How to Make a Hunting Knife

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Start your knife blade by first thoroughly cleaning the steel that you intend to cut into shape. If necessary, grind the rust off the old saw blade with a disc grinder or sandpaper.

Next, (using your cardboard pattern as a guide) trace off the silhouette of the knife blade (including tang). If you'll be using a cutting torch to rough the blade out, draw the outline about 1/8-inch larger in all directions than you want the finished silhouette to be (to allow for the cleanup grinding that will be necessary). Chalk, soapstone, a marking pen or whatever you have handy may be used to lay out the design.

After the blade has been rough-cut, grind off all the torch marks from around its circumference. (The idea is to leave a completely clean and square edge all the way around the blank.) If the knife is to have a "molded" handle, this is also the time to draw the grips in all pencil and then grind away any unwanted steel (using an overlapped rough abrasive belt on a belt grinder).

Now hold the blade and pretend to use it. Swing it through the air with the movement for which it is being designed. If it's a carving knife, use it to cut up an imaginary turkey. If it's a paring knife, chop a few non-existent onions with the blade. Is your unfinished knife graceful in its intended work? Does it naturally "want" to do what it's supposed to do? Do the lines of force extending from your arm and hand follow directly to where the cutting edge meets the turkey or onions?

Raise the blade to the light and examine its silhouette. Run it across a grinding wheel a couple of times, then hold it up to the light again. Carve off another piece of "turkey" or chop a few more "onions." Then use the grinding wheel to trim away a little more of the metal that still seems to "get in the way."

In your mind's eye, observe the line which flows down the knife's spine from the (still missing) outline of its finished handle to the tip of its blade. Check for desired finger clearance. Think about any plans you may have for a bronze hilt or butt, and consider any future etchings that you might want to put on either the blade or handle. Conceive quite clearly how you intend to finish the knife. Sooner or later, and at a certain point, you'll no longer be guessing. You will know that the shape of your blade is right.

Grinding the Blade

This is, of course, the essential step in knifemaking. It is also one of the most crucial and difficult. (There are a number of different ways to shape the edge of a blade, giving it anything from a convex to a concave shape.)

Begin grinding the blade by running it along your wheel in long, even, full length passes. Be careful not to pause or stop in any one place (if you do, the spinning wheel will grind deeper in that spot). Unless your hand is steadier than mine, however, you will, no matter how hard you try, grind both high and low spots into the blade as you go along. Don't worry about it. You'll soon develop a "feel" for this work that will make you automatically "lighten up" when you come to a depression and "hold longer" as you pass over a high area.

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