What size steel for a skinning knife?

A skinner is short but wide, and the width is what sets the bar. The 3 1/2 in blade is 1 1/4 in tall at the ricasso. Add 1/8 in for clean-up and you need 1 3/8 in, so it comes out of 1 1/2 in bar, wider than the calculator's drop point hunter preset needs. That height is there for the belly: the edge sweeps up in a deep curve to a point raised toward the spine, and the whole curve has to fit inside the bar. With a 5/32 in spine, that makes it 1 1/2 × 5/32 in flat bar.

The calculator starts on forged. The full tang barely draws out, but forging the bevels and the point stretches the blade, so about 7 in of bar, clean-up included, makes an 8 in knife. A 36 in bar gives five. For stock removal you cut the whole 8 in profile plus clean-up, about 8 1/4 in of bar, and an 18 in bar gives two. Either way, about a third of the bar's weight is gone by the time the blade is finished. If you forge to shape and grind the spine flat afterward, set "Forged thickness" to "One size up". That starts you at 3/16 in, which you then grind back to 5/32 in or less.

What a skinning knife is for

A skinning knife has one job: getting the hide off without cutting holes in it, nicking the meat or cutting hair. Most skinning is pulling, not cutting. On a warm deer the hide comes away by hand over most of the body, and the knife is for the connective tissue where it sticks, mostly around the belly and now and then along the back. Cuts through the hide go from underneath, with the edge parallel to the meat or facing away from it, because cutting hair dulls the knife and puts hair on the meat. If the hide is going to a tanner or a taxidermist, you want as few holes and score marks in it as you can manage.

The shape follows from that. The traditional skinner is short, wide and curved. The curve makes it less likely to punch through the hide, and it puts more working edge back toward the heel, where most of the cutting should happen, and keeps the tip out of the work. A drop point hunter keeps its point low for opening the body cavity. A skinner raises the point toward the spine (on a trailing point the spine itself curves up to it), so the tip stays clear while the belly makes long sweeping strokes under the hide. Hair and bone are hard on an edge. One hunter on BladeForums says his skinner needs sharpening after every use, and a reply in a thread on skinner steel says the edge needs wear resistance and enough toughness for breaking down the animal and cutting through joints.

Skinning knives were common on the American frontier. John Russell set up his cutlery works on the Green River at Greenfield, Massachusetts, in the 1830s. The company built its western trade on a hunting knife and also made a curved skinning knife and a butcher knife nicknamed the Dadley. A dating guide published by the Museum of Our Industrial Heritage lists buffalo hunters, mountain men, trappers, homesteaders and gold miners among the people who used the Green River knife. George Ruxton, who spent the first months of 1847 hunting on the Colorado Front Range and visiting mountain men, wrote Life in the Far West for Blackwood's Magazine. A footnote in the 1849 book edition says the hunters' and trappers' knives came from the Green River works with that name stamped on the blade, and that a job done thoroughly was "up to Green River" in mountain talk.

None of what follows is confirmed, so take it as story rather than history. An often-repeated figure says Russell's works shipped some 60,000 knives west between 1840 and 1860; the museum's dating guide gives a much bigger figure, but the number is garbled in its online copy. Another story says most frontier skinners were Sheffield imports sold through the Hudson's Bay Company. Even the year the works started is unsettled: one page of the same museum gives 1833, and others give 1834.

Stock for a skinning knife

Keep it thin. A maker on KnifeDogs runs his meat and hide knives at 3/32, 1/8 or 5/32 in and would pass on 3/16 in for skinning, and one knife company's skinning guide says a spine under 0.12 in slices membrane and connective tissue with less effort. Treat 5/32 in as the top of the range, not the middle.

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