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. Three and a half to five inches, carried alongside a saw or an axe that does the heavy wood. A camp knife is bigger (BLADE puts the range at five or six inches up to ten) 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 unpolished or squared spine that throws sparks off a ferro rod is a recent factory addition, not a defining feature: Morakniv's Garberg has one, the Woodlore and the puukko do not.

The lineage runs through the Finnish puukko, a palm-sized belt knife with a flat spine for thumb pressure and, note, a hidden tang. The workshop that became Morakniv was founded at Östnor in 1891 (a wagon factory that also made knives) and is the reason a competent Scandi-ground knife costs under twenty dollars. On the English-language side, Horace Kephart wrote the spec in 1906 in The Book of Camping and Woodcraft. His own blade was "4 inches long… 1 inch wide, 1/8 inch thick on the back, broad pointed," and a sheath knife, he said, "need not be over four or five inches long." He had no time for the bowie pattern: "too thick and clumsy to whittle with, much too thick for a good skinning knife, and too sharply pointed to cook and eat with."

The name is older than the British revival that made it a knife category. "Bushcraft" is Australian and in print since the 1800s, and Mors Kochanski carried it into the northern hemisphere. What Ray Mears did (through Woodlore, founded 1983, and his 2000s books and television) was make the pattern the default in Britain, with Alan Wood's knife as the thing everyone copies. Note that the Woodlore itself is 5 mm stock, thicker than most of what working makers recommend: in practitioner discussion 1/8 in is the most common answer, 3/32 in is defended as excellent and still batonable in North American hardwoods, and 3/16 in is where makers who like to pry a little settle. On batoning: it is a real technique for getting at dry inner wood when you are weight-limited, 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, as James Morgan Ayres argued in BLADE's two-sided debate on it, prone to wedging in deep hardwood cuts and 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