How to forge a Honshu inspired Bowie knife

Added: 2026-06-10

[00:00:00]Some of my favorite knives have been Bowie knives, and I think this might be my best one yet. Just the shape turn up beautifully. The weight's good. The handle feels like perfect in hand. Just just works, you know.

[00:00:16]It's pretty hard, too.

[00:00:19]So lately, now that I'm kind of getting back into working in the shop regularly after winter's finally over, hopefully, I decided I want to make a bow knife again because, you know, bowing knives are awesome. And I was just scrolling through some stuff online, looking the Honcho. I think it's United Cutler is the actual brand. Looking at some of their stuff, I'm like, "Oh, that's their stuff's pretty cool." I mean, it's kind of that like tactical yet still kind of traditional look to it. So, their stuff I think is kind of iffy in quality from what I've seen. probably depend on what you buy, but their stuff looks cool. So, I'm like, you know what? I'm going to make one of theirs. So, I found one of their Bowie knives. Like, I like the shape anyway. I like the shape, so I'm going to go with that. Just got a chunk of spring steel here and go from there.

[00:00:58]Don't know what I'm actually going to call this knife because obviously I'm not going to call it that, but I'll figure out something.

[00:02:01]Heat. Heat.

[00:02:07]Heat.

[00:02:29]Hey, heat. Hey, heat.

[00:02:33]Heat.

[00:02:52]Heat.

[00:03:10]Heat. Heat. N.

[00:03:19]Heat.

[00:03:39]Heat.

[00:03:44]Heat. Heat. N.

[00:04:08]Heat.

[00:04:33]Heat.

[00:04:55]Heat. Heat.

[00:05:19]All right, so I got the blade forged out. Really happy with how that turned out. Took way more than I was anticipating, but that happens. Of course, want to grind that to where it's a little flatter cuz that's just how it worked out. I also tried some new punches that I made well this last week.

[00:05:34]And honestly, I'm kind of satisfied how this turned out. This one was a little big, but I realized that the uh punch was a little larger than I thought it was. So, I don't know if this is really more efficient than trying to use a drill bit, but this is usually kind of a pain to drill. So, might be worth it.

[00:05:51]We'll see. Other than that, not bad. I guess we'll have to drill this a little bit because I'm wanting to put like a guard on here, but I also want this to be like flat. So, I'm probably have to like put in some sort of like stopper here. I'll figure that out as I go. I always do. But now, I just need to get around the shape.

[00:06:21]Heat. Heat.

[00:07:12]Heat. Heat.

[00:07:48]All right, now I have my blade ground out. Actually turned out really well.

[00:07:55]Uh, got the handle nice and smoothed out. Got the these have to file the holes open just a little bit. Not too bad, though. Now what I have is this is going to be my guard. just a flat piece of steel. Drill two holes in it that I need to cut out so the tank can slide through. And then I'll probably hammer out this part a little bit. And my plan, at least as of right now, is I'm going to very carefully drill a small hole through that so I can pin it in place.

[00:08:21]Hopefully that works, but I guess we will have to see.

[00:08:44]Heat. Heat.

[00:08:51]Heat. Heat.

[00:09:45]Heat All right. So, after a little bit of a pause due to cold weather and timing, I finally got this ready for heat treat. I made this little kind of pommel. I basically just clamped them in there, sand everything to shape. Ended up having to buy new vice grips. Turns out these are just Walmart hyperttough vice grips. just the cheapest thing, but they have like the coolest thing I've ever seen on vice grips and that's this. Most time they have this little tab you have to like pull in. Just doesn't work. But this literally pull it down and it pries it open. Honestly, I like that better than the official ones.

[00:10:24]I don't know if there's other ones with it, but hey, just thought it was pretty cool. Either way, I got the guard. I'm going to have it pinned in place. Just a little 8 inch pin. Just enough to where it doesn't like move. I mean, obviously it moves a little bit because of the no handle here, but it'll be enough to where we'll just go up once everything's on place because there's nothing back here holding it. So, other than that, just need to heat cycle it obviously and then give it a nice heat treat and then I'm going to put on my micarta handle scales which I made like two weeks ago.

[00:11:02]All right. So, now I've got this uh heat treated, tempered, all that fun stuff. I glue on the uh micarta handle scales.

[00:11:11]Should be pretty nice. I was going to of course sand this out, but I really like the way it looks just kind of left that way. So, I'm just going to take the wire wheel and just kind of finish clean up a little bit and then grind an edge onto it. I think it looks pretty good. So, now all I have left to do really is just shape this and got myself a nice little bow knife.

[00:11:28]Actually, it's pretty large bow knife, not really little.