There are many materials you can make make your design patterns out of but their function remains the same in that the design can be transferred onto your steel and the resultant knife, matches the design.īelow is a shortlist of various materials you can use, and arrange in order of increasing longevity. Make the same design over and over again.If not, at least you will have an idea taking shape and reach for the paper, pencil, rule, and french curves. Often you can look up the type of knife you want (Bowie Knife Templates, etc), and if you’re lucky you’ll find the one you want and you can simply print it off and stick it onto your bar stock. If you look up “knife templates” on Google, you’ll be flooded with hundreds of images. The blades were wrong in every way and are still lurking in a dark corner of my workshop. One of the biggest mistakes I made initially was designing a knife on the computer and having it laser cut without printing it nor testing it with wood. I myself have been through a number of templates before finally transferring those knife designs to CAD and having the blanks laser cut. Knife templates are the simplest and easiest way to get into knife design and a lot of concepts can be learned by looking and what other people do well or not so well. Good knife design is something that evolves over time and your knife designs will evolve as you gain experience and knowledge. and that’s well and good, but patterns are very handy in getting a set design off of a piece of paper and tracing it onto a bar of steel. A lot of bladesmiths have been heard to say that the steel “spoke to them” when forging a knife…. Knife templates are designs that you make or want to make that aren’t simply sketched freehand onto the steel. Today we have hundreds and thousands of different knife designs that have been tried and tested through the years, and likely the knife you want to tackle next has plenty of thought already given to it for you to base your own ideas and ideas on. Knifemaking is a tradition that dates back to the beginning of humans, they are arguably our first tool and as such have had thousands of years of design put into them.
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