Fishing in my local trout stream is closed in winter, and so there is more time for the workshop. I had documented every step in the manufacture of this knife with my mobile phone, but unfortunately I killed my phone recently when I dropped it into a river… no chance to repair it, and no chance to restore the pictures. So here is the final knife, and some written information about the materials used.
blade
The blade is damascus steel, which I made myself using hand-hammers and a coal-forge. No power hammer, no gas… just the traditional way, as always! The ingredients are three different sorts of high-carbon steel. The darkest one is alloyed with manganese, the grey one with tungsten, and the silver one with nickel. The German system classifies them as 1.2842, 1.2519 and 1.2796. These steels are forgewelded and folded numerous times to a number of roughly 350 layers. This damascus combination was “invented” by Achim Wirtz, a reknown German engineer and blacksmith, and it truely gives a killer edge!
I shaped the blade so that it is relatively universal, but it is ideally suited for dressing game, filleting fish and these sorts of things.
wood
The handle consists of birch and a small strip of bog oak.
The birch is from a burl I harvested roughly 15 years ago in a forest nearby. I just recently cut it and realized that it is an absolutely exquisite piece of wood! The bog oak is from a small plank I received from an Irish tatoo artist named Phil. I met him in a pub in Dublin on the morning after one of the last gigs with my former band, and we talked about this and that… and he told me that he was carving sculptures from bog oak he found on his own property. I was totally fascinated and told him how beautiful this material looks on knife handles…. Some days later, when we departed from Ireland, he came to our bus to say goodbye and brought a piece of his bog oak for me and my bandmate (who is also into knifemaking). Infact this bog oak is some of the darkest and hardest I ever saw, and great memories come with it… the taste of Guiness and black pudding for breakfast, a great show, wonderful hosts…
bronze
All the metal parts on the handle are from tin-bronze, and alloy which is much more beautiful than brassand does not corrode so easily. I cast it myself in my garden into bars and made all the necessary knife parts from it.
sheath
The sheath I made from finest italian leather. It was hand-dyed and -sewn. The metal bail is from the same bronze as stated above. The knife sits perfectly inside and and cannot fall out.
