Recycling Knives

I thought I'd post a tutorial on what I call recycling knives.  Anytime I see decent quality kitchen knives at yard sales or thrift stores I buy them and throw them in a box in my garage until inspiration strikes.  I haven't made any knives in quite a while and had a some free time on a Sunday afternoon.  Normally when I recycle a knife I'll take one of the kitchen knives, reshape the blade, rework the handle a bit and sharpen it up. I don't usually get too fancy as I prefer utilitarian type knives over show pieces.  This allows me to try different blade styles and shapes without spending a lot of money on knives and it's good knife making practice.  This time I decided to get a little fancier and see what I could come up with. I took a few pictures with my phone as I worked on it. I did no measuring on this knife, everything was hand drawn and all measurements were eyeballed. Let get started!

Here's the knife with the pattern drawn on the blade.  It's a 8" chefs knife that I bought at a yard sale for fifty cents.  It's got a fairly thick stainless steel blade that seems to be decent steel.

Here's the new knife blank after using a dremel and cut-off wheels to rough it out of the chef's knife blade. 

Here's the blank after coming off the grinder.  I held the blade in my bare hands to make sure it didn't overheat and lose it's temper.  When it started to get to hot to hold I'd back off and let the steel cool down. This is usually when you can tell if the knife you started with was made with good steel.  This one happens to be a good piece of stainless.

I decided to do a little file work on the back of the blade just above where the handle will go.

Putting a quick edge profile on the blade.  I don't want it sharp yet.  There's still a lot of work to do and I've been known to cut myself before.

Here's the blank cleaned up a bit and drilled for a lanyard hole. I dug up a couple of pieces of black walnut scrap for a handle and a short piece from a broken aluminum arrow for a lanyard hole liner.

Glued up with 2 ton epoxy and clamped.

Out of the clamps and rough shaped with the belt sander.

After a bit more sanding and shaping.

Here it is... Final sanded, polished to a satin finish with steel wool and finished with 3 coats of neatsfoot oil rubbed into he wood.  I'll give it a few more coats of oil over the next few days, but it's pretty much complete. 

Came out to right around 7" total with a 3.5" blade. Total amount of time it took (not counting waiting for the epoxy to set) was about 5 hours.  I just need to make up a sheath for it and give it a final sharpening.  Thanks for reading and I hope to see you in the woods.

N.E.V.