Been working on them since Feb. They were a stick of 1095 bar stock and a couple blocks of wood when I started. There is no telling how many hours and curse words I have in these two knives. They will knock the bark off a turkey or two next spring.

Nice work BC!.

True art my friend. They look outstanding

Great work

Looks great

That particular skill (talent) requires a virtue that I've never acquired.... Patience.
Those are spectacular. Beautiful work.

great looking knives BC!

Good job BC!

They look awesome!

X2

Great work BC.

Damn those look good

That's fine

Those look great!!

Those are really nice!

Really nice 👍🏻👍🏻

Nice work

Very, very nice

Nice

Nice!

Excellent work. Those look mighty fine.

Thanks for the nice words. Man those guys that make custom knives for a living are crazy. There are so many hours involved it’s crazy. It will be quite a while before I tackle another one lol.

Awesome BC!

WOW!!!!

Very nice.

What's the difference in the way the handles appear between the 2 pictures?

God Bless,
David B.

Beautiful work!

Beautiful work!!! I like the strutting gobbler on the blade too.

Very nice BC.

I rubbed them down with a little oil for the second picture.

I burned that into the steel with a stencil and a 2 amp battery charger.

Not bad for a Bammer fan.

Very nice

Those r awesome!

Beautiful work BC !

Those are nice!

Fine work right there, BC!

I'll take 3. Need 'em before deer season. Earlier completion
equals bonus attaboys.
Great work BC!

Very nice!

Dude, those are awesome. I LOVE the blade shape and the size. The turkey logo is legit.

Very very nice!

At $25 each they should sell quick......................

Good looking work BC. I just posted a couple of knives my son made then I scrolled down and saw these. Outstanding.

awesome man!!

Anyone interested in seeing the evolution of these knives? I took pics during the process.

Well of coarse.

Well Yeah.... sure do....

I will post up a few progression pics tomorrow.

I know from experience that you have a lot of time invested in those. Nice work.

Absolutely

It all started right after deer season. I was talking on the phone with one of my best friends and he was telling me he was getting Skullworks to make him a bird and trout knife to keep in his vest. I used to have a little B&T knife made by Buck that I absolutely loved and it was perfect for breasting out turkeys. Unfortunately I broke the tip off of it and tossed it years ago. I wanted to make something similar but of my own design. So I sat down at the kitchen table one night and sketched out my vision on a piece of paper and then rendered it to scale on the computer. I wound up increasing the overall length to 7.5 for the finished product and never updated the blueprints but this is what I started with.

Shortly after getting my final design hammered out, I simply printed it out and cut the knife pattern off the paper and put it on a piece of cardboard and traced it out. Cut the knife out of the cardboard and I had myself a pattern. Then I simply scribed it out on two blades on some 1095 bar stock I had and broke out the angle grinder and cutting wheel.

After that it was a simple clean up job on the grinder to get the profile.

The next step was to drill the pin holes and grind the bevels into the blades. The pin holes are a really critical step and if you get one hole off it ruins the whole look of a knife. I’ve thrown a lot of steel in the scrap pile because I wasn’t happy about the pin holes. Luckily I got them done and started grinding down the bevels on the blade. It took an afternoon of slow tedious grinding but everything went smooth and I got them ground down leaving the width of a dime on the blade edge so heat treat would not burn them and the edge “flake” off.

After some hand sanding down to 400 grit it was time for the heat treat. I don’t have the equipment to heat treat nor really the inclination since I’m not a big fan of burns, and 1500 degrees burns real deep real fast. So I sent the blades to Texas to my friend Cowboy Szymanski who is a professional knife maker and was on Forged and Fire Season 1. I knew I had about a month or longer before Cowboy could get to them because hey.... the man has his own projects and a business to run. So I got to thinking about the little things that would make it cooler. I came up with two, so I asked Cowboy to clay my blades for a hamon and I needed to come up with a bad ass logo with a turkey integrated. I’ve always used the BC in a circle for my makers mark and acid etched them into the steel. This time I was going to do it differently.

So I sat down at the computer and spent a couple hours designing a logo with the BC mark on it. I sent it to a guy in Florida who made me some stencils for a fee. Here’s the logo.

I will post some more a little later.

Outstanding work! Wanna flip the BC to CB and make me one?

Really like the look of the hamon line. Just curious why you only did the tip on the one knife. Will it have a different purpose than the other knife? Incredible workmanship!!!!

Cool!!

Very good question and I will explain here in a little while.

Great thread in the making here

Those are awesome BC!! Great looking work!!

Nice!

So while Cowboy has my knives I’m working on my makers mark side project. I get the stencils in and I’m ready to do a few test pieces. It’s a fairly simple process that requires you to make a jig. You essentially take a small I inch block of wood and drill a hole though the center. Insert a bolt through the wood and screw a nut on the end of the bolt. Then you get you a 1x1 piece of steel flat stock and tack weld that to the nut. Once complete you take a small piece of felt and zip tie it to the flat plate on your jig and get you a bowl of hot water with copious amounts of salt added to the water. The actual process is pretty simple. You tape the stencil on the steel and then make sure all the steel is covered in the area you are burning because if salt water touches the steel anywhere except on the stencil you will burn it. Once you get her taped down you simply set the charger on 2 Amp and put the positive lead on the steel and the negative lead on the bolt head of your jig. Dip the felt in the salt water and then dob the felt end on the stencil. You will hear it sizzle.

The process after this is 5 1-2 second dobs.
Clean the stencil (it will turn black)
Repeat 10 - 12 more times.

It sounds more complicated than it it but it literally takes 5 minutes to do. Here’s what you come up with.




You can leave it black or you can clean it out with a little oil and a Brillo pad.

With that done you can fast forward a couple weeks and I got my blades back from Cowboy. I was super excited about the steel when I got them back because he left the decarb on the blade and I could clearly see the hamon lines in the steel.




I begin the tedious process of hand sanding them down to 800 grit which took a couple of afternoons and some sore fingers but I eventually got them done. It was time to burn in the makers mark.

I get my stencil in place and let the charger do it’s thing.

It's extra cool that your initials are on them!

Once I got the makers marks burned in and looking good it was time to break out the ferric chloride acid and begin acid etching which will bring out the hamon. I won’t bore you with the 5000 word process for dipping and polishing but it’s extensive and time consuming.

Here’s where the earlier question about the hamon comes into play. Once I had gone through the acid etch process I could clearly see the hamon on both blades. Once I neutralized the acid though and rubbed off the acid only one of them had a clearly defined hamon. The other had the tip line and that was it. I re-etched several times but it would just go away when I cleaned it. Clearly there were some temp differences in the steels when they were heat treated and one just didn’t come out as good as the other. You don’t actually know how that’s going to turn out until you etch them so Cowboy couldn’t have known. I though the tip hamon was cool and unusual so instead of sending it back to Texas to be heat treated again I just rolled with it.


Here’s the finished product after acid etching.

At this point I was getting fatigued on the project and had a bunch of other stuff going on so I laid them down for about a month. All that really was left to do was put handles on them and do the finish work. Despite what you see on Forged and Fire you cannon put handles on a knife in 30 minutes. Everything has to be cut, squared up perfect, and the holes drilled correctly or it ain’t going together right.

With that said...... I picked out some Buckeye Burl and Arizona Ironwood blocks I had laying around and cut them into scales on the bandsaw.

Once I had them scaled up I started the tedious process of measuring, drilling, and shaping. I decided to make the back section out of G10 because it’s super strong and I knew that area around the lanyard tubing would be prone to breaking unless I used some stronger stuff.




Once I had everything cut out it was time to get it epoxied all together (which took multiple gluing sessions)




After that it was hours on the grinder and dremel tool getting them shaped. When I was done they looked like this.

Can't wait to hear the rest of the story...

To finish the handles I sanded them down to 1200 grit. Then I applied 50 coats of CA glue on the handle and sanded them down flat. This is suppose to give them a shine that won’t go away like buffing them does but it turned out to be a huge pain in the ass. If I had it to do over again I would decline that step but it was too late.

Once I got them all sanded and shiny I taped them off and re-etched the blade because the thin side of the steel get ground down when you are shaping the handles.

After that I was pretty much done except for breaking out some paracord and making some lanyard for them.

Finished product

Absolutely beautiful knives.

I'm getting one of those pins! LOL!

Alexi will hook you up.

Man that’s some awesome work!

Beautiful. Should be very proud of yourself.

Man those look awesome!

Now it gives more perspective to why a surgeon can bill what he does. Nice job!!!

Very nice. One looks like cocobola and the other burl of some type?

Arizona Ironwood and Buckeye Burl.

Looks great, you definitely have more patience than I do!