Next knife

I just thought I would put up my virtual prototype and try to get some feed back on my design. The slot is made to hold a 1/4" firesteel. When I saw the sparky knife it kind of bummed me out since I thought I had this great idea but you can't always be first. Anyway I didn't think the sparky has a clean enough design for me so I am going to give this a shot. I am also not sure if I could use the sparky when my hands were so cold that the fire was literally a lifesaver.




I am thinking the handles can be orange G10 material or maybe some dense wood. I know I don't want to mix natural and man-made and I have doubts about wood holding up on the teardrop shapes. Bone, antler? My other option is to use 3/16 material for the blade and mill a groove on the scales so I could still use a 1/4 diameter rod. If you look at the sharp end of the tear drop you can see the hole where I plan to pin it for strength. The more I look at it the more I want it to be one piece instead of two slabs, edit, think, edit, think, it never ends.





Like I said I want feedback so please let me know your thoughts.

Thanks,
kwog

Bushcraft knife

Here is the second knife I made. It's made from the same 1080 series steel from the paper cutter blade. Same process, trace over jpg image in Autocad and laser cut. I did not take any in-process pictures this time, sorry. The heat-treat on this was attempted with a propane torch first, didn't work. The heat-treat that worked was done in a bbq grill with a 7" tornado fan blowing up from the bottom. These are all cell-phone pictures as I'm sure you can tell. I'm in a run of bad camera-luck lately.






I ground the blade a little deeper than I wanted but I had to remove a lot of material to get the bevel flat. The bevel on this blade runs all the way up to the blade. It's like a really high grind scandi, which did not seem durable at this angle so I was forced to go with a secondary bevel. The high grind was done by hand on a stone, that took forever. I cut myself multiple times and my hands ached, I literally spent 10 hrs easily on this alone. This knife was not hot enough on my first quench so I had to remove the scales and do it again, I am sure that's something I will not let happen again. I was in such a hurry to get the handle done that proper testing for hardness was overlooked.




The handle is oak, held on with epoxy and pinned with poplar. I hope it holds up since that poplar seems pretty weak. I darkened the wood lightly with a torch then wiped on a light coat of wax. I have some kydex on the way but I plan to attempt a leather sheath after that. After I quenched this blade I decided that I like the scale so I left a hint on the blade.



This blade is about 3" in length if you measure the cutting edge 7" overall. I left the blade thick and dull past the handle so I could put my finger there and to help it "lock" into a future sheath. Yes this is a small handle, I ran into some trouble with cracking and had to grind it down. Luckily for me I have woman's hands so the handle is big enough.