How to Make a Hunting Knife

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Trace your handle design onto a thoroughly dried piece of wood or other appropriate material that,when added to the thickness of your knife blade's tang, is just a little thicker than you want the implement's finished handle to be.

Cut the shape out on a band saw, then flip it up 90 degrees and split it right down the middle (to make two identical halves that will be riveted, one on each side, to the shank of your knife blade). These two handle halves should be just a hair longer than the blade's tang and you should take the time to cut them out very carefully. The more precisely you shape these two pieces of wood, the less work you'll have beveling the slabs flush with the knife's shank. Watch for cracks and checks in the wood as you work.

Sand the insides of the slabs as flat and smooth as possible with an 80-grit belt on the flat support section of your sander. (I usually "reverse" the two halves of the handle before I do this, so their "outsides" become "insides," because the planed surface of the stock's outside is generally flatter to start with than the hand-sawed split inside.)

It is essential to the function and the appearance of the finished knife that there be no gaps between the slabs and the tang. Epoxy can be used to completely fill any small cracks, of course, but it will be unsightly and, possibly, weaker than a perfect wood-to-metal-to-wood mating. Take whatever time you need to make this fit as precise as possible. This is one of the features that knowledgeable people always study when purchasing a custom-made knife.

After you've worked your slabs down until they mate to your knife blade's tang as perfectly as possible, you're ready to drill rivet, pin and epoxy holes in the wood to match the same holes that you've already drilled in the blade's shank.

Clamp one slab onto the tang with a pair of vise grips, and (with the wood down and using the holes in the metal shank as a template) drill the main rivet holes all the way through the wood on a drill press. Then remove the first slab, clamp the second piece of wood against the other side of the tang, and drill it in the same fashion. (Make sure the slabs are both snug against the blade's bolster and perfectly lined up with the shank during this drilling.)

Next, clamp each handle half to the tang (with the main rivet holes in the wood precisely lined up with the corresponding holes in the metal) and carefully mark the position of each of the epoxy holes. The wood is then unclamped before the smaller holes are drilled so that you can see exactly how deep to make each one. (It would be a disaster if you accidentally pushed them all the way through the wood so they could be seen from the "outside" of the finished handle.) I generally drill these epoxy relief areas about 1/8-inch deep.

Finally, clamp everything together once for practice. Then, following the directions on the containers of cement, mix your epoxy (I like a "five-minute industrial grade"), apply the adhesive to both sides of the metal shank and the insides of the handle slabs, form the three elements into a "sandwich," and rivet them together. (Take care that no epoxy gets inside the female rivets or they may not compress properly and you'll have a mess on your hands.) The whole assembly should be held firmly together in a vise and/or with vise grips until the epoxy (a certain amount of which will squeeze out during this process) sets up.

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