The Bowie

Regular work has been a little slow this summer for me, so to fill the time I decided to make  something that I have always thought about making but never have gotten around to actually doing. A Bowie knife. As in Jim Bowie (not to be confused with David Bowie. I know how you kids love that tight pants rock and roll). A man's man. Probably had a mustache, maybe even two. He was so manly he had a knife named after him. Not just any knife. The Bowie knife ended up being more or less the be-all-end-all knife of the frontier. Mountain men, trappers, explorers, soldiers and anyone else who went outside in the frontier days carried a version of it. Large, heavy, thick, sturdy, this knife could handle anything. Splitting kindling, felling small trees, skinning game, fighting bears or the occasional fool who accused Mr. Bowie of being a cheat. nothing fazed it.

The design varied a bit from smith to smith but the telling feature to me when I see a Bowie is the clip point. When the blade was being shaped rather than the spine of the blade going all the way to the tip the billet was usually 'clipped' off at about a 30' angle. This gives you about a couple inches of a reverse curved blade false to the main edge. The way I heard it, this was done so that the heavy blade could quickly snap cut backwards if you missed your main cut...but I have a feeling it was more utilitarian than that. I'm sure I could research this and provide all the answers but that is not my purpose here.  Let's move on to the way I made mine.

I seem to be a fan of Stanley's 21" wonder bar for blades. At ~15$ it makes it hard to pass up. The process began the same as the last, nick off the ends and use the bar left behind. Now it's not perfectly straight when you do this, I have to straighten it out a bit using a clever technique I saw in a book one time. I hit it with a hammer.

When that didn't work I did it the right way using a different technique from a different book. Using a vice and three round pieces of metal 1/2 inch bar like teeth in the vice I crushed out the high spots. Sounds easy enough but it actually took allot of strength to straighten 1/4" thick tool steel. After I had it good and straight I readied my angle grinder with a cutting wheel again and made the clip. At this point all you have is a bar with a straight angle. Not very knife like. The key feature I wanted to accentuate was the flared out blade and curved reverse clip. Heat and hammer were the only solution and since I am between forges right now I used the next best thing. Oxyacetylene. Not the best way to do a knife but it works in a pinch. I heated the end of the blade and hammered the tip to a nice widened flare and a slight curve on the clip point.

The next step was the tang. I decided to make it 1/2" wide and the length of the handle for strength but thin enough to be hid by the handle completely. Angle grinder made short work of the steel in the way. Now for the guard. I had some 1 inch by 1/8" iron strap laying around so it volunteered for the job. I found the center and drilled two 1/4" holes in the center and used a Dremel to turn them into a square opening for the tang.  I bent the back about an inch up and the front about an inch and a half downward than rounded the tips on the bench grinder. It seemed a bit too ordinary to me so I accented it with a small round file.

After I made the fit adequate I put a cursory edge grind on the blade with a 60 grit flap disc on my angle grinder. Sandpaper is astounding when it comes to making metal disappear.

That being done I needed a handle. Hardwood was the only choice. I found an old scrap of oak in the corner that fit my needs. The one piece became two by way of miter saw and a router table made short work of the channel needed in the center of both pieces. Just set the depth and select the right bit and go. The only problem was that the ends of the channel were round not square like the end of the tang. rather than use a hand chisels to square the channel, I rounded the end of the tang with a bench grind. Fit like a glove to use a cliche. All that was left was to glue and wait.

After a few days I returned to find the expected results. My two slices of wood have worked out thier differences and rejoined.

Now I could slide this onto the tang and get to work shaping the handle down.

I put a bit of wood glue in the channel to fill any gaps there may be inside and keep everything temporarily tight but it was kind of redundant as the fit was so tight I had to literally pound the block onto the tang. I made some gross measurements and got an idea of the rough shape and began to shape by taking away the wood with a large angry looking rasp that has a fondness for taking wood down faster than a power sander.

The more detailed bits had to be done with a small cousin. Using hand tools allowed me to maintain a large measure of control and make it just right. After a few hours of this I had only managed to take a little bit of my thumb knuckle off  but the handle was as good as I needed to move onto sanding. Using a flap disc on my angle grinder I smoothed out the rougher lines and edges and moved onto 220 grit sandpaper for a hand finish. Nice and smooth.

All that was left was to rivet the handle on. Once again the drill press provided a wonderful solution for drilling precise holes through steel and wood all at once in a straight line. I used two standard nails and a ball peen hammer to rivet the ends over and that was that. This knife was roughly done.

At this point the finish work began. I sanded a little more on the blade and handle to make everything even and smooth. Red oak stain went to the handle to darken it and bring the color out. After the stain dried I applied two coats of clear coat to seal it and keep it looking nice.

Now as I looked at it I felt like the blade was a bit uneven on the grind. To protect the handles finish I wrapped it in a blue towel and painters tape and set to work with the angle grinder on sand mode.

When I felt like it was as even as I could get it I set the grinder down and resisted the urge that I so often get to over finish things and and up ruining them in the end. Hand made crafts in my opinion should have some flaws. I am no machine (although I am working on that). I finished the polish with sandpaper and oil and a rag. Next came the sheath. You can't just make a knife without a sheath to put it in. Its against the knife making code. True story. Luckily I live near a leather craft store where they sell everything you could want and more for making stuff out of leather. I bought a kinda rough piece of cow hide for about 6 dollars and measured the knife against it.

The color blends into the wood my bench is made of but you can almost see it. I used some shears to cut out the rough piece and began to punch holes into it for the lacing. I had to use a pop rivet to secure the most abused corner. Believe it or not, punching through two layers of leather at once is hard.

After a time of this I had enough holes to make this happen.

Tan is such an ugly color though. I am much more partial to darker brown for leather. I happened to have a trick to fix that. Normal people doing this would use leather dye, and they would be right to do so. But I used wood stain. Because I had it and it worked.

After it had a chance to dry I laced it up with the suede lace I bought with the leather. Not the strongest stuff in retrospect but it will hold. All in all, I think it turned out acceptable. And being something I made I decided to make sure I didn't waste my time. so I hit some stuff with it to make sure it could at least cut.

No problems with making wood chips out of this old log bit. I am satisfied. I like this knife.

I took a few more pictures so here they are. Just for kicks.

The spear

It's been a while since my last project. Life has a way of getting in the way of my hobbies however much I love them. I have always loved the spear. It was cheap and easy to use in it's day and was, despite what most movies and games would lead you to believe, one of the most prevalent weapons in the eras of melee combat due to those simple facts. In those epic stories some of us love you never see many protagonists with a spear. It's all about the sword. That's all well and good- but there just isn't enough spear love so I aimed to remedy that.

Now I made a go at a spear many years ago when I was not as practiced as I am now at this. It was not great. I feel like this attempt is much better. As with other projects this one started with an idea. I picked up my pencil after a while of it rattling around my skull and threw it on paper.

Once on paper I knew It was time to start making this thing. Again I found good steel in a Stanley wonder bar, an x2 I think it was called. But what about the shaft? That posed a unique problem as this was to be what I would consider a good spear and not the garbage I have seen in so many catalogs and internet 'weapon shops'. A spear shaft in my opinion needs to be able to take a fair amount of abuse i.e. impact, shock, direct hits so I decided to go with the only logical choice. A decent hardwood. The search begins. Turns out most hardware stores don't really sell hardwood shafts in more than about 4 ft lengths unless you look to buy tool handles witch to their credit are good strong hardwood such as ash, hickory, oak but all are machined down to unacceptable shapes or sizes for my needs this time. So I settled for a martial arts staff of red oak. I should have began there as they are made a bit differently than normal wood dowels. Most staves as, I understand it, are from the cores of saplings and have a long linear grain good for absorbing impact. Perfect for what I intended. Next up I picked up a length of iron pipe from the hardware store and a 1 and 7/8inch trailer hitch ball to be used as both a counterweight and alternate impact surface.

Work begins: I started off by cutting off the ends of the wonder bar to get a straight billet of tool steel with my trusty angle grinder. Next I shaped about 2 inches worth of tang to go into the pipe. With that task finished I fixed the two pieces of metal together with my Lincoln stick welder using 1/4 round bar stock to fill the gaps and reenforce the tang. It looked wrong though. It was missing something. I decided I needed a cross guard for both functional and aesthetic reasons. You see on Chinese fighting spears they have a large red tassel at the end that had a few purposes. One of witch was to keep a dedicated enemy from running up your spear shaft after you run him through to take you with him into whatever lies beyond. On English boar spears cross guards exist for the same reason. Wild boars don't care that they are stuck with a spear, they will keep right on charging unless something keeps them back. Enter the railroad spike. An ancient rusted thing I found about a decade earlier while walking along the rails that are all around my town. Some simple cuts and grinds later and I had two pieces that were shortly welded to the tang and formed the block of a raw cross guard.

That was about it for the first day. About 4 or so hours of real work. I returned when I was able and began the butt of the spear. Most spears that I have handled or seen usually had no end or if anything just a simple metal cap. I wanted more than that, this was after all supposed to be my ideal spear and I figured a nice solid ball on the end would be magnificent. I was not wrong. I cut the hitch ball off and welded it to the other piece of pipe and polished all the coating and scaling off with a wire brush wheel for my angle grinder and a bit of sand paper. Next I implemented a decorative groove below the beveled ends for the end cap and drilled a hole for the rivet after sliding it onto the shaft. A large nail and a bit of work with a ball peen hammer and it was together. This oak stick suddenly had allot more weight to it.

That was enough for that day. Another several hours worth of work. I came back for the final push a few days later. I began by rough shaping the tip and cross guard. Most of the work was handled with the angle grinder and a 4 and  1/2 inch grinding wheel. Next came the grooves in the neck of the spear head. They would serve as decoration and if necessary a grip for when you have to choke up on the spear. I had to get creative here. I mounted my grinder in the vice and spun the head in my hands along the spinning grind wheel...like a reverse lathe if you will. The result was good enough for me after touching it up with a 1/4 inch round file and sanding wheel.

After this the only thing left was the blade. It was looking a bit plain as I began to think about finishing the blade. I decided it needed a fuller. A blood groove as I have commonly heard it referred to. That however is not the purpose of a fuller, it's not to provide drainage, its merely to subtract wight from the blade and add aesthetics. It can be a bit complicated to make them though, especially if you want them to look decent. I used blue painters tape and tried to set up a rig to force the grinder to grind nice and straight down the center but it was not as easy as that. In the end I measured and drew the lines on the painters tape directly on the blade and free handed it. I'm not too bad at free handing as it turned out pretty even. I touched it up with a dremel and a carbide rounded tip, then a sanding wheel. After the fuller All that was left was the edge grind. I learned a neat trick about edge grinding to keep it nice and even by watching a master do it once. A simple line down the center of the edge of your billet works amazingly at keeping the edges even and clean. Just like in kindergarten you want to color, or in this case, grind inside the lines for the 'A'. After the rough grind a sanding wheel polished it up nicely.

The final steps were quite simple, two holes done on a drill press, two rivets made of large nails and ball peen hammer work and its all one ominous piece of hardware. Some final polishing with wire wheels and sanding discs gave it the finished look. I signed my mark, the triple V with a dremel.

Over all the spear measures in at 7'2" and weighs about 6 lbs. pretty substantial for a melee weapon but I definitely feel confident in it. But what now? There is no realistic need for this kind of weapon anymore. It will never be used on a battlefield or anything similar. I leaned it up on the wall and thought about it for a while.

That's it, I will hang it on my wall. After all whats the point of having a house if it never feels like your home? So I needed a mount. Where do you get a spear mount? The internet? Those purveyors of the junk weapons that I get so offended at seeing peddled? Well they do know how to make a plaque to display a weapon designed to do nothing more than hang on a wall, but my spear was designed as a weapon and deserved a better mount than that. It's only fitting that I make that as well. So a plank of pine ,some decent looking hooks, stain, a rasp, and an hours worth of sweat later and I had my solution. I love it.