Today’s handle material post features chechen wood. Pictures are never as good as the real thing, but to give you an idea, this wood looks a lot like rosewood, but much lighter in color.

Chechen grows in Mexico and the Caribbean, and another name for the wood is poisonwood. The sap is an irritant on bare skin, and loggers have to take steps to protect themselves from the it when harvesting the wood. In dried wood, this isn’t an issue, but I always wear my respirator when I’m sanding regardless. It’s hard to live long enough to be a successful knife maker if you breath fine metal and wood dust all […]

Well, folks, I’ve been working on some knives on the side when I get the time. I would almost call these knives the pre-protos for the next limited edition knives. I’m not releasing any knives with that blade profile yet, but these knives were made with the same steel that I will use for the next limited edition knives, and the wooden handles may be an option for the handle material for the next knife. That will be up to the stakeholders – I’ll let you know when I’m ready to tackle that decision.

But back to these knives. There’s a couple of new profiles here and of course the new stainless steel, which I have found to be very durable. Last […]

Last week I worked on a couple of new neck knife blade profiles. I’ve been thinking about the idea of a knife that’s very small, lightweight, all function, with no conventional handle.

People ask me all the time if I can build a knife like this picture they saw online, or a design they have in their heads. I’d like every one of those people that want me to do a custom profile for them to do this exercise: draw the profile of the knife that you have in mind. Draw it to scale, and draw it several times to get it just the way you want it. And then cut it […]

Kirinite is a really interesting new handle material that has emerged in the past ten years or so, and made a big splash in the world of knife handles and gun grips. It’s made from “a toughened acrylic with very thin colored strands of poly paper swirled through the mix.” And the results are things like this:

Kirinite is a […]

Bubinga is an African wood with a really cool name. Like the kingwood I talked about yesterday, it’s a rare wood that’s used for fine furniture and things like that, but bubinga is also used in bow making because it has a very high strength to weight ratio. It’s nice and light on the handle of a knife, but it’s very hard, and I have to use fresh sandpaper when I’m sanding it on my knife grinder to keep from burning the wood at high speeds.     This wood is going to make a lighter, reddish-brown handle than kingwood from yesterday. It also has strong grain lines, but not […]