Finally finished my first homemade knife, a direct clone of the Grohmann #3 jump knife as requested by my oldest son. The blade is 80CrV2, profiled from 3.2mm bar-stock and heat-treated to 60 HRC for me by Rob at knifemaker.ca. The scales are curly birch with thin layers of maple and copper for spacers, peened copper pins, copper lanyard tube, and finished with tung oil. I've learned quite a few lessons from this project, particularly about the virtues of patience and simplicity (next time I'm just going to stick to a single spacer material for a sharp contrast instead of the blurred-effect I got from the maple and copper). I've also learned that I want to invest in some proper tools if I'm going to keep doing this Fit and finish is going to be a learning curve for sure, but I've already got a few ideas for how to avoid some mistakes on my next one.
Very well done! I've always liked this style of knife. Did you do the jimping by hand with a needle file? I've found that contrasting spacer materials really stand out. I really dig the effect of black and white vulcanized fiber spacers next to each other. Great job! Dan
Thank you! I tried hand-filing some practice jimping on a bit of scrap and made a horrible mess of it, so this was done with a lot of breath-holding and lip-biting on the band saw, with some clean-up filing afterwards to make sure all the depths matched and to widen them out a bit. What thickness do you find best for contrasting spacers? I really thought the 0.25mm copper layer would stand out better, but it's almost invisible.
I can appreciate the time you put in. Certainly you made an awesome knife. Due to availability, I mostly use the 0.030" spacer material. This is closer to 0.75mm. Dan
0.75mm makes a lot more sense now that I have a reference; thank you for the advice! Time for some shopping...
First knife? Wow!! Really? That's an amazing job. I can tell that you pay a lot of attention to detail and have a lot of patience. Call me impressed and a little jealous - it took me forever to get anywhere near this level of quality. I find this style very interesting. It certainly has a distinct style to it.
Todd, thank you very much for the kind words. I've built a couple of kits and re-handled some old blades before, but this is my first bar-of-steel/block-of-wood attempt. I still haven't tried designing something unique instead of a clone though; everything I sketch out so far looks like something I've already seen someone else do better. Looking at the knives everyone else is building here, I'm in absolute awe at the creativity.
Great knife and built on a very versatile and proven design - a great improvement on the production model.
