I was looking at the set thinking that while they're beautiful, a Magnificent 7 set designed by the clowns here would be far better. 5 fixed blades with leather and hardwood, 1 folding hunter with matching wood and a matching cutting board.
I'm starting a savings account today.
That would be awesome. Definitely one heck of a project to tackle.
When John asked if I would be interested in designing a couple knives for deer processing, I was definitely intrigued. I kind of got caught up in the end of semester crap and and pushed knife stuff to the back of my head for a while. After thinking about it I came up with these two knives, obviously heavily influenced by knives I have seen in the past. If I had a deer hanging in front of me, something like these is what I would want.
When using my Redmeadow this deer season it performed great in butchering. This mostly entails de-boning the meat from the carcass and cutting it up into grinder sized pieces. I usually only save the inner and outer loins for steaks and it did a great job of carving those off. The only thing I would have changed would be to make it a tad shorter in height for a little bit of increased maneuverability. The bottom knife in the drawing reflects that and has slightly more cutting edge for a little more reach.
The little bullnose/nessmuck would be well suited for many tasks, but skinning would probably be where it shines. Having that hump at the nose seems like it would be an ergonomic place to rest you finger when in areas that may be out of sight, where you have to go by feel more than anything. I have always been fond of that blade style, but have never really used one quite like it. One of the most important things when using a knife is how intuitive it feels. The Redmeadow I have is like an extension of my hand, and it seems like a proper nessmuck/bullnose styled knife could be the same.
I had said that I prefer a drop point for the actual gutting process, but I think the little nessmuck/bullnose or clip point would be more than adequate. Given the choice, I would have 3 knives for processing a deer. One for gutting, one for skinning and one for meat duties. Realistically, any one knife would be fine to accomplish all three of these tasks, including the one already in my possession.
Usually when putting designs on paper, I have several different iterations of any given knife. For the nessmuck, I had originally drawn it a little slimmer with more belly and a narrower tip. You can kind of see some marks where I erased and redrew. I am still not sure which I like better. Also unsure about whether they should have guards or not. Both of those designs are pretty tentative, but this is a fun idea and a decent place to start. Thanks for asking me to do this John.