Calculator › Knives › Drop point hunter
The drop point hunter is the knife most people make first and most people make most, and it is forgiving about stock. A 4 in blade around 1 1/8 in tall at the ricasso forges cleanly from 1 in or 1 1/4 in flat bar in 5/32 or 3/16 in. If you forge to shape and then grind the spine flat, start at 1/4 in and grind down — a 1/4 in bar typically ends up 0.21–0.24 in at the ricasso after forging; if you forge close to finished, 3/16 in saves a lot of belt.
Full tang is the usual choice and it barely draws out, so budget close to the full handle length in bar. The blade grows about a third from forging bevels and the point, which is why a 7 in billet becomes an 8 1/2 in knife.
Steel is only part of the cost. Add abrasives, handle, heat treat and your time, and see the price that actually pays you.
Copy link to this calculationA hunting knife does three different jobs and the drop point is the shape that compromises best across all of them. The opening cut has to part hide and body wall without going through into the paunch, because a punctured gut contaminates the meat — that is why the point sits below the spine line, where you can feel where it is and it will not run away from you. Skinning is done on the belly, not the point, in long sweeping strokes that peel hide rather than cut it. Quartering and jointing are where the tip earns its thickness.
The alternatives trade away that control. A clip point penetrates better and snaps more easily under side load. A trailing point gives the most belly of any pattern and is the better pure skinner, but the raised tip is harder to keep track of by feel inside an animal. Drop point wins on control, not on any single task.
Bob Loveless did not invent the dropped point — it is on prehistoric flint, and he took the shape and much of the tapering from 19th-century Lamson & Goodnow butcher knives — but from the late 1950s onward he made it the default American hunting knife, along with the tapered tang and screw-together scales that came with it. Worth knowing if you are copying him: his own hunters were ground very thin and usually hollow. The modern instinct to build a hunter thick is not from Loveless.
Most classes teach it from 1 × 1/4 in bar so students have material to spare (a Master Smith in the ABS forum forges most of his knives from 1/4 in; a Journeyman in the same thread starts 4 in blades at 3/16). Once you have a few under your belt, 1 × 3/16 in is plenty and grinds faster.
| Small hunter, 3 1/2 in blade | 1 × 5/32 in |
|---|---|
| Standard, 4 in blade | 1 1/4 × 3/16 in |
| Large hunter, 5 in blade | 1 1/4 × 1/4 in |
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.
Between 1/8 and 3/16 in at the spine. Thicker than 3/16 in makes a 4 in hunter feel like a pry bar and slices poorly; a distal taper toward the tip helps either way.
About 7 in of 1 × 3/16 in bar for a forged 4 in full-tang hunter, or the full profile length plus a little for stock removal — roughly 9 in. That is around 5–7 oz of steel and about $5 in 1084 at 2026 retail prices.
Bar sizes for ten common knife patterns, weight per inch for every standard flat bar, and quick heat-treat numbers for the usual carbon steels. Print it, tape it to the grinder.