My new lacewood handled knife and lacewood & leather sheath

[Batmancaver]

Well, it's been a while since I've made any new knives, mainly due to personal reasons and it's been a while since I put rasp to wood and shaped something plain and boring into something interesting, however, that doesn't mean that there have not been loads of ideas wandering around my skull.

As a countryside ranger I've oft needed a fixed blade knife for work so it was time to sort something out. I've looked at lots of fantastic work on here to get ideas and eventually, I got my planning book out and sketched out some ideas. Then I dug out my tools, got out a blade I'd bought about 2 years ago and selected some wood.
The rest as they say is history! Oh, and a lot of swearing and cursing as some things worked and some didn't!

I liked another knife workers abalone bolstered knife so managed to pick a piece up of the bay. I think the one I bought was a thin sliver of abalone shell covered in some sort of acrylic because in the final stages of polishing, with a wheel, the blooming thing melted! I managed to rectify it with some auto acrylic paint, but I leant an important lesson and doubt I'll be using that again.
A couple of years back I'd bought some lacewood and liked the idea of that as a handle. I coupled it with some walnut I had and made some spacers with some red and black fibre liner interspaced with walnut veneer.

As I had backed the abalone with brass I decided to top it with brass as well.

I've always liked the looks of the Scandinavean antler sheaths but as I didn't have any antler then I decided to do the sheath in lacewood as well. I also decided to match in the walnut and red & black fibreliner and brass as well. Unfortunately the place I ordered some brass sheet from sent me copper by mistake and I didn't notice until it was all glued together and being polished. Oh, well, live and learn as they say! I won't do that again, besides, I still like the looks of the sheath anyway.
The leather top of the sheath was a nightmare. The first attempt just did not work as when I flattened out the stitching at the back it all spread out and became way too big for the sheath. The second attempt went the same way but on the third attempt all went mostly ok. It ended up a little bit loose and so I cheated a bit and used a bit of epoxy to hold the leather to the sheath. To finish it off and make sure it held together at the base I used a brass pin peaned into place and a brass mosaic pin epoxied in.
Oh, and I had to add my trademark owl to the sheath as well!

Well enough rabbitting on by me, what do you think?

[Bradlad]

Some skill there m8.

Knives aren't really my thing but credit where it's due ^:)^

[Finbar]

Some skill there m8.

Knives aren't really my thing but credit where it's due ^:)^

Only cause your not allowed sharp objects in the home..
Very nice work there BMC. :-bd

[westonadam]

you sir have a great skill , what a thing of beauty I suppose all the time and effort would put a high price tag on a knife like that ???

[cling on]

very nice, like the short blade too............ easy to conceal

did i say that out loud?

[novocaine]

very nice. send it this way and get the blade etched. (or did you miss that thread?)