Home > Heritage / Knives / Wood

Heritage knife No. 1

I've been keen for some time to try my hand at knife-making and although the process of hardening and tempering steel has put me off (for now), there are plenty of good quality Swedish and Finnish blade blanks available. This knife is the first in a series in which the handle has a special personal significance, i.e. I wanted to avoid off-the-shelf timber and instead use found or reclaimed material.

Two or three years ago I picked up a broken branch from a nearby field on the edge of the Thames. The branch, a piece of yew about 6cm in diameter, had an attractive heartwood and I stuck it among the rafters of the garage until I could decide what to do with it. This piece of wood, now more seasoned, looked an ideal candidate for a knife project and as I carved the design, the deep red heartwood began to emerge from the pale sap wood.

The following photo shows the piece left over and would be ideal for another handle, with the curve incorporated into the design. I have already peeled off a lot of the bark. Note the star-burst pattern of the heartwood.

Yew is extremely dense with even the sap wood being remarkably hard with little perceptible grain (its high compressive strength, light weight and elasticity made it ideal for longbows). At times it behaved more like a plastic and it made a sharp, crisp sound when placed on a hard surface. Its toxicity meant that I had to do any sanding outside while wearing a respirator though its density also allowed wet sanding with emery paper. I adapted the handle from my original design to allow the grip to conform more closely to my hand size.

In the following three photos, the knife is shown against a background of bog-oak.

The next component of the handle is an 1917 English penny, i.e. exactly one hundred years old. A coin of this age would have been through thousands of transactions and hands and its background shows in the wear of the surface, wear that gives the coin character and history though at the expense of numismatic value.

The handle is completed with a bog oak bolster. This comes from 6000-year-old bog oak from the Norfolk fens. The oak would have been preserved in an anaerobic environment while the process of pertrification began, the cellulose gradually being replaced by minerals from the water. The blackening results from the interaction of the tannins in the oak with the iron oxide in the water.

After this tree fell, towards the end of the Stone Age, it lay submerged while the world changed around it. A thousand years later, Stonehenge was built, as were the Egyptian pyramids. The Romans invaded Britain, followed hundreds of years later by the Vikings as the oak continued to darken. Then followed the Middle Ages, the Tudors, the Civil War, Empire, Victorian England, then the world wars.

I love the progression of history through this knife handle, starting with wood a couple of decades old to bronze one hundred years old to wood from a tree that grew in Stone Age Britain. I find it hard not to view wood as a living thing, absorbing experience of the outside world as it ages. I named the knife "The Henge" in support of this.

The blade is a Mora blade from Sweden in carbon steel hardened to HRC 58-60. My experience with this steel is that it keeps a reasonable edge and is easy to sharpen on a strop though like any carbon steel it needs a little care to prevent corrosive damage. The so-called Scandinavian grind has no secondary bevel making it suitable for working with green wood and softer seasoned woods though micro chipping is a risk with harder woods and could be countered by adding a small secondary bevel.

September 2017

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse