Round Knife

Project: October 2022

Writeup: May 2023

Round and profound

This is a specialised knife for cutting leather, known as a round knife or head knife (I think the terms are interchangeable). All the leather for my previous projects had been cut with whatever sharp and thin knife I happened to have around at the time, which worked fine but never felt very professional. Didn't seem like it would be too hard to make, so I had a go.

Marking

I started out with finding a good diameter to draw around. Some designs you see aren't perfectly round, I don't think it makes much of a difference. This was 2.3mm 1084 steel.

an image of a knife shaped piece of metal

Shaping

The profile was adjusted by hand until it looked right. I like the slight inward sweep of the top sides over the flat topped once you often see. In an ideal world it would have a longer tang area for more strength, but I was limited by the size of stock I had and didn't want to faff with a more complicated construction.

an image of a knife shaped piece of metal with bevels

Epoxy speed-holes

Bevels were filed by hand. They look convex in this shot, but they flattened out when I moved to the diamond stones. Two holes for the pins and some little divots to give the epoxy somewhere to hang on to.

I hardened this one by hand. Using the torch is fine on smaller stuff like this. It fit nicely in The Hot Log for tempering. 2 hours at 200°C.

Took the bevels to final shape on some chunky diamond stones and then sharpened on my natural oilstones. They're about 13° per side. I suspect real ones may go thinner than this, but this feels good in my testing. It gets extremely sharp and responds well to stropping with some polishing compound.

an image of a round knife from a different angle

Epoxy speed-holes

The handle was a kinda sandwich construction of two pieces of walnut with a little notch at the bottom to accept the stubby tang. I was concerned it wouldn't feel very strong, but it's fine. In use you're only ever putting pressure directly inline with the blade so it's not like it has to withstand serious twisting motions like a bushcraft knife or similar would. The leather strapping in the background here was cut freehand from a 1500mm long belt blank, taking about 5mm off the width. No way I could do that pulling a Stanley knife or similar. The pushing motion really helps to keep your piece in line.