Making a Bushcraft Knife Part 1

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The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

morning folks I'm Dave Canterbury with self-reliance outfitters in the pathfinder school what we're gonna do today is we're going to do a project that's going to be rather lengthy I'm going to make a bushcraft knife from start to finish we're going to start with a blank piece of steel and a piece of wood and we're gonna make a rat tail Tang bushcraft knife and traditional Scandinavian fashion we're gonna do that from start to finish now we need to understand that when we save the word bushcraft that the word bushcraft really was coined by a gentleman in the 70s and Richard graves was his name and he was an Australian military survival instructor and they call the Australian outback the bush so in his book he talks about bushcraft and he also talks about affecting bushcraft with a single tool in other words he makes usable objects from the landscape using a one tool option he carrying other things with him containers and such but for crafting the items that he wanted to make off the landscape he talked about using a single tool and his choice was a machete for his environment now in the late 1800s all the way through the 1920s and 30s you had authors like George Washington Sears who wrote about wood crafts and camping you had people like Thomas Sutton and Daniel Baer who helped create the Boy Scouts of America that talked about wood crafts all the way into the 40s and 50s with people like Horace Kephart and Ellsworth Yeager all calling it wood crafts talking about using multiple tools in the woods for the same thing to effectively make usable objects we're going to make a Scandinavian style bushcraft knife in the modern sense of the term so it's going to be a rat tail Tang knife that we wouldn't want to abuse too much like a one tool option assuming that we're going to have things like an axe a saw and other tools that we would need so stay with me and we'll get started ok so to start working with our blade we have a piece of 1095 high carbon steel here that's 12 inches long and 1 inch wide and that's a pretty good size that 1 inch is a pretty good size for a blade and we're just going to come up here and kind of draw in what we want for a blade profile we can adjust this on the fly as we need to so this is gonna be the front of our blade and then we want to look at how long we want that blade and typically speaking a bushcraft blade of about four to four and a quarter inches is pretty good Moore's gihan tsuki talks about liking his blade to be about the width of his hand and that's about what I've got about four and a quarter inches right there to the widest part so this is going to be the end of our blade where a rat tail tang will begin and then we need to decide how long do we want that rat tail Tang to be because that's gonna dictate how long our handle is gonna be as well and I like my handles to be a little bit bigger four and a half to five inches so I've got some stick out so we're gonna go with five and then we're gonna add about a half an inch to that of rat tail tang so we've got plenty sticking out in the other ends so now we're just going to take this and we're going to reduce this down into a Y like this and this will become our rat tail Tang and then we'll continue this down with a straight edge and we'll cut it out from there okay so now we're just gonna take ourselves a straight edge here and kind of eyeball this up just like this and take our line all the way down from both of these and then figure out our length which is right here and we'll put a little bit more reduction in this rat tail after we get the blade cut out here in just a few minutes now there's lots of ways that we can remove this waste that we don't need to work with on this blank I find that a bandsaw to remove the bulk works the best and then I take it over to a belt grinder to remove anything that's left and get my fine lines put and remember that you don't have to have a really expensive setup to do this you could do this with a hacksaw you could do this with just a handheld grinder of some sort like an angle grinder and you can use a 50 dollar grizzly grinder that takes these 1 inch belts you just have to buy different size belt for it and you can't hog material off with it you got a big 2 by 72 like the big grizzly - I use out here you can put a little more force behind it so it's just going to take you a little bit longer with less expensive equipment and you have to be a little more careful but it will all work okay so we've got our basic blade profile cut out I left myself some meat here on the bone so I could take it to the grinder and get everything exactly the way I wanted and I left my Tang a little thick so I could do the same thing so now we're gonna take it over the grinder we're gonna finally in our shape now I'm starting off with a very very heavy pail this is a number 36 grit belt and that's made to take off the mask material but when I want to go into these curved areas I'm gonna have to use what's called a J belt which has a lot more slop in it to bend on this back slack side of the grinder so that I can get that final din but this will help me get the profile and it gives me a flat table to work that profile and keep everything nice and flat and straight and keep good angles on the blade [Music]

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okay so once we've got our tang reduced to the size we needed we need to go back in now and change our bow to get these gentle curves in and talked about a minute ago all right once they get those about the way I want them now I'm just gonna come in here and kind of round this Tang off a little bit all the way down just to take any of the rough edges off of it clean it up a little bit and this will help with the epoxy process to make sure that bevel is nice and clean okay so now I've changed to a red ceramic belt it's fairly coarse so that I can grind my initial blade profile in or excuse me my initial blade grind in and I've got a wooden jig set up here that we use in our knife classes and basically you just set the knife in the jig and it creates the angle for you you just clamp it in and then you begin to grind in your blade angle or your blade grind we'll talk about that as we go here in a second