Fortunately, the knives in question are ‘full-tang’. That means that the steel from the blade continues all the way through the knife-handle. The handle isn’t much more than a block of ‘something’ attached to the outside of the ‘tang’.
You can make knife-handles out of lots of different materials, and there are plenty of shops online dedicated to just these ‘scales’ (as handle material is known in the knife-making world). You can get resins (often imbued with colours, glitters, or swirls), exotic woods with interesting grains, and a host of other things. However, I decided to use a chunk of oak off-cuts. This is partly because I’m cheap, and partly because – OK, it’s entirely because I’m cheap. Knife scales are expensive, and I want to do a set of knives. I may live to regret this decision, but so far it’s working out OK.
I’ll attach the wood to the tang with epoxy and then shape it using the tang as a guide. But there’s one part of the handle that can’t be shaped after it’s attached, and that’s the leading edge – the part at the front, perpendicular to the blade. The first task, then, is to take the angle of this down from 90 degrees to a more aesthetically pleasing 75 or 80 (I didn’t use a protractor, and just did this by eye).
There are many ways of shaping wood, and throughout this process I used ‘power carving’. In this case, I used a cylindrical sanding bit on a rotary tool to remove the bits I didn’t want. There’s no need to worry about the corners here. The basic idea is to have blocks of wood that are too large, with just the front face shaped. I’ll remove the excess material after the handles are glued on.
Most knife tangs have holes in, and you can put a brass bar through this. In my experience, this isn’t necessary for strength – epoxy is strong enough on its own to hold the handles in place. It’s a purely aesthetic thing. I decided not to add them – mostly because I have a lot of knives to do and not much time to do it in.
Gluing up is just a case of roughing the surface of the tang with some coarse sandpaper, mixing the epoxy, applying it, popping the handles on, and clamping up. The only thing to watch out for here is to make sure that you get the front face right. Too much epoxy and it will squidge out too much, and it’s hard to remove from the knife-blade. Too little and the very front bit won’t be glued (food might get stuck in here). I aimed to get a tiny little bit to squeeze out – so little that it wasn’t noticeable when looking at it. I think I succeeded, but I’ll only know for sure after I’ve been using it for a while. If things start to get caught under there, then it’s too little.
At this point, I had big square blocks of wood attached to the front of the knife. Shaping the handles seems like it should be a tricky process, but actually, it’s very easy. I used three tools: an angle grinder with sanding flap-disc for very rough shaping, a rotary tool with a cylindrical sanding bit for slightly more detailed work, and a sanding block for the more fine work. Getting the profile of the handle is easy because all you have to do is go in with the angle grinder perpendicular to the tang, and keep removing wood until you reach the tang.
The angle grinder with a flap disc is a powerful beast. It’s great for power carving because it rips out large chunks of wood quickly, and in this case, isn’t damaged when it hits the metal of the tang. It does produce a lot of dust, so a good ventilator is essential.
At this point, I had shaped the handle in two dimensions, but it was still square and blocky in the third. Time to smooth round the top of the handle. I did this with the rotary tool. Doing this free-hand isn’t too hard, but you must be careful not to remove too much in the wrong places. I found that playing with the speed of the cutter until I got the right level of aggressiveness was essential to keeping control of the tool.
Once that was done, I ditched the power tools and went at it by hand. First, with the sanding block, I ensured everything that should be flat was flat, and made minor adjustments to corners. Then, I went through the grades of sandpaper to get to a nice smooth finish. Finally, a couple of coats of food-grade wood-oil finished off the knife.
I’m really pleased with how it looks, but more than this, I like the feel of it in my hand. It’s hard to say exactly what is different about it, but it’s just nicer to use. Unfortunately, I still have four more knives to re-handle. Back to the workshop!
