what are your thoughts on this as a first knife?

M

mr_dove

Joined
Apr 12, 2004
Messages
90
I've been reading about knife making for the last few weeks and I'm getting excited to try my hand at it purely as a hobby. There's still alot that I don't know but I'm curious what you think about this design for a first knife? It is a very large chopper that I intend to use while camping. I took a new hatchet camping a few months ago but found that I really preferred batoning my firewood to using the hatchet. For those who don't know, batoning involves pounding on the spine of your knife with a piece of wood in order to split small logs into firewood.

qSFATDm.jpg


This will be a chopper so I'd like it to be thick and heavy. The length should be between 18-19". I haven't decided on the thickness yet. What kind of steel should I use, taking into account my inexperience and the pounding that the spine will need to take? Any thoughts on the angles of the bevels for this kind of chopper?

I think that most people probably start off with small blades as their first knives. This blade looks very simple to me though. It also doesn't require a high level of finish.
 
Nothing wrong with starting big. Depending on the tools you have available, this should be a fairly easy blade to make. If you are going for a Scandinavian style grind 12 degrees per side is very usable for a camp knife. For a flat grind a 3 to 5 degree grinding angle per side will be functional. You will want a secondary edge angle.
For a convex, which is what this looks like, do the initial grind at 12 degrees then convex it on the slack belt. I would recommend the convex for a camp knife; they split wood better than other grinds without getting stuck in the cut.
I like 01, 5160 or 1084 for camp style blades.

Let us know what you come up with, Fred
 
mr_dove said:
This blade looks very simple to me though. It also doesn't require a high level of finish.
Click to expand...

It was also designed very specifically for the aesthetic demands of a very specific Hollywood movie... and pretty much no other reason.

Sharpened pry-bars do work... sort of. They are also remarkably inefficient and uncomfortable to use, compared to properly-designed knives in the same size class. If all you really need it for is batonning wood, please google the term "froe".

There are many very good reasons why most experienced makers advise starting with much smaller projects.
 
Froes are ancient, specialized and highly efficient tools... not much good for anything else, but very good at splitting wood, and not exactly terrible at cutting it cross-grain. :) Naturally, they need a maul, club or mallet to strike them with, just as we baton with our camp/survival knives.

froe.jpeg


froe&club.jpg
 
My only advise here would be to think about the handle shape a little more. This is your first knife, you're going to want to use it. With that handle, I can see plenty of painful hands in your future. I have a Kabar Masterkey with the same profile, and the thin, wide shape makes it pretty uncomfortable (even painful) after some use.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top