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This is my knife. There are no others like it, and this one is mine.

No, it really is. I made it with my own hands. As a matter of fact, I might have possibly taken the notion of making it with my own hands just a bit too far.

The Secret Of Show Business, Again

This all started fairly innocently. You see, I have this OG Böker Rold. Have done for years. I never got around to talking about it here.

The Rold is a fine knife. I was using it as my default camp knife for quite a while, hence the surface wear you see on its blade there. Böker themselves describe it as a “very durable Outdoor and Camp Knife,” which in this business is a bold statement rather akin to standing on top of a hill in a thunderstorm with a copper tureen on your head while holding a flagpole, yelling about how all gods are sissies. That’s because what with “bushcraft” still being so much in vogue amongst them as watch too much Youtube, you’re likely to find dudebros attempting to use your creation for nothing less than hacking down the last of the sequoias and trying to baton rocks. It seems nobody thinks to pack an axe anymore or, heavens forbid, some type of folding saw.

But so far as I’ve been able to tell the Rold is the real deal in that respect. It’s a Jesper Voxnæs design, he of previous fame around here for also coming up with the Gnome, which we inspected quite some time ago. So far mine remains resolutely unbroken, but as these are now out of production and apparently in ascendancy to becoming collector’s items, mine doesn’t see much use anymore.

There are a lot of things I like about the Rold, but then again there are some things I don’t. On the positive side it’s a bit of an ergonomic tour-de-force, with a clever forward grip design that allows you to place your index finger through the massive choil forward of the guard to choke up on it for control, or hold it back on the main handle to give yourself more leverage. It’s also not exactly a small object at an 11" overall length, and it’s made out of D2, m’favorite steel. But it’s got a matte finish made of grey enamel or something that scuffs and scratches as soon as you look at it, the handle scales can’t be dismounted, and with the best will in the world the sheath it came with is a bit naff. Mine required significant tuning with a heat gun straight out of the box.

Plus, for as large as it is I am still immensely covetous of my nephew’s Scrapyard Dog Son of Dogfather for filling the same role, another currently unobtainable piece which has a similar jam as the Rold but is much, much thicker. Thus like a cat reading a newspaper, I concluded to myself one fine day not too long that I ought to make my own damn knife and see if I can marry the elements of these that are my favorites. Just then and there, on the spot. Just like that.

So, you see, what you do is you find an act that works.

And steal it.

How Hard Can It Be?

There are men in this world — and they are universally men — who will send away to have a blade blank cut, and then send away to have it heat treated, and then send away to have handles made for it and yet they’ll still stick their thumbs in their suspenders and insist to you as bold as you please that they’re a custom knife maker. Uh-huh. Sure you are, bud.

Thus at the outset of all this, I wrote one ironclad rule: I will do all of this in house, by myself. No outsourcing. This is Lemmy, after all; we love seizing the means of production around here.

And to as great an extent as possible, no outside research, either. You can spend all day watching videos or bickering on forums and never get anything done. I’m a bird of considerable resource and, let’s face it, also the ownership of a couple of hundred knives. So part of that’s got to rub off via some kind of horizontal osmosis to expertise in building knives as well.

…Right?

I’ve also got a quite broad selection of tools at my disposal amassed over the course of a lifetime. Surely this’ll be a cinch.

The Plan

An individual with more enthusiasm and rather less hard earned cynicism would grab the nearest chunk of scrap metal and go at it with the angle grinder straight away. But not me. Much to my own astonishment as much as anyone else’s, I sat down and planned this out.

In fact, I drafted my vision down to every last detail in FreeCAD.

I started with the general ergonomic plan from the Rold and got to modifying. With a whack-diddle-diddle-hi-ho, and a stretch here and a tweak there, I arrived at a first draft. I also made it bigger. Much bigger.

As you all are no doubt aware I am also the owner of a ludicrously large 3D printer. So I employed the same for, I think for the first time in my life, actually accomplishing one of the original stated intentions of the whole damn process, which was to prototype a 1:1 life sized replica of my blade blank.

Printing your plan out on paper is one thing, but actually being able to produce in less than an hour a real physical representation of your design that you can hold in your hand is an incredible game changer. There are ergonomic considerations you won’t be able to make just looking at the representation of a thing on the screen. I was able to iterate on my design basically for free, so I went through several prototype stages before settling on the final shape. And when you hold it, it is real in a sense that no mere paper proxy can approach.

This is not a how-to column, and in fact may actually turn out to be a how-to-not piece instead. But if I’m going to offer one piece of advice, it’s this one: If you’re going to get into this sort of thing, get your hands on some manner of rapid prototyping system. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a 3D printer. Something like a CNC router or similar that can reasonably precisely hack your design out of plywood or whatever material would also do. But you’re going to want something. Trust me on this.

Instruct Me Not

I bought some steel.

Total bill of materials cost: $30.

Alas, it seems to have arrived upside down. No matter; I’m certain I can make it work anyway.

Truth be told, this entire odyssey actually started when I was noodling around on the internet and I read about the heat treating process for D2 steel. I’m not actually a total stranger to metalworking, and I’ve seen enough about how this works. Regular carbon steels, and a lot of other alloys besides, are heat treated by the typical medieval style heat-and-dunk method you may be picturing which results in a large hiss and a bloody great cloud of steam. You can do this at home, if you’ve got a forge or some other suitable way to get your metal cooking red hot — but D2 doesn’t work that way. It’s an air hardening steel, and that’s exactly what it sounds like: Heat it up, and… That’s it. Just let it sit there. I found this fascinating.

You still have to temper it, of course, because at the end of the hardening and/or quenching phase most steels are rock hard but also possess a glassine brittleness which is certainly not a property you want in your big old tree-mauling chopper of a knife.

But I watched someone do this and I immediately thought, “Hey, I could do that, too!” So I did.

And D2 is still my favorite knife steel in the world. This is just icing on the cake.

Step one here was to print a full sized template of my design. This is significantly less fancified than my replica prototypes, which had edge bevels and everything. This is just a slab in the complete outline of the final product. I traced this out on a chunk of my raw D2 steel which alas I neglected to take a picture of at the time so you’ll have to use your imagination on how that works.

Actually, back up a bit. Step one was actually to figure out whether or not the D2 flat stock I just bought from some rando on eBay in trifling hobbyist quantities actually arrived in its annealed state.

D2, you see, can be hardened to an extreme degree. Like, a drill bit dulling and tool breaking degree. I had to determine if my metal arrived soft and annealed as it should have, or if I was going to have a heat treating operation on my hands right out of the gate.

I don’t have a fancy Rockwell hardness testing machine, but I do have this suspiciously cheap set of allegedly Japanese hardness grading files I bought off of the internet for twenty bucks some time ago.

Trepidatiously, I started with the hardest one and worked my way down until I determined that, yes, the corner of my D2 slab succumbed to each and every one of them. So it ought to be soft enough to drill.

I also had some misgivings about being able to accurately locate the three holes I’d need to lance into the handle in order to put the scale mounting screws through. I devised a solution which I’m proud to declare that I think is clever, which was to make this set of printed bushings whose inner diameters match the business end of my centerpunch precisely, and which fit through the holes in my template in exactly the right positions, provided I manage not to move the template at all between punchings.

I have been told that starting your holes with a centering bit is actually the “wrong” way to do it. It worked for me, though. Thus I was able to bore all three holes without much trouble.

I ain’t not no undummy; I drilled the holes first, whereupon I would discover whether I was bashing my head against a brick wall or not, purposefully long before wasting an entire afternoon hacking the profile of the blade out of the metal and winding up with a complicated chunk of scrap after discovering I couldn’t put holes through it.

The astute among you will probably have realized that since D2 hardens by heating it and simply allowing the stuff to cool to room temperature, doing anything to it that creates heat will readily cause it to work harden. And this is indeed so, including the bits immediately adjacent to where you have, just for purest sake of example, just been throwing a nine foot long rooster tail of sparks off of it with your angle grinder.

I don’t like to toot my own horn except in very precise and specialized circumstances. This is one of those. I am by my own recognition the king of all angle grinders. I can do damn near anything with an angle grinder, up to and including this, and all the things I couldn’t I turned out on my little belt sander, the same one I use for reprofiling blades and getting nicks out of edges.

…Almost everything.

I quickly concluded that my weedy Harbor Freight 1x30" sander was absolutely not going to hack it for the blade’s primary grind. Oh, believe me that I gave it a damn good try anyway. But after spending an hour and winding up with little more than just shining up the first eighth of an inch I boldly gave up. My stock is a quarter of an inch thick and I made the deeply questionable decision to put a full or at least nearly full flat grind on this thing, just like the one its inspiration has.

So.

I Was On The Internet This Week…

And I bought this.

Some manner of honest-to-goodness belt grinder has been on my shopping list for literal years, and today on this glorious day I was finally handed a solid justification.

Total bill of materials cost: $829.

This highly suspicious Chinese model seems to be built on the same pattern as pretty much all of them on offer around this size and price point. I picked one based purely on lead time, and here it is. I couldn’t tell you who actually made it. Probably no one can.

It arrived in an alarmingly dense crate as if I’d actually ordered a Tasmanian devil. I had to break it apart with hammers and a crowbar.

To illustrate the true breadth of the cost cutting measures we’re dealing with here, this thing is so cheap the manufacturer couldn’t even be bothered to make a 120 volt version for North American consumption. Instead it comes with this yum-cha 120 to 240v step up transformer which I’m totally certain will not randomly blow up in my face and subsequently burn down my shop some day. I’ll just keep this unplugged when it’s not in use, I think, if it’s all the same to you.

I’m also chuffed to bits to discover that it came prewired with this mountable VFD unit that would be right at home in an industrial control panel enclosure. Astonishingly, it worked right out of the box, although in my opinion by default the motor ought to spin the other way. I believe rectifying that is a simple matter of switching two wires, but there’s also a reverse button right there on the panel and so for now I can’t be bothered.

I’m much less chuffed to report that no part of the perfunctory instructions leaflet that came with this thing wastes any words on explaining how the hell you’re meant assemble it. It also doesn’t tell you the trick to correctly tensioning the belt, but I figured it all out readily enough.

I am given to understand that there is no upper limit to the potential bodaciousness of a belt grinding setup, and the true aficionados inevitably build their own. I’m pleased as punch to report that this one sure does it for me, though. The complete and utter lack of safety mechanisms, guards, or interlocks makes it feel right at home in my workshop. And my Harbor Freight sander feels like an electric toothbrush by comparison. For reference, that’s the little green jobbie immediately to the left of this that looks as if you could just about stick it in your shirt pocket.

In sheer recognition of the extent of my talents, I also bought this handy jig for holding your knife at a consistent angle while you’re grinding the bevel into it. Certainly I could do it freehand like a Real Man, I tell myself in order get to sleep at night, it’s just that this will provide a more consistent finish. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

What the hell. It was only twenty bucks.

Total bill of materials cost: $849.

Even with my shiny new toy I found that the primary grind was taking an inordinate amount of time. I eventually determined that this was because I was running my grinder entirely too slowly, out of a combination of misunderstanding the readout on the VFD’s panel and also being afraid to wind it up too high lest the thing suck me bodily into the works and spit me out the other side.

The former was easy enough to rectify and the latter turned out to be a non-issue, since even at maximum throttle I actually found the process to be fully controllable. Except, now we were making real sparks.

Schoolboy errors made: 1.

Finishing the primary grind still took a much larger chunk of the afternoon than I would have liked. My troubles may come down to using the equally cheap and Chinese belts supplied alongside my grinder. Since this whole process is a learning experience, we’ll chalk up that one thusly: For the next knife, buy a better set of belts.

This entire affair produced an alarming yet curiously satisfying amount of metal dust.

After taking this picture I placed a five gallon bucket full of water directly below the belt path on my grinder to catch the bulk of the shavings, which appeared to accomplish absolutely nothing.

With the primary grind complete, now it was time for the fun part.

The Fun Part

Recall, many paragraphs ago, that I said I would do no outsourcing of my production. I was not kidding when I said that. I was making my Serious Samurai face and everything. I absolutely will not send this away for heat treating. Get the fuck outta here with that.

I am now proud owner of my very own heat treating kiln.

Total bill of materials cost: $3804.

This is a Hot Shot Ovens 18K knifemaker’s kiln, for knifemaking, by knifemakers. Which is what I am. Unlike my grinder it is a highly competent piece of equipment. Yes, I even got the one with the fancy “TAP” programmable controller. Hey, it was only a hundred bucks more. That basically fits within a rounding error by this point.

Actually, if I were to do it all again I probably would have foregone the fancy controller and just gotten the regular single stage one. The TAP controller is wi-fi enabled and theoretically offers smartphone control, but it’s another one of those thrice damned things where the manufacturer expects you to pay a monthly subscription to unlock some of the features built into it, and I’ll be stuffed if I’m doing that. You can still do multi-step programming of the kiln with timings and temperature curves and all right on the screen, so I’ll be sticking to that instead.

Paywall or not, this baby will still do 2200° F. I don’t need it to, mind you, but it’s nice to know that I can.

Step 2: Bake at 1875° F for 40 minutes, then allow to cool.

It feels wrong doing a “quench” on a piece of red hot glowing steel by dangling it off of a chunk of round stock clamped in the vise and just leaving it there.

After cooling off the blade has this rather attractive patina on it.

Schoolboy errors made: 2.

The more sage among you are aware that I made a critical blunder, here. You see, D2 is a high chromium content steel and when you’re cooking it at thousands of degrees you really ought to protect it from the atmosphere somehow, which I in my combination of exuberance and inexperience, plus being acquainted only with plain carbon steels, failed to do. That black stuff all over the blade is a layer of steel that’s decarburized, and has instead allowed the chromium to come out of solution and form up on the surface to oxidize.

On plain carbon steel you also get forge scale all over it, or I guess whatever the equivalent of that ought to be called if you haven’t actually forged the thing, but this is trivially easy to knock off with a quick trip back to your belt sander.

Not so with the chromium rich layer encrusting what was until forty minutes ago my beautiful and shiny knife-to-be. Even my meanest 24 grit belt would barely touch the stuff. You know what they make out of chromium oxide, right? The grit for abrasives. Like, it’s the active ingredient in that bar of green stropping compound that makes it green. And it’s the stuff that’s in Flitz, too. That means it’s harder than steel, Q.E.D.

Fortunately I had another brain wave, which was to try dunking it in acid. White vinegar, in this case, which after a 30 minute bath enticed the stuff to let go to the extent that I could blast it off with a high speed wire wheel.

Still and all, next time I’ll use some toolmaker’s foil to wrap my blade before heat treatment. I’d rather not go through all that again.

The final phase after tempering (500° F for two hours, chosen to prioritize toughness over hardness/edge retention) was to polish up all of the surfaces from the ugliness I imparted on them by being a dummy about the heat treatment. I stepped up through my collection of belts until I reached 180 grit which was the finest I had for my big belt grinder. I briefly toyed with the idea of switching to my little machine to keep going, since I have an array of specialty sharpening belts for it going all the way up to the equivalent of 2000 grit. But I ultimately decided against it because A) the blade is so damn big I’m not sure I could get even coverage with the little machine to begin with, and B) for a bushwhacking knockaround knife I’m not sure I want a satiny smooth finish on it I’ll just fuck up in the first three seconds anyhow.

So the hell with it.

I also realized at this point that I’d forgotten to cut my planned jimping into the spine.

Schoolboy errors made: 3.

Life pro tip: Next time, do those cuts before hardening the fucking thing. I’ll bet you it’ll be easier.

I deftly avoided one other obvious pratfall in all of this. You’ll note that at no point doing this treatise did I say anything about putting an edge on it. That’s because I didn’t until the very last step, in order to save myself from amputating all ten of my fingertips while I was grinding and tempering and polishing and all the rest of it.

I may be stupid, but I’m not crazy.

A Clever Dick

I hate making handle scales. I’ve only done it twice in my life, and it was a pain in my tailfeathers both times. I resolved not to do it again.

Fortunately, I already had a plan in place. The beauty of drafting my knife in CAD down to the last maniacal detail is that I can simply instruct my 3D printer to print out a set of handle scales for me. Perfectly formed, pre-holed, the same on both sides, and direct fitting. And you don’t have to breathe a single molecule of Micarta dust.

Sometimes my genius is tangible.

Additional Financial Considerations

Throughout this procedure, several friends and acquaintances stopped by my workshop to see what all the noise was. The ultimate upshot of that is, I now have six or seven open orders for more of these.

In light of that, I made another decision.

Total bill of materials cost: $7403.

Do I need a $3599 large format 100 watt fiber laser engraver? No, absolutely not. Could I have made do with a lesser 60 or even 40 watt machine? Yes, probably. But I wanted a 100 watt fiber laser engraver, you see. And now I have a good excuse.

Plus, it lets me do this.

I don’t envy people who have to justify their toy purchases to their wives. Not one little bit. Man, my life really is rad sometimes.

Laser engraving is another whole skill set I’ll have to add to my repertoire. I’m getting there slowly and I’m sure I’ll have lots to say about it later. For now, I used the offcut from my first piece of steel to figure out what the best settings are for my material, and had at it.

To celebrate this momentous occasion I drew up a new logo and everything. You know, now that we’re not making knives out of plastic anymore.

The Review Part

I now find myself in the unique and somewhat unenviable position of having to present to you… er, my own knife. Foibles and all. It’s not perfect, but to be fair it is literally my first attempt at this pattern, in this steel, with this machinery.

I would like you to meet the Flightless Forge Emperor. So named after the most humongous of all extant penguins, an attribute which it shares.

It is, without a doubt, fucking massive. Of course this is by design. It’s 12-5/8" (320mm) long from tip to tail, with a 7-1/4" (184mm) blade with every little bit of it being usable as a result of the choil at the base that’s big enough to fit even a gloved index finger into. All told it weighs 16.72 ounces (474.2 grams). Of course it does — It’s a quarter inch thick slab of D2. If you are a wimp, this is not the knife for you.

Since my ISO standard comparison method would be close to useless, here it is next to the oft aforementioned Böker Rold. The latter is in and of itself not a small knife. The Emperor could probably cleave it in half.

The blade is a flat grind that’s nearly the full breadth of the knife ending in a roughly 20 degree microbevel that should result in unparalleled chopping and splitting power. Opening your mail, fine whittling, cleaning your fingernails, trimming your arm hairs: These are all tasks that the Emperor is absolutely not designed to do. The Emperor is for bifurcating logs and fighting bears, and looking mean as hell doing it.

One of the things about the Rold that annoys me is its pronounced and slightly wonky plunge line separating the primary taper from the flat part of the knife, which bisects the front of the choil and leaves an unrefined stairstep there. Plus, with the best will in the world it’s also not quite the same on both sides. Thus the Emperor has no plunge line at all, with the grind gently and at least mostly smoothly transitioning into the flat just before the handle. This leaves nothing to snag, and also no crevice for gunk to accumulate in.

A small ramp on the spine of the blade provides a forward endstop for your thumb when you’re holding the Emperor in either position. This is jimped subtly for tactile feel more than any kind of grip, since the ramp and the finger guard should prove sufficiently proof against sliding up onto the edge. The edge which is, mind you, nearly a full inch and a half below the lower edge of the handle anyway. In order for the Emperor to bite you in any situation something must have seriously gone wrong, although provided only you can keep your off hand out from in between it and whatever unfortunate object you have underneath it on the stump.

(The blurry thing behind it in the shot is one of those telescopic magnet retriever tools, which I’m using as a kickstand to prop the knife up. It won’t quite stand up on a flat surface and makes an almighty clang every time it hits the deck when you attempt to do so.)

This also means that every single iota of its cutting edge can be brought down on a flat surface. Not even the finger guard interferes with this. It’s not exactly shaped to be great at, say, slicing tomatoes wafer thin. But because of all of the above, you could probably still do it if you were a sufficiently high caliber of nut.

The handle has a sculpted bird’s head design with a pronounced flare at the pommel to prevent it from sliding forward out of your grip. You can hold it either fore…

…Or aft of the finger guard depending on what you’re planning to do with it.

On the final article the scales are 3D printed ABS. This material is both heat and impact resistant, but also dead easy for me to print without driving myself into apoplectic fits. Unlike a depressing number of purported “bushcraft ready” knives, these are screwed rather than pinned into place so the scales are readily dismountable for cleaning, customization, or let’s face it — replacement. One of the major knocks against the current crop of swanky Micarta handled models that are all the rage out there now is that you’re forever afraid of fucking up your irreplaceable bespoke handle scales because they’re permanently pinned into place.

I’ve long maintained that a fancy knife you won’t use is automatically lesser than a ratty one which you will, so that’s not how it works here. If, somehow, you manage to mar or even break the Emperor’s handles you can simply take them off. The print job to make a new pair takes less than an hour, and they’ll bolt right up.

Before I handled the first pair I was predicting for sure that printed scales would be stupid and terrible. Surprisingly, they’re not. The inherent layer structure of the print results in a rather Micarta-esque texture or, if we’re feeling especially charitable, one that’s reminiscent of woodgrain. This results in a surface that’s grippy but not too rough on your hands. It looks, feels, and acts like the business.

I deliberately sought out hollow handle screws for this so that those lanyard types of people could have something to put their cord through without doing anything so vulgar as punching a vestigial hole through the entire assembly that’d rankle you forever if you didn’t use it. As it happened, such hardware was tougher to find than you’d think.

You guys will love the solution I came up with. Are you ready for this? These are stainless steel chainring bolts for a bicycle.

They’re authoritatively rustrpoof, swank as all hell, and you can see daylight right through them. They’re also readily undone with a garden variety 5mm Allen key, and you don’t even need to stick a spanner driver in the other side. It’s a bit of a squeeze to get 550 paracord through the hole in the middle although it can be done if you use a nail or the end of an awl or something as a pusher. 3mm cord, however, sails right through like it was meant for it.

The left hand side bears my new Flightless Forge logo, which you’ve already seen. Left hand, that is, relative to holding it in your right hand with the edge down, i.e. ready for use.

Just who is that handsome penguin, anyway?

The right hand side proudly proclaims that no robots, AI, underpaid child laborers, or CNC machinery (well, except for my 3D printer if you want to be pedantic) were involved in the creation of this knife. Mine is also a serial number that no one else can ever ever have. Neener, neener, neener.

I figure now that I’m working in steel rather than silly old plastic I ought to invent a new brand to illustrate that we’re no longer fucking around.

Well, but we demonstrably are fucking around. This is just like playing store when you were a kid — we’ll pretend to be a real outfit with a logo and a cash register and the hours on the door and everything. Except in this case, it’s bad ass.

The Emperor requires what might possibly be the widest Kydex sheath ever concieved in history. The upper mounting screws are spaced such that it is technically Tek-Lok compatible, at least if you are stark raving loony enough to try it. Otherwise, the webbing belt loop provided is a much more practical option and is comprised of the fattest webbing I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s 4" across!

With the Emperor dangling off of your belt no one at the campground, or hell, anywhere within half a mile of you will be able to doubt your virility or outdoors credibility.

The Emperor’s edge is mirror polished at 2000 grit and thanks to the flat grind going nearly all the way down to the apex, it doesn’t need to be very broad. The chopping power is phenomenal, which is half and half due to the geometry but also due to the monumental heft of the knife. The weight distribution is somewhat blade biased, with the point of balance being nearly precisely on the first bit of the edge forward of the choil.

Yes, it batons.

Hacking at the grain crosswise is likewise no problem.

As stated, the Emperor is a full quarter of an inch thick at the spine. This makes it absurdly robust at the expense, of course, of weighing over a pound.

On the left, the Emperor. On the right, the Böker Rold, itself not exactly a svelte object.

I spent all afternoon whacking every piece of scrap wood I could lay my hands on into kindling. This had no noticeable impact on the finish nor the edge, even after one ill-fated attempt to split a hardwood log that was about 10" across and got the knife so irrevocably stuck I had to use a rubber mallet to knock it free. I call that a success, I don’t know about you.

I only filmed some of this. The bulk of it will surely remain lost to history since Lemmy only lets you post little snippets, although I might be talked into it if the weather’s nice and there’s any market at all for, say, a live stream of me and my stupid penguin face smashing random chunks of wood into toothpicks for hours on end. It can’t possibly be any more insipid than what most of the kids seem to be watching these days.

The Inevitable Conclusion

This is my knife. There will some day be others like it, but this one will always be mine.

I’ve heard it said that for your first knife you should start with something uncomplicated, in an easy to work with steel, and above all small.

Um…

No.