You Say Size Matters...

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waredbear

Joined
Nov 14, 2005
Messages
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I was looking at E-Bay at the stabilized wood offered there for some handles. There is some really beautiful wood pieces but some of it is very thin. So what is a good size or minimum size for a knife handle? I know that it will depend on the knife but what are the standards?...if any?

1/4" for a folder?
1/2" for a fixed?
3/8" for a dagger?

I don't have any idea? Any advise would be helpful. I don't want to buy a beautiful slab and not be able to use it.

Thanks
Reid Allen
 
Reid, here are some basic guidelines for you.

1/8 for most folders will work fine. I mill mine down to size of the bolsters I am using.
3/4 to 1 inch on a hidden tang works well.
1/4 to 3/8 on a full tang, depending on if you are looking for a palm swell.
I like 1 to 1 1/4 on my daggers depending on the OAL of the dagger.

Best to you and yours,

Jim
 
With these sizes in mind. How important is it to you to have matched sets of wood for slabs? Necessary? Would like to have? Or not that important? Or does it depend on the wood? I understand that you wouldn't want to have a dark side and a light side, or one side with small grain and the other with wide grain. So what so you want?

I haven't created my first knife so I'm still gathering all the information I can. I keep running the process through my mind and I keep coming up with new questions.

Thanks for all of your help.
In His Service,
Reid Allen
 
I buy much of my wood at Cross Cut Hardwoods (The candy store for woodworkers) in Portland, Oregon. This way I can hand select wood in larger sizes with the wood grain, burl or look that I find attractive. I then cut it to the sizes that I like and then send it out to be stabilized. I'm not sure if there is a Cross Cut in Spokane. There is one in Seattle area somewhere. To make the handle sides match, you can cut them down the middle to "book end" them. The pattern in the middle will be an almost perfect match.

My advice, no matter where you get your wood, is to get it in twice the thickness you will need and cut it down the middle with this book end technique.

By the way, I get to Spokane quite often on business and would love to visit your new forge shop.

Scott "ickie" Ickes
 
A lot of people like bookmatched scales but I think that their value is somewhat overrated. Get the new scales, lay them down together and the symetry is very pretty. Put them on a knife, grind them away to the contours you want and they don't look so similar any more. At least they don't if they have enough pattern for the bookmatch to matter in the first place.

So I guess I agree with you. Similar is important but exact match may not gain you as much as you might hope.

Yeah, I still buy pretty bookmatched pairs sometimes :o
 
Not much of a shop yet. We do have a forge going and a few workbenches. I did clean the shop out (most of the way) this past weekend. I plan on doing more this weekend. I'm on another thread trying to figure out how to lay it out and what benches I need. But you are welcome to drop by and give pointers.

In His Service,
Reid Allen
 
Reid,
Email me at scott.ickes@timken.com I'll email you back when I'm making my next trip to Spokane.

Maybe I'll bring up a 1084/15N20 stack up for you to play with. We'll find out if you're getting up to welding temperatures that way.

Scott (ickie) Ickes
 
That would be totally awesome. That is the main question my son-in-law has in regards to the forge. He had pounded out some scrap metal he found and was able to get it to forge weld together. (he ground down the edge and pried it apart to verify) I will e-mail you.

Thanks
Reid
 
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