How to Make a Hunting Knife

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These last grinder marks can be polished away with 80-, then 120-, 240-, 320-, 480- and 600-grit belts. The final 600-grit marks are then buffed off leaving a mirror finish. (This is important, not only for the appearance of the blade, but for ease of cleaning.)

Keep two things in mind each time you go over the blade. First, do not heat the cutting edge. (If it turns blue, or darkens significantly, you have to either carefully grind that portion of the blade away, or retemper the steel and start over again from there.) Second, maintain and perfect the clean and well-defined grinding lines of the knife. (Occasionally vary the angle of your progressively finer grinding so you can see if you're gutting down past previous grit marks.)

Rivet Holes

If your knife will have slab handles, you will most likely fasten the slabs to the shank of the blade with epoxy cement and rivets or pins.

Carefully determine the location of the rivet or pin holes. (Rivets should be placed in large flat areas of the handle so that the edges of their heads will not be ground away as the handle is finished. Pins, which are smaller and take up less space, can be placed closer to a handle's edges.)

After marking and drilling the main rivet or pin holes, two to four for most knives, drill a minimum of another six to eight smaller "epoxy rivet" holes in a pattern around them. (The more of these you have, the more invincible the bond between the tang and slabs will be.)

Inexpensive Rivets

Ordinary brake-shoe rivets are excellent for holding a knife handle together. You can get them in either steel or brass from any good auto-supply store and the ones you'll want come in two size ranges: the five series and the seven series.

These rivets each have a long shank with a flat head, and, at the end of the shank, each of the fasteners has a hole which measures about 3/16-inch deep. Now, here's the trick: Although they were never intended to be used in this manner, you'll quickly discover that the shank of the size five rivets can be hammered into the holes of the size seven rivets, thereby forming a very tight male-female press fit that'll hold your knife handles in place till the cows come home.

Slab Handles

Wood, especially such tropical hardwoods as lignum vitae, cocobolo, pau-Brazil, partridge wood, ebony, greenheart, rosewood and padouk, makes excellent knife handles. Manzanita burl, black walnut burl, apple wood, desert ironwood, bird's-eye maple, and other closegrained, hard and beautiful domestic woods also work very well for this purpose, as does Micarte (phenolic resin impregnated into wood, paper, linen cloth, cotton and other semiporous materials), European stag, bone, whales' teeth, etc. (Personally, I feel that these last "more natural" materials should no longer be used if it will help take the pressure off the poor creatures which produce them.)

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