Adventures in Fancy-Shank Making

I recently order a knife kit, from knifekits.com (of all places). While I got materials for making a sheath as well, this is only about making the handle. My friend Jared helped me out with it (we used his shop) and was a tremendous asset, and not only because he took almost all the pictures, which is something I almost always forget to do.

Here's the blade that I started with (I taped the blade to make handling it safer):


The material I chose for the handle was G10, which is interesting stuff. Here's my initial layout using masking tape:

The G10 comes with a "protective layer" covering the textured side. That's what peeling up there.

Cutting out the rough pieces with a band saw:


Handle bits are rough cut, ready to take the protective layer (no, not the masking tape) off:


Using the drill press to make holes for screw sets:


Once that's done, the rough handles can be attached to the blade for shaping and sanding:


The bulk of the sanding was done with a belt sander:


The dremmel was used for the getting in to those "hard to reach" areas.


The handle pieces where then taken off the blade and screwed together in order to make the blade-facing sides symmetrical and nice.


Sandpapered it all to get a nice finish. These are the nearly completed handles:


Finished product!


All in all, I think this came out super bad-ass! There's some more fine sanding to do (and Jared hooked me up with some sandypaper) and there's a few places where I took just a little too much material off, but those are mostly hard to spot. Jared's review of the process was "unadulterated success" which I completely agree with.