What size steel for a bushcraft knife?

The preset is a plain drop point: a 4 in blade, 1.1 in tall at the ricasso, 5/32 in (about 4 mm) at the spine and a 5 in full tang, with a straight spine and a mostly straight edge that keeps its belly near the point. Add 1/8 in for clean-up and the height comes to 1.225 in, so it comes out of 1 1/4 × 5/32 in bar. The first Woodlore knives were made from the same bar: their maker, Alan Wood, started with 1 1/4 × 5/32 in O1 and later moved to 30 × 4 mm, slightly narrower.

The calculator starts on stock removal for this one. A bushcraft knife usually has a Scandi grind, one flat bevel running to the edge, so you will be grinding it dead flat whatever you do at the anvil, and on a knife this short forging saves little steel. Stock removal takes the full profile plus clean-up, 9 1/4 in of bar per blade (about 8 oz), and a 48 in bar gives five. Forged, the blade grows as you draw out the bevels and point, so 8 1/4 in of bar (about 7 oz) is enough, and an 18 in bar gives two. Either way, the finished blank weighs 5 to 6 oz.

What a bushcraft knife is for

A bushcraft knife is a woodworking knife you carry. The jobs are small, repeated and need fine control: shaving a feather stick (also called a fuzz stick) for tinder, cutting notches for joints, and the detailed cuts that turn a piece of wood into something useful. Reuben Bolieu, writing in BLADE, describes the shape that suits that work: the tip close to the handle's centerline, the spine of the blade and the spine of the handle in one line, and no thumb jimping. A post on the Bushcraft UK forum adds that the edge should start as close to the handle as possible, because that is where power cuts get the most leverage, and that long unsharpened ricassos and finger choils look good but don't help with woodwork. So the edge is long and nearly straight, with the belly near the point. Ray Mears asked for the belly there on the Woodlore knife, for carving out the bottoms of bowls. Not everyone agrees: Bolieu prefers one continuous curve along the whole edge.

Alan Wood, who made the first Woodlore knives, has described how the design came together after he met Mears at a London arms fair in the late 1980s. Mears wanted carbon steel, a full tang that wasn't tapered and a short Nordic (Scandi) grind, so people could sharpen it by laying the whole bevel on the stone. The first ones were O1, with the spine ground flat and left with sharp corners for striking a ferro rod, the same 90° spine people ask for now. A ferro rod throws the best sparks off a sharp corner, and striking it with the edge soon puts dull spots in the edge. The cost is that a squared spine can be hard on your hand. Morakniv's Garberg, released in 2016, has a spine ground for striking a ferro rod. Today's Woodlore knife is still O1, with a 113 mm (about 4 1/2 in) blade, 5 mm at the spine (thicker than the originals) tapering to 3.8 mm, and a 25° edge.

The word is older than the knife: Australian writers were using "bushcraft" by the 1860s. Who popularized it is argued over, so take the rest as story rather than history. Mors Kochanski, the Canadian instructor, is often credited, largely for his book Bushcraft (first published as Northern Bushcraft), though he is reported to have said the title was a nod to Richard Graves's Australian bushcraft books. Ray Mears and his television programs are usually credited with making it current in Britain. Use of the word in South Africa in the 1800s is also claimed, but unconfirmed.

Stock for a bushcraft knife

Stock thickness sets the height of a Scandi bevel. At a 25° included angle (Woodlore lists a 25° edge for its knife), the bevel is about 0.28 in tall on 1/8 in stock, 0.35 in on 5/32 in and 0.42 in on 3/16 in, and that whole face gets ground every time the knife is sharpened. In a BladeForums thread on bushcraft blade thickness most answers fall between 3/32 and 5/32 in, and one poster says 5/32 in is the most he would want on a 4 in blade.

Widths assume blade height + 1/8 in rounded up to stock; thickness is the finished spine rounded up. Change the inputs above for your own pattern.

Steels that suit it

Questions