Just an update to the group and for those following this thread. We've been throwing ideas back and forth. Although I see stingrays point in his recent post about a camp and hawk knife being somewhat redundant, I also think that if we use the curly Maple from Morans shop (generously donated by Stacy Apelt...Thank you sir, for your generousity) we owe it to ourselves to use it for both of those classic pieces (hawk and camp/bowie). If the pieces are designed correctly the two pieces will fit well together.
- Hawk...designed to be very sturdy and durable for heavy chopping such as splitting logs.
- Camp/Bowie...designed to do heavy chopping, but more adept at finer chopping such as smaller pieces of wood such as the branches on saplings, cutting meat for dinner in camp, hacking through bone on a harvested deer or elk. Although a hawk can be used for these applications, a lighter, quicker in the hand camp knife would be a joy to use.
- Hunter...We are leaning towards a drop point hunter.
Justin Golat has suggested a wonderful finishing process for the maple and has provided pictures. I, for some reason, am not able to open them in the emails. However, based on the email responses from the others on our team, it must be a wonderful finish.
Justin,
Could you post a picture of the finished curly maple here, plus the finishing process so that others can see it and learn from it.
As far as design, we have a few different hawk designs to choose from.
The camp/bowie knife has quite a few different designs that we're looking at. We are leaning toward a hidden tang design with a nice choil and ricasso. It appears that a bowie look to it seems to be what most of us like.
The hunter is a classic drop point design thus far. We're leaning towards a full tapered tang design. The reason that we are utilizing to different tang designs for the hunter vs. the camp/bowie is to take advantage of both the hidden/thru/stick tang talents of some of our makers and to also take advantage of the talents of our full tang artisans. Using different tang concepts allows us to more fully use the skills of our many talented team members.
I am holding off posting the designs here until our team settles on one design for each piece. We are however getting close.
As for the efforts, I've been very impressed with this group of knifemakers. All of them are very eager and willing to put their ideas out there for scrutiny. Some of the ideas stick, some of them don't, but it doesn't stop any of them from putting their hearts out on their sleeves. I expected this to be an effort where a few people would be doing the bulk of the work, but to my delight, it's been a true team effort. This team may be newbies, but they are very professional and very talented.
Stay tuned. I think you'll be impressed by the ideas and designs of the newbies here on BladeForums. Now, we just need to effectively put the designs that are in our minds into reality.
Ickie
p.s.
100 posts to this thread. It will be a lot more than this eventually. If we had been rehashing our ideas here instead of in an email distribution list, we'd probably be at about 300 by now.
