Second Scandi Style Knife

This is my second attempt at making a Hidden tang/scandi style knife. I really like how this one turned out. Its a Puronvarsi blade, brass guard, leather washers, brass spacer, and stabilized birch burl. Took me a while to find a handle shape that I liked but once I did it all started to come together. That blade is about 4in long so a bit on the big side and heavy, but the stabilized burl balances it nicely.

The guard on this blade gave me a fit to start with. This maker makes the blades thickest in the middle where the grind line begins, which you can call a rhombic transversal section if your feeling fancy. Essentially its a diamond shape and the guards don’t come with this premade so some serious time was spent getting the fit right. I messed up one but fortunately I had a spare. With this blade I also tried something differently from my first one. My first one had some mistakes on it, mostly from slipping on the belt sander so I think hey, lets do this only using hand tools. So I cleared up a day on spring break, slapped this thing in the vise and went to it. Used half round rasps for rough shaping and an i-forgot-the-name style file for fine shaping. Boy that is a workout if you do it long enough! It started raining while I was working outside, so I moved my bench under the roof next to the door. Then it starts to hail while im working. I decided to call this extreme woodworking. :)

Alright, the worst picture up there is the before, with an opiknife on top for size reference, no.8 opi. The other 2 photos are before and after I polished the leather section. I had it finished up, got on the computer and looked at other leather handled knives and noticed that mine looked pretty terrible compared to those. So I did some searching and found out how to fix that. Looks much better now I think. Alright thanks for reading and checking out my blade! Leaves comments if you feel like it, I love getting them.

Here is a link to the site I got the supplies from: Thompsons knives

-- Visit my Etsy site to see my burl wood jewelry at http://www.etsy.com/shop/S2ArtDesigns?ref=si_shop