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Customized Wedding Knives with Laser Etching: A Personal Touch for Your Special Day

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Wedding planning can be overwhelming, but there are many ways to make it personal and special for you and your partner. One unique touch that you can add to your special day is customized wedding knives with laser etching. With this service, you can create a one-of-a-kind knife that you will use for years to come.

Laser etching is a precise and effective way of creating intricate designs and text on metal surfaces, making it the perfect method for creating custom wedding knives. The laser removes material from the surface of the knife to reveal the design or text you have chosen. The result is a clean and permanent mark that will not wear off over time.

Some popular designs for custom wedding knives include:

Names and wedding date
Personal quotes or vows
A special symbol or emblem
The couple’s initials

A custom wedding knife with the message etched in Gaelic

I offer a truly custom wedding knife with laser etching as one of my services.
When you order your customized wedding knife, be sure to provide clear and detailed instructions on the design or text you want to be etched. You are able to choose from a selection of font styles and knife styles. I also offer design services, in case you need assistance with creating your design.

Laser etching wedding knives is a unique and memorable way to make your special day even more personal. You and your partner will treasure this knife for years to come, and it will be a cherished reminder of your wedding day every time you use it.

If you want to discuss having a knife made for your wedding head over to the contact page where we can discuss your requirements.

The Advantages of Hand-Crafted Kitchen Knives

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Kitchen knives are an essential tool for any chef, but not all knives are created equal. Hand-crafted kitchen knives offer numerous benefits over their store-bought, mass-produced counterparts. Here are just a few of the many advantages of owning a hand-crafted kitchen knife.

Quality and Durability

Hand-crafted knives are made by skilled artisans who take the time to carefully craft each knife to perfection. This results in a higher quality product that is made to last. Store-bought mass-produced knives are often made with cheaper materials and may not be as durable or long-lasting as a hand-crafted knife.
k-tip check knife with a stabilised linden burl handle

Precision and Accuracy

Hand-crafted knives are made with the utmost precision and accuracy, which means that they are perfectly balanced and can be used with ease. Store-bought knives are often produced on a large scale, so the focus is on speed and quantity rather than precision and accuracy.
A paring knife in stabilised green poplar

Personalization

With hand-crafted knives, you have the option to personalize your knife to your specific needs and preferences. From the shape of the handle to the length of the blade, you can customize your knife to fit your hand and your cooking style. This is not an option with mass-produced knives, which are often only available in a limited range of sizes and styles.
K-tip chef knife handle in white dragon juma

Unique Design

Hand-crafted knives are truly unique pieces of art, and each one is different from the next. The attention to detail and craftsmanship that goes into each knife results in a truly one-of-a-kind product. Mass-produced knives, on the other hand, are often made with generic designs and lack the character and charm of hand-crafted knives.
Petty chef knife with a wrought-iron san mai steel blade close up

Improved Cooking Experience

With a high-quality hand-crafted knife, you can elevate your cooking experience. The precision and accuracy of the knife will make food prep a breeze, and the unique design will make cooking more enjoyable.
Nakiri vegetable knife in damascus sanmai

In conclusion, hand-crafted kitchen knives offer numerous benefits over store-bought, mass-produced knives. From their quality and durability to their unique designs, hand-crafted knives are truly a cut above the rest. Whether you’re a professional chef or a home cook, investing in a hand-crafted kitchen knife is a wise choice that will greatly improve your cooking experience.

If you are thinking of investing in a Hand-Crafted Kitchen Knife you can visit my online shop here, or drop me a message to discuss having something truly unique made.

What is a Bushcraft Knife?

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A Bushcraft knife is a tool that enables you to make or help repair kit whilst in the wilderness. Be that the woods or forests, jungle or grassland this knife should be able to help you successfully survive in any situation.

Bushcraft knife with a desert ironwood handle

The Cutting Edge

The blade should be easy to maintain and sharpen and should excel at carving and woodwork. You should be able to make tent pegs with ease, carve a spoon for eating your dinner and split down wood and make feather sticks for a fire.

It is a blade you need confidence in, as one moment you might be using it to cut string or paracord, and then next battening through wood to get a fire going after you have fallen into the water and are desperate to warm up.

The back edge of the knife should be sharp at the 90-degree angles. This isn’t for cutting, but for scraping. It should throw sparks from your fire steel with minimal effort, but should also be able to rough up the bark of silver birch to catch those sparks and take wispy thin shavings from your fatwood.

The Handle

The handle should be not only comfortable but also secure in both forwards and reverse grips. This is a knife that needs to be usable in any manner that you wish to make cuts. From straight forward cutting away from you to sharpen a stick, to the chest lever grip to make power cuts.

Handle shot of a bushcraft knife

The Sheath

The sheath needs to securely hold your knife. A leather sheath should be deep enough to hold the knife without risk of it falling out as you clamber through dense woodland, and a Kydex sheath should have good retention that needs a little effort to release the blade from the grip of the sheath.

Bushcraft knife in a leather sheath

Bushcraft knives have been made famous by the likes of Ray Mears, Lofty Wiseman, Lars Falt, Bear Grills, Ed Stafford and Ben Fogle who have all influenced the world of Bushcraft.

Bushcraft knife with a desert ironwood handle

If you want a Bushcraft Knife made by one of the best UK makers that have been tried and tested then why not get in contact today?

How to get one of my Knives

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There are two ways of getting a handmade knife from me. Either a custom knife order or directly from my knife shop.

I always build in time between my custom orders to make knives that I want to make. This allows my creativity to flow, and not get bogged down in making what others want me to make.

From now on when new knives are listed in my knife shop I will send an email to everyone on my mailing list to let them know that they are available. I will then wait at least 2 hours before advertising them on my Instagram and Facebook pages. This means that anyone signed up to the mailing list will get the first refusal.

So why not head over to my main page, and sign up to my mailing list (You have to scroll down the page a little). I promise to not send out loads of crap, or give your details to the dodgy bloke down the pub!

These are the two knives that were made available this week by the mailing list, and both sold within a day.

A custom knife order for a walnut handled TFK

My TFK Model in 1.2419 carbon steel with a stabilised walnut handle over vintage burgundy micarta liners.

A custom knife order for my Talon model with a green micarta handle

My Talon model is in AEB-L stainless steel with a green linen micarta handle over grey G10 liners.

However, if you want to enquire about a custom knife order then head over to my contacts page and we can discuss your requirements.

Knife Design – How to get started

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It can be quite a daunting task trying to design your own knife for the first time, but I hope that this guide will give you a few pointers and help you feel more confident in planning out and drawing your knives.

Firstly you need to think about what purpose the knife will be serving. Are you designing a knife for wood carving, a kitchen slicer or a diving knife? Each of these has properties that need serious consideration when designing your knife. A dive knife for example should not have a sharp tip, whereas a wood carving knife may want a sharp fine tip for detail work.

Take inspiration from knives that you own, or have used that you enjoyed using. What was it about these that you like? Is it the proportions of the handle or the design of the blade edge for example? What would you change to suit your preferences better? Do you wish that the blade was wider, and thinner on your favourite kitchen knife? The blade length on your favourite carving knife was a little shorter?

It is important when taking inspiration that you don’t just copy someone else’s work though and that you put your touch to the design.

When designing the handle you need to think about how it will be used. A kitchen knife isn’t going to be used in a reverse grip, but a bushcraft knife will so it is important to design a bushcraft handle that is comfortable in both forwards and reverse grip. A kitchen knife however does need careful consideration for finger clearance when chopping. No one wants a kitchen knife that will smash your knuckles into the work surfaces or chopping board.

Paper and pencil is a great place to start. Grid paper is excellent, as you will be able to use this to size your drawings, but you can also do this with a ruler. A nice set of French curves will also really help you get your lines to flow.

This is a set of French curves, these tools have many different radii that can be used to allow the lines to flow nicely when designing knives.

Using French curves to help design knives

Coins are great for tight radii and a rubber will take out your many mistakes. Make sure you continue to refer back to your notes and pay special attention to the handle. It is very easy to make a handle both too long and too wide when just drawing, and neither of these is comfortable in the hand. Use your hand as a reference on the paper to see where your drawing fits against your proportions.

This is a photo of a drawing I made very early on, with a knife handle that would be far too big for the average person’s hands. However, in drawing, you begin to realise the importance of proportions.

Using French curves to get the basic shape of a knife

If like me you are not great at drawing then it is a good idea to learn how to use a vector graphics editor to transpose your drawings from pencil and paper to a computer image. I use Inkscape which is a free open-source application. I use this to transpose all of my freehand drawings and improve the flow of my lines. It is also excellent for designing folding knives such as friction folders. This will allow you to play with more natural lines, and get a nice flow to your drawings. You can save the file, and tweak it as you make and test your knives. You can print it out to scale, and then transfer this straight onto your steel. I simply cut around the image with a scalpel and glue it to the steel.

A friction folder knife designed in Inkscape

Here is an example of how a pencil drawing evolved into a knife I redrew in Inkscape, and then made into a knife. This model is my Forager.

A hand drawn knife design
The same design transposed into Inkscape
The finished knife

The more you draw, the better you will become. All aspects of knife making are improved by content practice and drawing and design is the same. Just draw knives, get your ideas out of your head. For every 10 you draw you will probably only ever transfer 1 to steel, but it is that practice that will help you become a better knife designer and ultimately a better knife maker.

Have you now got the bug to start making, why not read my three-part series on how to make your knives here.

Knife Handle Material – What is available?

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It is a really exciting time for knife handle materials at the moment, there seem to be more and more options hitting the market all the time and as a maker, this is a great way of making your knives stand out from the crowd.

So what is available to you the customer? This blog will let you know and identify the benefits and disadvantages of each choice.

Wood

Wood is a wonderful material for knife handles and has been used for thousands of years. You only have to look at Otzi the Iceman and the wooden handled flint knife he carried to realise just how long it has been used for knife and tool handles.

The wood from every tree species is different and has different properties that you need to consider when choosing your handle material. They all offer different grain patterns, colours and chatoyance. Some woods such as birch are softer wood, whereas something like desert ironwood (the clue is in the name) is hard, and this really must be taken into consideration when thinking about how your knife will be used.

My Bushcrafter model knife

A knife with a wooden handle feels nice in the hand and has a warm feel. It is a popular material for knives that will be used in cold conditions because of this.

It is however susceptible to growth and shrinkage depending on how humid or dry the conditions it is kept in. This is also true of where it is made and then sold. A knife made by a maker who lives in a hot dry part of the world, shipping it to a buyer in a wet humid part of the world will mean that the handle will never remain in the same condition as when first made.

A knife with a wooden handle needs maintenance. It will need oiling to help maintain the stability of the timber. How often will depend on what you use it for, and how often you use it. Even a knife that remains in storage should be oiled once a year. Talk to your maker for advice on what oil they recommend you use, and how often.

Wood goes well on outdoor knives, pocket knives and especially well on sloyd knives and whittling knives.

Stabilised Wood

Stabilised wood offers all the wonderful qualities of a natural piece of timber, but with the benefits of not suffering from growth or shrinkage. Stabilised wood has been soaked under vacuum and pressure which forces a heat curing resin into the space where there was once air. These knife handle blocks are then baked in an oven to cure the resin, which hardens making it almost a plastic piece of wood. It retains its colour, the natural twists and swirls in the grain and makes what would have been brittle burrs stable and usable as wonderful blocks of wood for knife handles.

Often dyes are added to the stabilising fluids, which can add a new dimension to the timbers. Offering many different colours that wouldn’t normally be seen in the natural world that look stunning on a knife, as can be seen in the photo below showing the kitchen knife handle material that has been both dyed and stabilised.

A kitchen knife handle

Make sure that you purchase from a reputable supplier, as unfortunately there seems to be a lot of people offering poor quality stabilised timber, so make sure you do your research to ensure you are buying a quality product.

Stabilised wood goes well on chef knives, outdoors knives and hunting knives

Micarta, G10 and Tufnol

These are man-made synthetic materials. As such they are very durable and hardwearing, They are also stable, and will not change in size with dry or wet conditions. They are easy to keep clean and make for a great handle for an outdoors or hunting knife.

These materials can be taken to a very high polish, or bead blasted for a grippy handle that has an excellent texture and feeling in the hand when working in wet conditions.

A heavily sculpted knife handle

There is a great range of materials in this range, with fantastic colour combinations. This leads to some really interesting patterns that can be revealed as you sculpt the knife handles. When buying look for this pattern to be replicated on each side of the knife, it shows the care and attention from the maker when they have gone to the length to ensure that the sculpting matches each side.

Goliath Friction Folder

These materials go well on hunting knives, kitchen knives, pocket knives, folding knives and combat knives.

Composite Resins

Casting resin has opened up a whole new arena for knife scales. You name it, someone somewhere has cast it in resin and made a knife handle from it. From corn on the cob to pine cones to shit! I kid you not, I saw a knife handle made from shit!

My personal favourites are c-tek honeycomb knife scales. You can get amazing results with crazy colours of translucent resins that make for a unique knife. C-Tek seems to be the marmite of the knife world, but I think it’s fantastic.

A folding knife with c-tek resin

I am also a massive fan of Juma. This again is a cast resin, but it looks like dragon scales. It comes in a variety of colours and makes for a beautiful knife handle. The pattern runs through the material, so as you shape your handle it continues to reveal itself.

A green dragon skin juma handle

Resins are a very stable material, but they can be brittle. I wouldn’t want to use it on a knife that would be put under any stress as the material could chip or crack.

These materials go well on kitchen knives, EDC carry knives, pocket knives and folding knives.

Bone, Antler, Tooth and Horn

Another material that has been used for knife handles for as long as time can tell. As a material, it lends itself to being a tool handle incredibly well. It can be used in its natural state, with the tang of the knife slotted directly into the antler or bone with little other work needing to be done. Often seen on bowie knives and those in the style of mountain men knives. Bigger pieces can also be cut into scales for full tang knives. Bone and tooth can be dyed and stabilised in much the same way as wood can. IN this condition it polishes well and makes for a truly beautiful knife handle.

The material can be fragile, especially with things like mammoth teeth that are 100’s or thousands of years old. If not stabilised any of this material is at risk of growth and shrinkage depending on the conditions it is kept in. This can also lead to material cracking.

It ages beautifully, bone often developing a rich patina through both age and use.

These materials go exceptionally well on pocket knives and folding knives. It also makes for a great outdoorsman knife and hunting knife.

So now you have you handle material sorted, learn about steel types here

And while you are at it, why not browse the current knives I have available for sale