Can I get an upgrade?

Many of the pages in the gallery say something like, “this knife starts at $140 on up, depending on options.”  I intend for this post to highlight some of those options. 

 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.