Antipode, High Carbon Steel with Brass Details, Ironwood Scales

If there's one thing worse than a client with maniacally detailed specifications, it's a client with no specifications at all.

Sorry, I didn't mean to start this off sounding negative. But my client gave me two old files which I am given to understand they found in a barn and asked me, "Can you make something out of this?"

Well...



It is written, or at least often repeated on the Internet, that the accepted project for starting to learn about knifemaking is to make your first knife out of a file. I must report in all honesty that I've never actually done this. It is just possible at the outside that I missed out some epiphany by skipping this phase, but if so you all will have to tell me.

Now that I'm a member of the club, I can say this about that: The next time I take it into my head to face the teeth off of a big file by hand, do me a favor and talk me out of it. I don't have a surface grinder nor have I gotten around to building any manner of flattening jig for my belt grinder, so I did this freehand. Nothing in history has made me want to buy a surface grinder more than this, but given my usual workflow I obviously haven't gotten around to it.

So after I was done banging all my rocks together, this is what I came up with. Megadyptes antipodes is the official name for the yellow-eyed penguin, and I'm definitely getting some down-under notes off of this one.

Nah, yeh see mate, this is a knoife. The name seemed fitting.

I don't normally talk about my process a whole lot but I'll do so now because this one is obviously such a radical departure from what I normally do and where else am I going to get a chance to rabbit on about it? Despite all appearances due to my professionally honed pessimism, I actually had a blast with this.

These files are of unknown provenance and if there were any markings on them they were lost to time before I got my grubby mitts on them. After a darn good wire wheeling this is what I found I had to work with. Files are naturally extremely hard when you get them, probably far too hard for me to drill handle pin holes through, so step one was to throw these in the kiln for a good annealing. It's just as well, because this gave me some time to scheme.

I will probably horrify some of you when I reveal that I rough out my knife blanks with a plasma cutter these days. Weedy though my Chinese knockoff cutter may be, it still saves me a ton of effort — not to mention angle grinder wheels — to knock all the big pieces of steel off before I start finalizing the shape on the ol' belt grinder.

I have absolutely no idea where the ray of inspiration came from which struck me to go for a Bowie knife sort of design. Since my client hadn't given me any instructions, I more or less took a wild punt based on what I knew about them to cook up something I thought they'd appreciate. (And I was right, for the record.)

I tend to doodle my designs in FreeCAD, which not only helps me keep on top of all the dimensions but also has a nice side-benefit in that I can then instruct my 3D printer to crank out a prototype of my blade shape. This physical 1:1 replica is rotten at holding an edge, but it does allow me to handle the ostensible final product here in reality rather than on paper, in order to e.g. determine if I've made any critical gaffes in the shape, feel, proportions, or possibly assuming that the user will have six fingers. Often what looked like a great plan on the screen turns out to be a stupid idea in reality, and being able to determine this while wasting only 30 cents worth of plastic instead of fifty bucks' worth of steel as well as hours upon hours of my labor helps keep me from bankrupting myself any faster than I otherwise would do.

It also gives me a handy template that I can trace onto my steel. So that's nice.

At the outset I apparently decided to make my life difficult with this. The Antipode's most striking feature, possibly other than its wide and upswept blade with its pronounced belly, is the absolutely ridiculous number of handle pins. There are seventeen in total, not just the fifteen you can see embellishing the ironwood handles but also two more holding the brass pommel on, which I've ground flush so they're invisible. Needless to say, this necessitated the drilling of many, many holes. If you must know, I marked them all by laying my template on top of the steel and hosing it down with a can of spraypaint.

The crossguard presented me a bit of a challenge as well. It's a solid slab of brass which is slotted through the tang and butts up against the ricasso at the base of the blade. The common wisdom here is that for a good fit you should cut the slot as well as square off the two rear faces of the ricasso with your milling machine.

Except, you see, I haven't got a milling machine (yet; fill my coffers by purchasing more knives and I promise you I'll buy one) so I did this all by hand.

This was, to use the technical terminology, rather a faff. The results definitely aren't perfect but I got it done. I'm not a huge rush to do it again the same way, though, if it's all the same to you.



There are quite a number of things I'd do differently if I'm ever given the opportunity to do this again, but I think the result speaks for itself. Here it is assembled, before I engraved it and finished sharpening it. Yes, the wooden scales split because the pin holes are too close and I glued them back together along the seam. Yes, there's a sliver of daylight visible between the blade and the guard if you hold it at just the right angle because hacking at it with a file I can only get the interface so close to square. But you know what? At the end of the day, it still never stops being absolutely astonishing that this shiny blade was hiding inside that rusty old file for all those years.

As if I hadn't put enough on my plate, I also made the decision to make a traditional-ish leather sheath for this since just slamming the Antipode into one of my usual Kydex sheaths somehow felt inappropriate. I made it from some scraps of leather in a bag of offcuts I've had lying around for years. I've never made a leather sheath for anything before, either, and the final result is a bit rough and ready but it'll do.