The Highway knife – Make Your Own

Who would like to make their own knife? I have to say that it’s a blast and incredibly satisfying, I’ve made a few knives over the years and enjoyed it immensely.

There’s something special about having it in your hand, something you’ve made and if you’ve made it well you’ve created an heirloom that will be passed on to your children and that’s an amazing thing.

This article done’s cover the actual forging of the blade but ti does give you a great start to getting hold of materials, and you can look up the actual forging bit on youtube or one fo the great knife forums.

The thing to keep in mind is that it doesn’t matter how rudimentary your knife is because all that really counts is that you’ve got a good cutting edge, I own a few knives that have hammer marks all over them but boy do they cut well and that’s what’s important.

If you want a really neat knife, then you might have to get some practice in and knock out a few and then you’ll start to get a feel for it and start producing better and better knives.

For now, though this is a basic intro to how you can get hold of some materials and create a knife, getting a little forge set up isn’t hard, a hair dryer and pipe can act as your bellows and some charcoal as your fuel, any hard flat surface can be used to hammer on, just make sure you’ve got some protection from the heat and some goggles on.

Here’s the highway knife from Forginhill

I love scavenging and making useful stuff from the free junk I find. Recently I explored a short stretch of highway and found a piece of leaf spring and a piece of juniper wood lying close to each other. I decided to combine them into a “highway knife.” I roughed the handle out with an adze and knife.

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Thanks to Forginhill of Bushcraft UK Article Source

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We love this sort of thing on Outdoor Revival and we’ll be bringing you a lot more of it over the coming months, if you enjoy making or repairing your outdoor kit or if you have a good story to tell or blog let us know about it on our FB page, we’re also happy for article or review submissions , we’d love to hear from you.

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jack-beckett

jack-beckett is one of the authors writing for Outdoor Revival