Alistair Phillips - Knifemaker

Member of the Australian Knifemakers Guild

The next thing I did was to use the template to lay out a few copies onto the ATS-34 steel I had.

You can see here I have darkened up the steel with a permanent marker so that the scribed line will be easier to see. I am also holding the template steady by using a bulldog clip to hold it in place. You can see I have plenty of room to fit 2 knives in one section of steel.

Here I have done a rough grind of the outline. I ran into a little trouble here since the layout was different on 2 of the knives. It meant I couldn't get into the tight corner in the disc sander.

I did the final outline with a P100 sanding disc on the disc sander and used a round file to get into the tight curve.

I used a bit of scrap steel to determine what size hole to drill in the tangs. I needed to make sure I could fit 2 pieces of paracord through the hole for a tight fit. You can see I have also sanded the scale off the knives by flat sanding them on a sheet of sand paper on my workbench.

Here I have centre punched all the hole locations in the tangs ready for drilling.

And finally all drilled.