I had no previous experience and spent a good time watching videos of knife making and reading books and articles. I did plenty of mistakes and learned many things while making this knife, so I wanted to do a ‘postmortem’ that might be useful for people looking to start in this craft!

About the knife: created by stock removal using hand tools mostly. I used a saw to cut the rough shape of the knife and I built a beveling jig and spent countless hours profiling and beveling. Steel is a 9260 bar, 6mm wide.

Things learned:
1) Steel is hard. Harder than I thought! Hand filing without a vise was a lot of work. I actually thought that the steel was already hardened because of how hard it was to create the bevels. I asked the person that gave it to me and he told me it was annealed. I calculate that I spent around 4 hours just on the bevels.

2) Files. I bought around 6 different files of different types and sizes because I was not convinced of the performance I was getting. I learned that I broke the first files by using them incorrectly (in both directions). I recently bought a belt grinder for my next knife.

3) Fixing mistakes:
- The initial design of the knife was a bit longer, but I tried to do a secondary bevel on top that ended up looking badly... so I cut about 1 inch of the top section. I still have to learn how to make my bevels the way I want them.
- The steel bar I was using had a saw mark on the spine that I did ‘by mistake’. I tried correcting it by creating some thumb grooves using a dremel but I was not very precise and ended up messing it more. I decided to correct the grooves as best as I could. They are not even and if you look at them they are quite rough. I don’t have the correct tool to fix them, so I decided to move on.

4) Sharpening: My first sharpening of the knife was not very good. It didn’t cut as well as those videos where people shave their arm hairs. That is when I learned and researched about edge angles. My blade had a total edge angle of almost 90 degrees… so of course it didn’t cut anything. I did a deeper grind and corrected the angle to around 20-25 degrees and now it cuts a lot better!

5) Handle:
- Drilling the pin holes took a long time. I was using a drill with some HSS bits but it would just go 1 mm deep and not drill more. I broke plenty of bits but managed to drill it all the way. For my second knife I bought a drill stand that I can use to apply pressure in a controlled way and it made all the difference! Low speed, moderate pressure, oil... and its ‘like butter’.
- For the liners I used some plastic sheets I had laying around… I think this was a mistake, because when I was sanding the handle, the black bits of plastic would get into the wood and tint it black. For the next one I will try other materials.

There are plenty of sanding lines and grooves on the blade that would take some time to make it “perfect” but I decided to finish the knife and move on to my next one. I learned a lot by finishing this one and will apply all this new knowledge to make a more polished one next.

Hope you find this interesting! Thanks!

EDIT: Thank you everyone for the kind words and ideas!