Making a belt knife

As I observed at the time, one takeaway from Marathon 2015 is that we still sometimes need a small but sharp knife around camp for mundane jobs.  Since my flanged dagger project will require grinding primary bevels and cold-forging flanges anyway, I decided to practice these skills and acquire a needed accessory in the process.

The knife is inspired loosely by one seen in Oriental Institute Publications 69 (pg. 311 of the PDF) and, to a lesser extent, one with a more extreme recurve found at Deve Hüyük.  Mine doesn't exactly resemble either of them, and is sized to be useful for tasks like cutting rope and opening boxes.  I don't know what the purpose of the recurved shape is, but it's pretty common, used by the Romans, Thracians, and in South Asia, so there must be something to it.

The lack of any blade shoulder gives it away as a utility knife with little use as a weapon, as there's nothing to keep the fingers from slipping onto the blade if used for stabbing and it's too small to put any power behind a slashing attack.  Of course, that does make it a bit less safe as a tool as well; even most utility knives have a bit of a shoulder, but not all, so if you're not reckless, it's fine.

I markered the outline freehand on 1x1/8-inch mild steel bar stock, added the rivet holes with a drill press and cleaned them up with my Dremel's cone cutter.  I cut the outline with my angle grinder and did the primary bevels with the standard stone grinding wheel.  I intended for it to have a flat grind from the spine, but when the edge started to get too thin, it wore away and deformed.  Perhaps being overly cautious, I wound up giving it a convex bevel that only extends about half its width.  As a result, the blade is very sturdy but probably won't get too sharp.

Forging the flanges was easy enough (took a lot of effort, but that's just my lack of stamina talking), but there was still quite a bit of extra material, which suggests that I might want to go back and reduce the extra width I added to the flanged dagger tang for that purpose

The grip is black walnut, cut and drilled at Bucks, with a simple linseed oil finish.  The trick in drilling rivet holes in a grip of this type is to chuck up a bit on the drill press, hold the blade either over the edge of a block or preferably in a vise so that the tang sticks out, and position it so the drill bit is sticking straight down through the rivet holes.  Then slip the grip onto the tang, making absolutely sure not to move the tang at all, start the drill press and lower it until it drills through the grip, passing through the tang holes in the process.  It's a delicate job even with modern equipment and a humbling reminder of what clever bastards ancient people were.  I understand that a clamp is preferable for holding the blade but there weren't any in the shop that would actually work for the purpose.

I made the slot a bit too wide, requiring a shim (that little pale edge peeking out between the blade and grip), and the grip is a bit too narrow between the flanges, which I didn't notice until after drilling.  So I rounded off the ends of the flanges so they wouldn't bite into my hand.  Rivets are simply an annealed common nail cut up with the angle grinder's cutting wheel.  The sheath is heavy molded rawhide with a welt and glove suede facing, painted with the Iranian rosette and just tied to the belt with a suede band.

My camera didn't want to focus on it, but I found the rope-like seam produced by single whipstitching very interesting.  When the needle initially entered the leather from the front, whipped around and passed through the front again, the seam on the back was curled forward into a shape I found oddly reminiscent of the edging seen on ornate akinakes scabbards (see here, third photo from the top on the left).  Obviously the resemblance is not that great, but I could imagine this kind of leather seam edging, whose decorative quality is purely incidental, as being distantly ancestral to that used on what are presumably metal facings.