Thanks,

Jason

Hats are made by Steve at www.maddogdesignstx.com

This particular knife is handled courtesy of a Llano county white tailed deer.  The blade is 1/8″ D2 tool steel, with fish filework.  The knife has black and red fiber spacers, and brown leather spacers.  I like to add a few spacers to antler handles, as it sets the blade off from the handle a bit.  Antlers come in all kinds of conditions, from chalky white old ones, to fresh off the head brown ones.  This one started out weathered, but a few coats of leather dye got it back to brown. 

 This first knife has a MOSAIC PIN in the center of the handle.  It is made of a brass tube with other small pins and tubes inside, and filled with black epoxy.  Mosaic pins add $10 to the cost of your order.

This knife also has a QUENCH LINE or HAMON.  The words are somewhat interchangeable, but technically different.  Regardless of what you call it, what you see are the different structures of the metal as the result of the heat treatment process.  I ordinarily harden the whole blade, and if etched it will show lightly like the bottom of the blade in the picture.  On a knife with a quench line, the edge is hard Martensite, while the spine is soft Pearlite.  The line you see is the transition between the two.  Some people like the contrast a quench line provides.  The finish will scratch sometimes, but the performance (edge holding, etc.) is the same as a fully hardened knife. 

This knife also has FILEWORK.  Using small files, I remove metal from the spine to make a pattern.  There are several patterns I use regularly, plus some more I use less frequently.  The vine pattern and arrowhead pattern are somewhat traditional, geometric patterns are clean looking, and the fish are my own invention.   I can add filework only to the blade, as in the picture below, only to the handle, from handle to blade, or all the way around the bottom of the handle.  Filework adds $5 an inch.

Another area of variation is HANDLE MATERIAL.  There are pictures throughout this site of all different kinds of handle material.  In general, the price structure looks something like this.  I usually quote the same price for either of the first two tiers, unless I have to purchase stabilized burl.

Wood (straight grain)     Micarta     Horse Stall Mat    

Wood (burl)     Antler (Axis, Elk, Whitetail)

Stag (real Sambar)

Ivory (mammoth, elephant, walrus, etc.)

Another area to improve is the SHEATH.  Unless specifically negotiated, my knives always come with a sheath.  I make them all out of 7/8 weight shoulder leather.  TOOLING adds to the look, but also a bit to the cost.  The sheath below is tooled in the basket weave pattern.  There are several other tooling patterns shown througout my site. 

This little knife is built on the Spicewood Special profile and handle.  I had it in mind for a boot knife.  I added a swedge and made the handle profile thinner than usual.  I used canvas micarta for the handles and added some grooves to the handle for grip.  Steel is 1/8″ 1080.  A knife like this sells for about $140.  More exotic handle materials or steels, liners, filework, etc. add to the price.

This knife is a small drop point utility or EDC (Every Day Carry) knife, made from 3/16 1080 carbon steel with horse stall mat handles and stainless pin and thong  hole. 

While I may occasionally buy handle material and bar stock online, I grind or forge every blade I make.  Some “knife makers” buy a blank off of the internet, handle material off of e-bay, and put it all together and call it a custom knife.    This particular knife is as far from that as possible. 

This knife blade began its life many years ago as the leaf spring from a 1958 Ford pickup truck.  I cut the spring down to a bar 1 inch x 3/8 inch and went to forging on my brother’s Peter Wright anvil.  An hour or two later, I had a blade, using only about 4 inches of the original 9 inch long bar.  I normalized three times, then did some grinding to clean up the bevels and the profile.  I heat treated the knife in my kiln, soaking at 1500 degrees for ten minutes then quenching in mineral oil, then tempering two one hour cycles at 450 degrees. 

This handle material is from a juniper burl stump I carried out of the mountains in Ruidoso, New Mexico, from approximately 33 degrees, 20 minutes, 58.42 seconds North and 105 degrees, 41 minutes, and 29.45 seconds West for you GPS users who want to see exactly where this stuff came from. 

The guard and pin are copper, to match the reddish color of the burl wood.  This is perhaps the finest wood I have ever personally harvested.