fresh Mora #106 knife blades with shop made handles!

this is the knife blank you get from morakniv. i ground up a little bit of the blade edge so that it was separated from the hilt of the handles on my bench grinder.

I forgot to take action shots of the handles getting glued up. it's a "clam shell" construction, where you have two halves of the handle, and route out the knife bolt into one side. I traced with a pencil and used a chisel and a small router plane to get the blade to fit snug on one side. i dont think it has to fit super perfect because i used epoxy with glass fibers mixed into it. in my experience this bonds metal to wood pretty well. I did abrade the knife bolt and clean it up with mineral spirits before assembly.

I used two woods here: padouk, and afromosia. i had some random offcuts in the bits box and these both have interlocked grain which would do well as knife handles i think

my patternmaker's vice was so wonderful. it held the work beautifully and i was able to use stop cuts and chisels, and saw rasps to refine the profiles.

I ended up using my small japanese block plane to achieve the bevel on the handle edges, along with a spoke shave. the padouk was more well behaved, the afromosia was quite wild and so i had to resort to sandpaper/scrapers to refine the facets.

I finally used an old beater chisel to clean up the epoxy squeeze-out at the hilt.

can't wait to put these babies to use. next weekend's project is to build wooden scabbards for them...