The Outdoor Gibbon
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The Outdoor Gibbon
14. Knife Making
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A craft born from curiosity and nurtured through pandemic isolation, my journey into knife making reveals the deeply satisfying process of transforming industrial scrap into functional art. What began with childhood fascination – my grandfather's pipe knife and treasured Swiss Army knife – evolved decades later when I recognized the potential in high-quality spring steel from biomass boiler components at work.
The transformation from materials to finished blade follows no fancy blueprint. With my makeshift backyard forge, a basic belt sander, and techniques learned through trial and error, each knife bears the unmistakable mark of handcrafted uniqueness. These aren't pristine display pieces destined for glass cases – they're working tools designed to perform in the field, with high-carbon steel edges that maintain sharpness through multiple deer processing sessions with just occasional stropping.
My knife making philosophy challenges the common collector's paradox: why own beautiful tools you're afraid to use? After six successful blades and growing interest from potential buyers, I'm considering small-batch production while remaining committed to the approachable craftsmanship that makes each knife special. The high-carbon steel requires more care than stainless alternatives but rewards users with superior performance. Beyond the functionality, these knives represent something increasingly rare – skills worth passing down, tangible creations in a digital world, and the quiet satisfaction of using something shaped by your own hands. Whether crafting custom sheaths next or attempting true forge work in the future, this evolving hobby connects me to ancient traditions while creating potential heirlooms for future generations.
Join our outdoor community by following along on social media where I share images of completed knives and adventures in the field. Your feedback and questions about this craft are always welcome as we celebrate a year of podcast storytelling together.
The Outdoor Gibbon, episode 14, knife Baking. The outdoor gibbon, episode 14 knife baking. Well, we've made it to march 2023. We're now. The outdoor gibbon podcast is now exactly 12 months old. So this is episode. We've managed to do 14 episodes. Thank you all for listening. If you you've got this far, I'm really happy that you're still with us. If you're just joining us on this episode, please go back and listen to the back catalogue.
Speaker 2:Hopefully this one kind of goes through my story of making knives and things I've done and how I got started in it, and hopefully it's an interesting one. Anyway, let's get this podcast started. Just thought I would cover my hobby that I've started and explain how I got involved in it, etc. Etc. You may hear my dogs kicking around in the background, as I'm actually trying to record this in a different location and there are three spaniels moving about. You never know, they might start barking, but we'll we'll cut those out if we do have that issue anyway.
Speaker 2:So how did I get involved in knife making? I suppose you have to look back to when I was a kid, and probably knives and pen knives and things like that weren't one of those restricted items. They probably from about the age of seven my grandfather would have probably, I think he did he gave me a little tiny pen knife I think it was a pipe knife actually. So one side was designed, had a big spike on it for cleaning, cleaning the hole in a pipe, and the other side was a little little tiny blade and it was just commonplace to to play with with pen knives and things like that.
Speaker 2:Learn about them and gradually, as I went on, I remember in my teenage years getting hold of a Swiss champ the biggest, I think, swiss army knife they made with a huge number of accessories and things like that, and it came in a black leather pouch with a compass, a pen, a sharpening stone, a mirror for attracting attention and doing Morse code, sos and stuff like that. And it was just. It was commonplace for a child or teenager to have a penknife. So knives carried on through they've always been something that I've been used to having and using and they've never been something that's been one of those restricted items. So I think as time went by, there was that tv show that came out. What was it? Forged in fire and you saw people competitors getting a piece of steel, heating it up, hammering it out, forging it, producing these absolutely fantastic blades.
Speaker 2:I like you know I kind of fancy having a go at making a knife. Didn't know really where to start, didn't have a forge. So before moving to Scotland, a friend of mine's a blacksmith down in Leicestershire and I kind of said to him this is what I want and I'm looking for a piece of Damascus type of steel. And he goes, oh, I'll have a go at making something for you. So he produced me a copy blade with a really nice piece of steel in the core and a sort of a Damascus finish on the outside. He gave it to me sort of in its rough forged state and I was like that's not really what I want. So he put it on the sander and sanded it up and I'm not quite. I think we kind of. He was building a rustic knife and I wanted something that when you, when you etched it, you saw all the damascus in it. But it's um, it's still. It's still a really nice little knife. It's incredibly sharp and does everything, everything you want. So with my in sort of business, I I repair and fix large biomass wood chip boilers and they have these fantastic arms that move the fuel around in the fuel store and they're made of very high quality spring steel. It's probably two or three mil thick and it's probably exactly what you want for cutting a knife out of. So I'd found some some templates of knives on the internet and printed those off and I one afternoon I kind of got the grinder out and and just cut a rough shape out of a knife. I was looking, I think I just made a single knife and I made two smaller knives as a test. I still didn't have a forge or any way of doing the process and I think I cut the blanks out and then got sidetracked and I left them on the side and didn't do anything with them for about sort of probably 12 to 18 months. And I was messing around with my my lad outside and I said let's uh, let's get a make a charcoal forge and we sort of got the compressor out, got some charcoal and a couple of bricks around it, got this thing piping hot, got these knives knife blanks out and heated them up, got them glowing cherry red and dipped them in a can of engine oil. Didn't know if it worked, obviously remembering everything they'd said. Once they're glowing at the right colour, they'll not be magnetic anymore, so put a magnet near them. They weren't dipped them in the oil, got them out, filed them they seemed hard enough and finally got round to sort of going well, I need to put a handle on them. And we chopped an apple tree down in the garden and there was some sort of this apple wood left so it hadn't burnt at all on the fires, so took a piece of that, turned that into into the first sort of set of handles and they're they're quite nice knives. It's sort of a, a full-size blade and like a little companion blade. He obviously wanted one, so he's got his first knife out of that.
Speaker 2:Time went by and probably another few years disappeared and I thought, wow, yeah, I think we're on our way to ireland. Actually we stopped at bushware and we bought a knife making kit Quite a nice kit, it wasn't anything too expensive and he said, oh, can we make this knife? I'm like, yeah, we'll make this knife at some point Now I have that word at some point, and it just kind of years go by at some point. It just doesn't happen. But what we did was drew a template of the knife. It just doesn't happen. But what we did was drew a template of the knife and when we got back over from Ireland.
Speaker 2:I cut a whole load of these out of the spring steel again cut the blanks, started to roughly grind the blanks and that's where it stopped. They got put on the side left and that kind of brings us up to the the wonderful thing of the pandemic and finally I was like, well, nothing much is happening. I've now got covid. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to finish a set of knives and finally I actually got around to heat treating them in my my little forge that I'd actually made. That ran on a little bottle of gas. I've got them up to temperature, dip them in the oil again, got good hard blades.
Speaker 2:Out of that found a load of bits of wood that one of my customers had given to me. They kindly, because I kind of said about knife making and he'd gone, oh, I'll give you some, some nice bits of elm and and other stuff. So got these bits of wood out, remembered about some brass pins, had been to b&q a couple of months before and brought some brass bar and um and actually put these knives together now for a first attempt. They're rustic but they came out looking quite good. They seem to sharpen up quite well and held a fantastic edge. So, yeah, that was my my first set of blades all messing around like gluing and bits of wood together and stuff like that, and I think I'd been looking on the internet and seeing all these absolutely stunning knives that people had made and I thought, well, do you know what I'm not looking to make? Something that's absolutely fantastic, but something that's functional and works. So the first set were made and and, uh, I thought we'd give it a go and they've been the ones I've been taking out, stalking and using and testing and all the rest of it posted pictures up on on social media and I didn't realize they'd be quite such a hit and I've had lots of people going.
Speaker 2:Or do you sell knives? And and so on and so forth, and it's like I'm not sure it's one of those things. Is the heat treatment good enough? Is the knife good enough? What happens if I sell this knife and it breaks or it doesn't hold an edge or it chips? It's still at the, the early stages and I know there's lots of people out there that keep going. I'd like to buy a knife off you, but I'm still sort of dubious at the quality of the work that I've produced and will it hold up.
Speaker 2:So the next phase was I was going to make another set of knives, so pretty much made, I think, three virtually identical knives. Somebody had asked for a straighterer back, not a drop point on it, so I just roughed out another couple of blades that were a similar design, put those together, spent a bit more time polishing the handles and making them. They look really, really smart and I thought I'd get some feedback. So basically, a friend of mine's, a butcher down in Leicestershire, when I was visiting, took them down and said what did he think? And the first comment he came out with was the handles are too short. And, yes, where I'd mounted the actual handles on, if I'd made the handles probably a centimeter longer, they'd have sat better in the hand. But again, it was one of those things. It's trial and error when you're doing this and you're doing this and and you're trying to come up with a, the design for a for a blade and a handle. So got some good feedback. They're still nice blades. I think those, those ones will actually be um, will be given to my kids as sort of.
Speaker 2:I made these. Here you go, these are your, your presents that your father made you and hopefully they can hold on to them for a good number of years and it's kind of a bit of a family heirloom, but again it's. I've learned so much in the process of doing this and you haven't had to have lots of fancy kit. I've not got a fancy grinding grinder, I've literally got a belt sander and I do most of the shaping on that. And people have said how do you do your grind? And it's like well, it's all by eye. Nothing is um, nothing's done any other way. It I've, I don't have jigs to put them in, and I know some guys use jigs and have got bevels and and and different ways of setting these, these blade grinds up. But now I just everything for me is done by eye. The shaping of the handles is, again it's done by eye, um, and that's what makes them slightly different and quirk, and I don't think any knife I produce will ever look the same. So they are all one-off, bespoke type of blades.
Speaker 2:So what do I plan to do next? Well, as I've had so much interest in in these blades, I think if I, if I actually can find the time and one of those things that time is is the only thing you can't create more of, then I will probably produce some more blanks, do another run, custom run of blades and actually probably come to sell them. So there is a possibility that somebody that I will actually fulfill some of the orders and then there'll be a few to go up on the open market and be sold. I learned something new as well about like etching your logos on using the vinyl printer. Cut out the actual logo, stick it on nothing special here salt water and a battery charger and you actually etch the steel, and I've had some quite good results. So I've actually managed to get my own logo onto the blade. So everything is tying together quite nicely. So yeah, in the future we might make a few more.
Speaker 2:It's not something that I'm going to do lots of these knives. I kind of think they're a bit sort of special and there'll be the occasional one-off. I did give one away for one of the competition prizes to um, the young lady that came up from from down south, so she got one of the first knives. Again, I don't know how it's holding up the. The downside to these blades is well, it's not a downside, I suppose it's actually quite good, but they're actually high carbon steel. Um, so they're not. You stain the steel you. They will rust. So if you get it wet and you leave it wet, it will rust. But on the flip side of that, the edge that it actually takes is like a razor blade. You only have to sharpen them or even just strop them on a leather strop and you're back to that high quality sharp edge again. The downside is that if you don't look after that blade, it will rust, and it will rust very easily and very quickly.
Speaker 2:But saying that, so let's look at the one I've been using mostly. I I sort of built the first one with a a dark elm handle, two pins. It's quite a nice weighted knife. It balances well in your hand. Uh, sharpened it up and I think that I've probably got to about deer number six on it now and all I've done is is rubbed it across a leather strop a few times. It's really just to see how long I can keep stropping it for before I've actually got to resharpen it. And that's not bad going really. I remember other knives I've got, like my plastic-handled Moiras and things like that, and those you've got to sharpen them. They're stainless steel. They don't really hold the edge as well. Um, you do a couple of deer and you need it sharpened again, but I'm quite impressed that my my own homemade knife uh, just with a leather strop and some and some paste on it, and yeah, you're getting that razor sharp edge back up no problem at all and it's good for the next deer.
Speaker 2:I don't have time to to turn this into a business, and I think there's so many guys out there that do an absolutely fantastic job of making some beautiful knives that I'm not. I'm not in any way trying to compete with them. However, the only thing I can say is having a knife that you've made or isn't massively expensive and isn't so beautiful, you're not so concerned about actually them. It's like do you use your really expensive knife? Oh no, no, I bought it, never used it, or maybe I've got one deal with it. I'm fear of god for losing it on the hill.
Speaker 2:So what I've done is I've gone back to using my cheap moira or whatever plastic knife. Again, it's like okay, so you bought this really beautiful knife, but you're never going to use it, whereas some the sort of the thing that I'm making it's like yeah, you can use it, all right, it might cost you a hundred quid or something like that, um, by the time you've taken my time and effort into it. But, uh, if you lose it, it's like it's not the end of the world. You've lost the knife, you get on, you get another one and uh, and you move on. But, um, yeah, it's, that's, that's what I made them for. They're made for me just to to mess around with a hobby and just to see where it goes. But uh, if people have shown an interest in them, I might make a few and actually, uh, get a few quid back for all the the bits and the time that I've taken into actually making these knives in the first place.
Speaker 2:I suppose the next thing that I want to do is the actual leather work for them. So I bought a load of knife sheaths on ebay not ebay, amazon because they were cheap, but they are cheap. And you look at them nice leather and and well, they're sort of well made, but they're not designed for that particular knife. They're a bit loose fitting, they look a bit cheap, whereas I've seen other guys that make their own. They make the knife and then they make a sheath for it and things like that, and it sets the whole package off, and I've already found out the one I've. The ones I've been making and using, the sheaths aren't particularly good fitting. Um, you can lie back on the hill or something like that, or catch yourself on a funny angle. Your blade falls out.
Speaker 2:While I was out, um, doing the wild boar, it was very dark trying to get the blade out of my sheath, I literally must have caught the, the little flat round strap that I was supposed to hold it in. Well, the knife was that sharp, it just sliced straight through it. So by the time I got home I was looking going oh, I actually cut straight through the leather leather part of the sheath on there. So again, that's, that's something else to try. Um, one of those cold winter nights when we're up here in aberdeen, get Aberdeenshire, even get, get myself doing the leather work and get knackered fingertips with the pushing the, the threads through and all the rest of it. Or try and find somebody local that actually enjoys doing leather work and maybe get them to make me a bunch of bespoke custom leather sheaths for for these knives, just to just to set them off that little bit more. That might be. Might be the next phase of it. But I've also looked at wanting to do like the, the plastic heat formed sheaths as well. Just because one they're completely clean and sterile, you can chuck them in the dishwasher and stuff like that.
Speaker 2:But again, it's another, another bit of hobby time that adds to my incredibly long list of things that I get up to, and it's actually just trying to keep on top of everything else. As I say, there's never enough hours in the day to do all of this, but the knife making has been one of those. It's been something that's been quite fun and actually to be able to use them and to try them out, and everyone that's been produced so far has been pretty good. I think the very first knife is a bit soft. It's not very well hardened and I think I got all my proportions wrong Length of the blade, length of the handle. But, as I say, it's been a learning curve all the way through and getting some feedback, positive feedback, from different people who've held them in their hand and said, oh, your handles are too short or your handles are too long. That's really that. That's absolutely fantastic and it's something that you just can't, um, you can't really do without, because at the end of the day you could, you could carry on making these things, thinking they're great, and then they're actually useless and they don't work. So, yes, there are more in the pipeline and for anybody that's not seen them, I think there's a. There's a number of photos on my instagram feed of these knives, but I might do another post about them shortly, just to follow on from this podcast so that it keeps everything sort of updated and people can actually see what's going on.
Speaker 2:But yeah, that's where the the knife making fun came. It was, uh, more out of boredom and wanting to try my my hand at another skill, and I think I was so enthralled by the forged in fire show that uh had a go with it. I think that might be my. My to go with it, I think that might be my later on in my career is actually to actually forge a proper knife from a piece of steel and actually, instead of grinding the material away, which I do at the moment, is to take that and actually hammer it out. But I'm trying to find an anvil and they're like, as rare as anything or incredibly expensive. My forge seems to work quite well, so I've got no issues there getting everything up to temperature. But it's just trying to find the anvil and, again, the time to spend outside turning a piece of steel into an actual blade. But watch this space. We might have a go at that over the summer if we can get everything sorted out.
Speaker 2:I suppose this hobby was just a bit of fun. Try it, turn my hand at something, have a go at it. It'd be a skill I'd like to pass on to my kids. I know my son's had a go and he's made a few things Straight away. He went to try and make something incredibly large and wanted to make a big dagger of some description. Probably quite hard and quite difficult. It was very difficult to get straight edges on it.
Speaker 2:But we had a go and uh, and he seemed quite happy with that. But again, it's one of those skills that I think, if I can pass this, pass this down the generation, and it's only my, my way of doing it. There's probably better ways and different ways, but at least they have another hands-on application that they can, they can use in their life, and I think that's really important. So, yeah, it's just a bit of fun. That's all all these things are, and I'm not getting too caught up in it and I'm not looking to make absolute perfection out of them. That brings us to the end of another podcast. Thanks for listening. Buck season is rapidly approaching, as march is running out very quickly. The nights are starting to get lighter, which is always good, and so so are the mornings. We'll soon be to that point where you blink and you miss it, and we'll be in the summer here and, yeah, it's virtually daylight all the time. But for now we will leave it there and we will see you on the next one.