Sheffield-style Bowie

Although I've only read it once, now nine years ago, one of the novels I've found most moving is Catch-22, by Joseph Heller.  Incidentally, there's a couple passages where Yossarian ponders stabbing Orr with the hunting knife slung from the mosquito net bar over the dead man's cot.  I forgot until recently that it wasn't just any odd knife that could qualify as a "hunting knife" (of which there's a wide spectrum of designs meant for different tasks involved in hunting).  It actually receives a little bit more description in one passage, where it's stated to be "long" and "bone-handled."

I always had in mind to make it in an Old Western style.  I settled on a "classic clip point" Bowie from Crazy Crow.  It features a guard from the same source, sold as "white brass" - this may mean either very high-alloy brass or nickel silver, but since it has the same color and working properties as the latter, I assume that's what it is - and matching cutler's pins, escutcheon plate and scabbard hardware.  I did have to rely on yellow brass for the escutcheon pins and the staple holding the throat.  Since I dislike working with bone, I used a pair of holly scales, finished with linseed oil, which coincidentally imparts a color to pale wood not dissimilar to antique bone.  According to the Wood Database, holly typically has a janka hardness comparable to black walnut, but the hardness and density of a tree trunk varies with growing conditions and the scales I used seemed little harder than poplar.

This time around, I tried to use only pre-modern materials wherever possible.  The sheath and frog are unstained veg-tan, finished with neatsfoot oil and then a thin coat of beeswax melted in, and stitched with waxed linen thread.  Admittedly the beeswax is in the form of Sno-Seal, which is softened with a volatile solvent to make it spreadable at room temperature, but the only modern material remaining in the finished knife is two-part epoxy used to reinforce the attachment of the scales, throat and chape.  Both the throat and chape are seamed up the back and silver-soldered.  Because I don't have the skill to produce a smooth round end to the chape, I instead left it with a round opening closed by a soldered flat plate - which isn't correct as far as I know for this type of knife; it really looks like something more appropriate to a Napoleonic-period spadroon or naval dirk.  The frog button is attached the same way, using a leftover bronze stub from another project as the "neck."

The frog itself was a bit of a puzzle to me until I noticed that a number of originals have frogs significantly wider than the scabbards themselves.  This means that pressing the stitched edges of the frog together makes the middle pop open wide enough to fit around the scabbard, button and all, and the buttonhole can then be pressed down around the button provided the hole is large enough and has a wide enough horizontal slash to either side.  While it strikes me as needlessly complicated compared to the more modern style of making the sheath side-seamed with an integral belt loop, it does work perfectly well for holding the scabbard in place while unsheathing and resheathing the knife.

While I was at it, because this blade, the matching guard and wooden scales are so cheap, I ordered another set which I hope to later turn into a "sister" knife.  This one will have curly maple scales, brass hardware, and leather blackened with vinegaroon.  I think yellow brass pairs better with darker woods and leathers than lighter ones.

These blades require a lot of work off-the-shelf.  The tangs are wide enough to be considered slab tangs, but don't come with pin holes drilled, and being upwards of 5mm inch thick, they took a lot of effort to drill through, moreso because apparently EN 45 steel requires more care to anneal than just heating it to red-hot and letting it cool on its own.  I made the pin holes on the first knife 1/8 inch, but these struck me as too big because of how there are two of them side-by-side next to the junction of the tang and blade, possibly creating a stress point that's larger than necessary.  Antique Sheffield Bowies often appear to use thinner pins.  So I plan to make the holes and pins on the second knife 3/32 inch wide.

The blades come with an edge ground on, but are otherwise brut de forge.  The hammermarks are too deep to remove entirely unless you want to make the blades significantly thinner.  The first one measured 4.5mm (nominal thickness 3/16 inch, or ~4.76mm) before polishing and a hair over 4mm afterward, which is still decent for a blade this length.  I've seen very few original 19th-century blades that were this rough-looking, and real Sheffield Bowies always seem to have a nice even finish, so I assume they were either thicker before finishing or less deeply hammermarked to begin with.  The rough look still works if the conceit is that this isn't a Sheffield Bowies per se, but rather a domestically-made one in the popular imported style - which is, of course, exactly what it is.

The butt ends of the tangs have to be shortened and look better when slightly rounded.  I gave the tangs a very slight waist with an angle grinder so as to provide a more secure grip, since the straight-edged, peg-shaped grips seemed likely to slip out of the hand, especially when paired with smooth wood scales.  But I felt they were too narrow to be made much narrower without leaving the grip uncomfortable.  Instead, I followed a suggestion from Mikko Kuusirati at myArmoury and tapered the scales toward the guard (i.e. they are thicker at the butt end).  Lastly, the tang on the first blade met the ricasso ever so slightly closer to the edge than the spine, which made for an unappealing look.  Since these blades have a saber grind, they can tolerate losing width on the spine, which I achieved with a few quick passes of the angle grinder (this incidentally also flattened the spine and removed all remaining pits and scale).

The guards also require some work:  The slots are designed for hidden-tang blades and need to be tediously filed until they're wide enough.  Luckily, the crowns on the guards are exactly the same width as the blade tangs, so neither needed adjustment.  I shimmed and silver-soldered the guard and then packed any remaining gaps with a beeswax-linseed oil mix to ensure no water gets in and causes corrosion, though historically cutler's resin might've been a more likely choice.

One last note:  I am not a hunter, and I understand that many hunters find the large-ish (but far short of machete- or cleaver-sized) Bowie knife with a centered clip point and a quillon on the spine side ill-suited for any particular field task.  The Bowie is a fighting knife, or at least a multi-purpose one, and the features that make it suitable for fighting are detrimental to some other uses.  So I won't argue either way about the appropriateness of the name.  That being said, this style is frequently referred to as a hunting knife and I see no reason Yossarian would've analyzed its suitability for various jobs before casually describing it as one.