First attempt at a Bowie Knife

[anthonyget]

Hi all,
For a while now I have wanted to make a tough, hefty Bowie knife with a stacked leather handle/
Here it is. It came out ok I feel but with much room for improvement.
Please let me know what you think.
Best to all.

[Frank S]

I really like your knife and I agree with you about how your handle turned out but it is still a nice knife. My dad made one out of a huge file he brought back from the Korean War the file started out at over 3/8" or 10 mm thick 2 1/2" wide or about 65 mm almost 24" long or about 600 mm plus the tang, it was one of the big files he and I used to mill a few 0.000" off of flat head engine blocks and heads until it got so dull it would no longer cut. He said files that large were never hardened all the way through, so he annealed it until it was soft enough to file with a mill bastard cut file or cut with a hack saw. He spent months grinding it down on a wet wheel bench mounted hand cranked grinder and filing it to the shape and size he wanted. Re hardened it and tempered it.
His handle like yours was stacked leather cut from 3 different shades and thicknesses with aluminum or brass spacers alternating after each 3 pieces of leather. Quite a bit shorter than your handle and more oval in shape.

[anthonyget]

Hi Frank, Thanks so much for your feedback and sharing that story with me. Really appreciate it. Take good care.

[Frank S]

Hi Frank, Thanks so much for your feedback and sharing that story with me. Really appreciate it. Take good care.

I'm not particularly a blade smith but like many other things I do I learned something a long, long time ago from my Blacksmith mentor which confirmed something my mechanic dad explained to me the way he felt about files then I'll tell you something I suspect about modern files.
You may be a practicing or a professional blade smith for all I know and may or may not have heard this before or learned it on your own. if so just ignore everything I am about to explain of what I heard and have in theory.
Anyone who knows the history of files knows that of old, they were hand made with the teeth being chiseled in then hardened and tempered. This was why my dad felt that the real thick old files were not hardened all the way through due to their being so thick but in order to make a good knife out of them instead of heating them up and hammering the teeth back into the body it was better to grind them away down to the base metal then heat them to anneal them. But my dad was a mechanic and not a blacksmith. Clarence explained to me, that since the teeth were cut by bending them away from the body. Heating them and trying to reform them into the base metal was akin to forge welding them back into the metal, it depended a lot on how much you planed on working the steel if your goal was simply to make a good knife with as few steps as possible just grind the teeth away heat it up to a dull cherry quite a bit hotter than if you wanted to temper hardened steel but not hot enough to forge it, and let it slowly cool in heated powder, either sand, lime, or salt, a few times to anneal it and not to do it all in one or two heating's, to preserve as much of the properties of the steel as possible the more times you heat metal the more of the original properties you are likely to burn away. but if your aim was to make Damascus steel out of it then cut it and add the layer of whatever other metal you were planning on using but you needed a combination of hard and softer metal.
My theory is file knives are never going to have good springy characteristics like those made of spring steel so they would never have much flexibility but can be made to hold a good edge.