L's a stay at home mum with a shoemaking background and general creative and artistic flair so I thought a utility/craft knife would be suitable. I wanted to make a wharncliffe style blade with a hidden tang for a left hander.
I made the blade out of the other end of the file I used for SBW's knife and the handle is nickel silver, tin, reconstituted stone, black and white spacer material and curly birch finished with Danish oil.






S is a whiz in the kitchen so a chef knife was the obvious choice - or at least obvious after asking L for ideas and having her suggest it. I freely admit that I cheated with this knife and actually bought the blade as a blank, rather than grinding it myself. I was concerned that I'd grind too much off making such a thin knife and simply didn't want to take the chance. So rather than this being a custom knife it's more of a 'customised handle' knife, as all I had to do was fit a handle and give the blade a bit of a quick sharpen and strop.
The blade is a 440c stainless Santuko that I purchased from Jantz Supply in the US. Handle is made from red spacer material and Fiddleback Redgum. I finished it with a few coats of danish oil and sealed with wax.

Knives by Dave Myhill

I met Dave Myhill about 7 years ago when I was at the home of my best friend (Dave's daughter, L) having a bit of a catch up, and he dropped over for a visit.
At the time, Dave was a little apprehensive about the boys his daughter spent time with, and had the misconception that this young lad sipping tea with his only female heir must be her boyfriend, or at least a potential candidate - so he offered to take me hunting, and said he'd even give me a 3 day head start.

Dave also took the time to explain that he could lodge a knife, bullet, or arrow in me from 30 yards with very little difficulty on his part.

We had a few chance encounters shortly after that (helping L move house, the occasional shared meal, birthdays, etc.) and we gradually began to warm to each other. On several occasions I even made the trip to Dave's place on the Mornington Peninsula with L to help out with some yard work.

A few short years later Dave and I really started developing a friendship. He'd tell me at great length about knives and damascus steel and I was fortunate enough to spend some time with him in the shed getting a crash course in forge-welding.

Sadly, Dave passed away at the beginning of last year after a lengthy battle with cancer. This was pretty hard to take considering Dave had become very much like a second father to me.
I'm not sure if this is the right choice of words but maybe the one good thing to come from this was that it prompted me to start making knives on my own. At some point in the future I hope to start my first forged knife and give the finished product to L as a tribute to her father's dedication to the craft of knifemaking.

While recently attending the knife show I ran into a friend of a friend and she introduced me to her partner A, who happens to be a knife collector.
We got to talking and it turns out A rarely missed an opportunity to wander past Dave's stand at shows past and usually walked away with one of his knives.

He offered to let me come over and look at his collection, and was kind enough to donate some of Dave's unfinished blanks, agreeing that as payment I would put a handle on one of them for his partner.


I've decided that I'll finish the large trade blade and keep that for myself, but the large dagger will be redesigned into a tanto style blade for an old friend and the smaller utility knife will be finished and one day be given to my godson - who happens to be one of Dave's grandchildren.

Knife for The Suburban Bushwacker

I've been following SBW's blog for some time now and recently asked him if he'd be kind enough to review one of my knives. As a thankyou for taking the time to post a review I've offered to make a knife to SBW's specifications and he's kindly accepted.

After a few emails back and forth regarding the design we settled on making a full tang scandi styled knife, loosely based on Rod Garcia's Skookum Bushtool, though with a deep finger choil and orange G-10 handle.

The initial sketch I sent through to SBW (above) shows the handle with two tubes holding the scales to the tang, and pins arranged in the shape of the Southern Cross (A constellation seen in the Australian skies). The buttcap is to be welded on to the tang.
The design has changed slightly in that the index finger choil will be deeper and (given that I'm making this out of a file) the file markings near the spine of the blade will be ground back to avoid having a rust trap.

I've done the initial grind on the file and now have a blank (once I've removed the rasps) ready for profiling.



More to come later.

Bushknife Sheath

It took a long time to work out how I was going to make a sheath for this knife. The blade is such a strange shape to begin with and every time I started drawing up a sketch of what I thought would be able to hold the knife I ended up with something that looked like an oblong gone horribly wrong.
But then decided to cut out the nasty oblong shape and then round off all of the corners slightly, and glue it before doing anything else - then inserted the knife and wet formed the leather.
After the wet form it started to make a bit more sense and I'm now confident that I went the right way.
The belt loop is a bit odd as I originally intended to have the loop drop behind the sheath but then realized after cutting the leather that this would leave the handle dangling loosely out the top of the sheath. Being one inclined to not start again from scratch I incorporated a larger piece of leather, cut a few holes in it and fed the original, unstitched loop through it. Pretty happy with the results.