What size steel for a camp knife?

A camp knife sits between a hunter and a bowie: a 5–7 in blade, 3/16 in spine, full tang, built to baton and chop a little without being a hatchet. 1 1/2 × 3/16 in bar covers the whole class. Go to 1/4 in only if the blade is over 7 in or you want a true chopper.

It is a great forging project because the mass distribution matters: forge the tip thinner and leave the ricasso full so the balance sits just ahead of the guard.

Camp knife, bushcraft knife — not the same thing

A bushcraft knife is a carving tool: feather sticks, notches, tent pegs, trap parts, food and game prep, and a square-ground spine for throwing sparks off a ferro rod. Three and a half to five inches, carried alongside a saw or an axe that does the heavy wood. A camp knife is bigger — six to ten inches — for clearing brush, camp chores and light chopping. Conflating the two is how people end up with a knife too big to carve and too small to chop.

The lineage runs through the Finnish puukko, a palm-sized belt knife with a flat spine for thumb pressure and, note, a hidden tang; Mora industrialised it from 1891 and is the reason a competent Scandi-ground knife costs fifteen dollars. On the English-language side, Horace Kephart wrote the spec in 1906 — "broad, central point, nothing over four or five inches long" — and dismissed bowies as too thick and clumsy to whittle with. The category only got its modern name in the 1990s, through Ray Mears, whose Woodlore school opened in 1983 and whose Alan Wood-made knife became the pattern everyone copies.

Working smiths build these thinner than the market expects. In practitioner discussion 1/8 in is the most-recommended stock, 3/32 in is defended as excellent and still batonable in hardwood, and 3/16 in is where you begin trading cutting for prying. On batoning itself: it is a real technique with real instructional pedigree, correct when you are weight-limited and need dry inner wood, and not what the tool is for when a saw is in the pack. If you sell one, say plainly whether yours is warranted for it. Same for the Scandi grind — superb in wood, and it wedges in deep hardwood cuts and is poor on meat and dense food, which is why plenty of bushcraft makers grind convex instead.

Stock for a camp knife

For a Scandi-ground bushcraft knife (4–5 in blade, 1/8 in spine) use the drop point hunter preset with a 1/8 in spine instead — this preset is the bigger, chopping camp knife.

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