Bowie tutorial

Ok, so I skipped a few steps here. I profiled and ground the edges. It is a two handed job and I could not take pictures of it. I also created the tang of the knife. After doing all that, I filed in the shoulders using my file guide. It has two carbide inserts and I can file right down to them, and no further. This assures me that I have very straight shoulders. I also use a chainsaw file to make a radius where the tang meets the shoulders to keep any stress points out of the blade. This is the file guide.

OK, so I skipped about a thousand steps. First, Jerry and I decided that the knife I was making was not "beefy" enough. I promised him one that would remove a limb, and the one I am making will be a great slicer, but seems too thin to me. It is probably just me being too picky, but I decided to get some different steel and try again. So just repeat the above steps and then heat treat with clay, and then you will have what I have here. It has been fitted up with a nickel silver guard and heat treated with Satanite clay for a very nice hamon. In the next photo, it has been fine sanded to about 600 grit on the grinder, and then hand sanded to 180 grit by hand.

In the ferric, out and sand with 2000 sandpaper, in the ferric, out and sand, in and out, lather, rinse, repeat...

After the last time out of the ferric, when it is about where I want it, I sand it one last time with the 2000, spray it with windex with ammonia to neutralize the ferric, then I take a paper towel, wet it and wrap it around a wooden ruler and sprinkle some rottenstone on it. Rottenstone is a very, very fine powdered abrasive. It cleans up any of the oxidation caused from the ferric, and really reveals the fine details of the hamon.

OK, I guess I might have skipped a few more boring steps. Let me tell you what I have done, and you can see the results. I milled out some nickel silver for a guard, then some black micarta for a spacer, some more nickel silver, more black micarta, and finally I had some stabilized curly koa on order from Burlsource. It came in, so I got to the task of hollowing out the hole for the tang. It is a fairly tedious process, and I am not great at it. I outline the tang on the outside of the block, then set it up in my drill press and drill following the basic angles of the tang. I drill several holes, then connect them with a handle broach that I made out of a jigsaw blade. This process involves a lot of scraping, and fitting, and more scraping. Finally, when the handle is snug, I tap it all together with a hammer and drill the pin hole. It goes through the tang and will hold it all very tightly together. I also used a little cut off of the koa as a spacer.

Now, I use JB weld to hold everything together, along with the pin, it will never come apart. I know because I have had to remove a handle after I screwed it up, and it took me about a half an hour with a hammer and chisel to tear it apart. I had to borrow a bar clamp from my friend, because mine was a little too small for this knife. I mixed up a lot of the JB weld and put it between all the layers, then filled up the tang hole with it. I put in a temporary pin in it that is coated with vaseline so I can remove it after it is all set up. I do this so that I can sand and sculpt the handle, then countersink the hole a little, and put in a permanent pin that I will peen over to fill the countersink. That way it will never come out, and if I do it right, it is slightly domed also.

I spent the last few hours in the shop, and this is what I accomplished. I basically rough grind the handle shape on my 10 inch wheel and 2 inch wheel. After I get the basic shape down, I attack it with files and rasps. Next, I go over the whole thing with sandpaper, from 180 grit, all the way up to 800 grit. Then I buff it. The nickel silver takes some time to get out the scratches, but it is not nearly as bad as stainless. The Koa really polishes up well on the buffer after I sand it to 800. I keep going over it and touching up here and there to make sure all my lines are symmetrical. This is the result.

For this next part, I am not going to get too detailed, because I already have a sheath tutorial/WIP. I kind of wanted to document this one though because I am trying a completely different style of sheath that I have never tried before. I started it the same way that I had done on the other WIP, and made a pattern on paper. This one has several components, and I had a lot of little pieces to cut out and stitch together. Here are the pieces. The long piece on the left is for another sheath I am working on at the same time.