Custom Knife Project

This came about following a conversation at work on what the ideal knife would be on the job. Working on boats and ships for a large portion of my life I have found a good knife not only indispensable but life saving. I have come to prefer a fixed blade knife over a folding blade. This stems from an incident back in 1980 when a sinking shipping container we were towing decided to sink even faster and almost drug our 21' boat under by the stern-I whipped out my trusty Gerber survival knife and sliced the tow line just before our transom was pulled under. A folding knife would have taken too long to deploy and we would have been sunk for sure. Here's the knife that saved our butts that day:



This is NOT a politically correct knife for a civilian to carry these days!

So here's what I decided would be MY ideal knife at work, custom knife v1.0. It's a nice little "drop point" knife:

It started life as a nearly completed blank from Smoky Mountain Knife Works:



The grip wood is from the same scrap of Walnut that I used for my rifle fore end and grip cap as well as the grips on my handgun.

I used Marine Tex epoxy to attach the wood to the knife blank and pinned it with brass rod for a classic look. I shaped the grip with a drum sander, hand file and a lot of hand sanding. I finished it with Tru-oil gun stock finish. When I shaped the grip I made it asymmetrical to fill the palm a little better:



This knife is actually a little "dainty" for my big paw:



I made a simple leather belt sheath for it and have been using it at work for the past several months with great success. I like it a lot but I will build a larger version and try that out as well. When I bought the blank I picked up a couple of others as well because they aren't that expensive and the shipping was the same for 3 as it was for 1:



I have some wood grips already cut for the middle "spear point" blank but I will use some graphite rod for the pins on that one.

The upper blank will become custom knife v2.0 but I haven't decided what to use for the grips on that one yet.

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