Monday, March 20, 2006

Bone Knife with Sheath

I am participating in the Skill of the Month Club that my brother and his friends came up with. This month's skill is making a bone knife. I ordered an elk and moose femur bone from an online company. I recently completed my moose bone knife. Here are several pictures of the knife.

This is the original moose leg bone.


Here it is after sawing off part of it.



This is my nearly complete knife.



Here you can see the compartment door I put on the knife. Since the bone is hollow, I thought I might store a sharpening stone or other items inside of it. The door slides back and forth, but will stick when it is in it's closed position so I don't have to worry about it always falling open.



Here is the knife after painting blue ink into the carved out areas. I carved a moose design on each side to honor the animal whose body is now my tool. The sheath is a design I found on this web page. The beauty of it is that it requires no stitching. I will eventually loop a leather cord through the top of the sheath so it can be worn around the waist. Alternatively, it could be looped through a belt.


I wasn't able to get the knife to be very sharp. I did some scraping and burnishing as suggested by Tom Brown Jr., but I couldn't get it to be sharp enough to shave as he has.

2 comments:

fooiemcgoo said...

very nice. your attention to detail and craftsmenship on this one should be commended!

I can't believe that you can get a bone knife sharp enough to shave!

fooiemcgoo said...

I require a new post.