Recommendation? Puukko Question

T

tom57

Joined
Dec 28, 2009
Messages
11
Hi there,

This is my first post on the forum and I was hoping to get some more opinions on the handle of my puukko, specifically the grain orientation. I have read that the grain running perpendicular to the blade shouldn’t be an issue but wanted to be sure considering the time I’ve put into this knife already. I am a hobby maker and managed to miss this during the build. The wood is curly birch with antler and leather spacers.

Any advice or tips would be really appreciated. I’ve put some pics of my build below. It’s not finished yet so excuse the poor finish.

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Thanks for reading,
Tom
 
Tom

Curly Birch is pretty dense with grain multi-directional. I've made several puukko with it and have had no problems. Nice looking work.
Rich
 
Thats great to hear! Thanks for the comments everyone. I'll post a photo of the completed knife when it's done, I'm waiting on some leather for the sheath.

Thanks again,
Tom
 
Your knife looks fine.

I think that if one looks at how wood is defined, there is grain orientation, and there is ring orientation, and you might be able to talk of fibre orientation as separate from both, although fibre direction is more a thing for bow making.

Anyway, if you saw through log like you would to make it into fire wood, you get a cross section that shows concentric rings. The grain runs down the length of the log, the rings run around it. Having grain perpendicular to your blade means your wood handle has very little strength, grab blade and end of handle and bend and your handle could snap like a carrot. The knife you made has grain running parallel to the blade, so that is fine. You can get away with using perpendicular grain on a full tang, but a hidden tang its a risk.

Rings are another matter. Having the rings parallel to the tang of a full tang can cause a problem with scale/tang mismatch as the scales tend to shrink/expand more around the rings. A hidden tang matters much less.
 
Hi Claycomb,

Thanks for the detailed explanation. Finally got my head around it, I always knew perpendicular grain would be weak.

Thanks again.
Tom
 
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