Joe's Knife build

Now that the cat's out of the bag I can share building Joe's knife.  Instead of hammering out and grinding a high carbon steel blade, I ordered a stainless steel blade. My reasoning for this choice was I wanted it to be usable without worry of rust.  When the blank came in it was rough, and needed a lot of help!!

here you can see some deep scratches





and the improperly formed radius at the hilt juncture





after some hours work with a file, most of these problems were straightened out






After that there were many many hours spent with ever finer grit sand paper.  I didn't take pictures of these steps.

Then finally the handle slabs were rough cut dry fitted with over sized pins.



Then the slabs and pins were glued in place.  After the glue had set up (10 ton epoxy, slow cure) The slabs and pins were sanded and shaped.



and the final sanding was begun.  Here is where I ran out of time, and instead of sanding down to 400 grit, I stopped at 240, and put on 4 coats of spar varnish, sanding with 300 grit between coats...



and then it was off to the post office.

You did a great job on it. It'll probably end up being our chicken butchering knife.

It turned out very nicely after all the work you did on it.

What ever use ya'll put it to, I think you will like it.

Thanks Patrice, I mainly wanted to show the basic steps in case someone wanted to make their own sometime, or repair an old one

Keith it's good information to know, thanks for sharing it.

It's very nice!

Very interesting Keith. Knife looks really nice.

That is awesome!