I have been trialling this method of knife handle making for a while now, the dowels will be for sale on the site soon but for the moment any Sloyd ( small/ standard/ laminated) blade will come with one for free. The straight edged blade is another pattern that I used to make that may well make an appearance on the site. I would advise taping up the blade for safety, I haven’t for clarity.
I make them in a couple of sizes, a smaller dowel still will be needed for my detail blades, still working on those. This is the sort of fit that we are after. It is possible that the slot might be a bit tight on some blades. My approach ion the workshop would be to grind the tang down to fit, but another option is to sand or carve down the inside of the slot until the blade goes in without spreading the arms of the dowel.
Drill a suitable hole, 10mm in this case, in an oversized piece of wood, I used cherry. You want a few mm protruding from the handle at this stage. If the dowel gets stuck you can put the blade in and rotate and whilst gently pulling. Check that the blade is roughly in line with the handle, if it isn’t try rotating the blade or dowel, if this doesn’t help then your hole isn’t straight and you need to start again. When you are happy with the alignment mark the blade and dowel so they will go back the same way ( I know that if the tang was perfectly straight and the slot centralised this wouldn’t be necessary, but it doesn’t hurt)
When you are happy with the fit, glue the dowel in place, use enough epoxy to get a good joint but not so much that it fills the slot for the blade. Wedge the end of the dowel open with a scrap of wood, best to make it narrower than the dowel or it might get glued to the sides of the hole.
Sand down the tang of the blade, this will make a better key for the epoxy. You can see that the shoulders on the blade are not aligned, the shoulder at the spine needs to be recessed into the handle, leaving the edge shoulder will be slightly proud.
When the glue is set the blade is held in a soft jawed vice ( or a standard vice and the blade wrapped in cardboard. The handle is hammered onto the tang, it should only be a tight fit as the shoulder is being driven in, if it is tight earlier on then it is possible some epoxy has got into the slot; heat the tang gently over a flame and try again the epoxy should soften enough to allow you to get the blade in, it will grab as it cools, so pull it out and and sand off any epoxy stuck to the blade. You should end up with a flush shoulder like this, the handle is left oversize to reduce the chance of it splitting, but if you are worried you could remove some of the wood with a needle file or alike.
Check the alignment of the tang, and mark the centre lines of the blade.
Pull the blade out, if it is stuck you can hammer carefully on the front face of the handle whilst holding the blade in the vice. I then roughed out with an axe, using the x as the centre for the butt of the handle.
I then shape finally with a knife including both ends of the handle, and give the handle a coat of oil to stop the glue staining the wood. Then run some epoxy into the slot, let it settle to the bottom , push the blade in and ideally you should see epoxy drive out of the slot just as the blade goes up to the shoulder, if glue comes out too early I pull the blade out and wipe some epoxy off the tang and try again. If there isn’t enough I either add more to the slot or if it is nearly there run a bit into the gaps down the sides. Wipe with a tissue to get a neat fillet. The woods don’t match that well in this case, but the joint is sound.
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