tapered/rat tail tangs and handles and handle materials

[GoldSkula]

Nice knifes. I highly recommend that you use a spacer between the knife and wood on your next knife. Without a spacer the wood can start to crack a lot easier. My brother had a marttiini puukko blank that my father made the handle for. After a couple of hunting trips the knife started to crack from part where the steel meets the wood. The handle is still in one piece, but I don't think it will be like that for long.

 

[NapalmCheese]

I hear you on the spacer/bolster. I never got around to prepping any bone but I do have some brass around I might use when I finally handle the leuku blade I purchased.

On another note, I decided to try my hand at putting together a knife handle about as simple as possible. I settled on:

1. Taper the tang down to a point
2. Cut a piece out of a birch limb of appropriate diameter
3. Drill a hole in the limb with a depth that is slightly shorter than the tang is long
4. Use needle files to open up a slot for the wider part of the tang near the blade
5. Get it to a point where the knife slides into the handle with about a 1/2 inch to spare
6. Hammer the handle on
7. Make some wedges out of fatwood to fill the the voids on either side of the tang
8. Shape the handle

This one came out neat. I left the tang a little too long because I'm expecting it to break or work loose or something, and wanted to have enough tang to pein it over of I desire. It feels plenty solid, but I haven't tried using yet (having just finished the handle). I've seen pictures of knives built similar to this recovered from burial mounds, etc. If the wood is still there, it's often split. I imagine nailing the tang in like that puts a lot of stress on the wood, and that it will eventually split.

At any rate, it's simple, and I learned more stuff about making knife handles!

I guess now that I'm getting a handle on things (so punny) I ought to start looking at making a blade one of these days. There's a guy around here that has 'forge nights' pretty much every week. I suppose I ought to start going.

 

[NapalmCheese]

I finally got around to putting a handle on the big blade, trying to step up my game a little bit and added a hammer finished aluminum bolster to compliment the .300 Win Mag peening washer. Not overthinking it and just drilling out what I needed with less regard for a tight fit was much quicker, as was doing it in three sections. Using the walnut sapwood in the middle chunk was okay, but it didn't finish out as nice as I would have liked, and is dark enough to not be as distinguishable from the heartwood walnut as I would have liked. C'est la vie. It's an 8 inch Lauri Leuku and using it in the kitchen for some quick 'testing' reminded me of using that big butcher knife mom used in the kitchen when I was growing up. I'm working on finishing up the scabbard now, should be nice looking when it's all said and done. Shaping the handle with the bolster was frustrating. The aluminum gummed up in the files and often an aluminum chip would wedge itself into the wood. Shaping the handle by sanding without a block (predictably) caused the wood to sink around the aluminum which I would then have to address with the file. So far it's safe to say making/shaping bolsters is not my kind of fun (yet).

Now I've got a chunk of 1075 sitting on my workbench and a brand new file, time to try my hand at some stock removal.