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Back in the mid-sixties, I was stationed in Kitzingen, West Germany. One of my local friends gave me an old hunting knife... That was 40 years ago, and it was probably 10 years old at that time... Recently, I decided to give it a new lease on life...

The original handle was way too short, about 3 1/2" long. I pulled it off, and decided to make a handle out of an old deer antler I had found.

The blade, being so old, has a lot of character... ("Character" sounds a lot better than "pitted", don't you think?" ;-)

Here is the blade...

Here are the parts, ready to get started...

This is how the tang is supposed to fit into the handle...

The old brass guard was pretty beat up, and there was a gap between it and the blade. I kept the brass piece, and decided to not touch the blade, because I wanted an old, well used look to the final knife. It did take some work to make it fit right, tho...

Marking up the end...

Drilling out the hole... I don't have any production equipment, so everything was done with hand tools...

Then, filing the round hole into a slot, for the tang...

Part way through the filing, I check for alignment with the handle... Looks good so far!

After the hole was drilled...

You can see how much material must come off to match the handle up...

Working the antler down to match the guard...

Now you can see why it is called the Crooked Spear... Spear point blade, and a crooked piece of antler... Not only is it bent, but also twisted... Can't be seen here... Instead of picking a piece of antler that looked good, or fit the blade well, I picked one that felt good in the hand, and then made it work... I have found way too many knives to be painful to the hand, when used hard. I wanted to eliminate that problem with this one.

Here it is dyed, and only the flats and butt are rough filed down..

Here is the right side, rough filed down...

Here it is, after finishing...

The full view...

Here is the butt end...

And finally, it rides in a Rik Palm sheath...

A special thanks to my very good friend Rik Palm for the generous sharing of his knowledge. Without the discussions I had with him, I would not have been able to be so successful on this first attempt. There are lots of tricks to mounting a handle on a blade with a stick tang...

Thanks, Rik, you're the best!

Check out Rik's fabulous blade work at KnifeSmith.com. Click on the banner below:

Thanks for looking folks,

Bill

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(09/05/2011)

Hi Folks...

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http://bill-hay.com/Links.htm