Hand-Forged Bushcraft Kukri, Full Tang

What it is optimised for. A chopping kukri is arranged around a single question: how much energy can this blade deliver into wood in one stroke. That leads to thick stock, mass carried forward and a robust convex edge. Bushcraft asks a different question, because most of the cutting is small: carving a pot hook, notching a stake, taking feather sticks off a dry stick, splitting kindling, preparing food, cutting cord. Those jobs reward a blade that is light enough to control precisely, thin enough behind the edge to slice, and comfortable to hold for a long time. This piece is ground for that. The kukri curve is still there and it will still chop when it needs to, but the design has been pointed at the other ninety percent of the work.

Because of the grind, not because of anything removed from the blade. There are several ways to make a blade lighter. Some of our pieces use a fuller, a groove ground down the flat, and one carries a small cut panel. This one has neither: it is simply forged from lighter stock and given a broad flat grind taken high up the blade, so the whole cross-section is thinner than a chopper's. The result is 600 grams over 12 inches, or 50 grams per inch, against 55.4 for our deep-fullered 13 inch and 57.0 for our bhojpure. The trade-off is honest and unavoidable: a thinner section means less mass behind the edge in a chop, and it also means the edge is a little more vulnerable if you drive it into a knot at full swing.

No, but it chops like what it is. You will get through green limbs, brush and anything up to roughly wrist thickness without difficulty, which covers most of what a camp actually needs. Beyond that it takes noticeably more strokes than a heavy chopper would, because momentum is doing less of the work and you are doing more. The honest framing is that this blade trades peak chopping power for everything else: control, carrying comfort, and the fine work a heavy blade is clumsy at. If a typical outing has you processing large seasoned rounds, take our bhojpure and accept the weight. If it has you carving, splitting small stock and cutting one or two limbs a day, this is the better tool and it is not close.

Wet hands. A smooth polished grip is comfortable and looks good, and it becomes slippery the moment your hands are wet, cold, sweaty or gloved, which describes most hands doing outdoor work. Deep-cut texture solves that by giving the skin somewhere to key into rather than relying on friction against a smooth surface. It is the same reasoning behind checkering on a gun stock or a rasp texture on a tool handle: not decoration, though it looks well, but a grip that works in the conditions the tool is actually used in. The trade-off is that aggressive texture can be uncomfortable over long sessions with bare hands, and the deeper it is cut the truer that becomes. Ours is cut deep but with rounded tops rather than sharp points, which is the compromise most people find comfortable. If you want it shallower, say so.

The grip is built up from sections rather than shaped from a single piece: darker contoured material at the front where it meets the blade and again at the butt, framing the textured centre section where your hand actually sits. It does two things. Visually it defines where the grip is, so the eye and the hand agree on where to hold it. Practically, the raised contoured sections at each end act as soft stops without carving finger grooves into the handle, so your hand is located but not locked into one position — which matters on a blade you might hold three or four different ways in an afternoon. Finger grooves solve the same problem more aggressively and suit fewer hands.

Yes, and this is a piece where the construction supports it properly. Batoning means striking the spine of the blade with a wooden billet to drive it through a piece of wood, and the two things that fail when people do it badly are a partial tang and a thin blade struck near the tip. This blade has a full tang running the length of the grip and visible along the spine, so there is no hidden joint to work loose. Strike over the thicker section toward the middle of the blade rather than out near the point, use a wooden billet and never a steel hammer, and keep the splits reasonable in size — this is a lighter blade than our choppers and the section is thinner, so it is well within its capability on kindling and small rounds rather than on large seasoned logs.

A steel surface at the back of the knife you can use and inspect. Because the tang runs through and is exposed across the end of the grip rather than being capped in wood, you can tap with it: driving a tent peg, seating a wedge, cracking a nut, breaking ice on a water bottle. None of those is what the knife is for, but all of them come up, and doing them with a wooden butt cap is how butt caps split. It is also honest construction in the plainest sense — you can see the steel running from the edge to the end of the handle, and there is no way for a manufacturer to hide a short tang behind a fitting. Do not use it as a hammer on hard steel, which will eventually deform the end and start to loosen the pins.

5160 high-carbon spring steel, oil-quenched and tempered. It is the family of steel used for vehicle leaf springs, which is the origin of the Nepali practice of forging kukris from them, and it is chosen for toughness rather than for maximum hardness. That is the right choice on a bushcraft blade for two reasons. Toughness is what survives batoning, prying and the occasional strike into something you did not see. And a steel that rolls rather than chips can be brought back with a stone in the field, where a chipped edge in a very hard steel needs a workshop. The cost is that it needs sharpening a little more often, and that it is not stainless, so it will rust if you leave it wet.

It is the light one. Our etched chirra at this length runs 61.7 grams per inch with a 7 millimetre spine and is built as a decorated working blade. Our bhojpure is shorter at 10 inches but heavier for its length at 57.0, with mass deliberately carried forward for chopping. This one sits at 50.0, the lowest figure in the range, with a thinner section and a high flat grind. If you are choosing between them, the question is what your day looks like. If it is mostly cutting wood down to size, take the heavier blade. If it is mostly making things out of wood, take this one.

More easily than most kukris, which is a genuine advantage of this grind. A broad flat grind gives you a wide, clearly defined bevel that you can lay flat on a stone and follow, where a convex chopping edge has no flat reference and has to be worked in small circles with a feel for the curve. Lay the bevel down, keep the angle constant and work along the length, following the curve of the belly as you go. A pocket diamond stone or a small ceramic rod is enough to maintain it in the field, which matters on a blade you are carrying for days. Avoid fixed-angle pull-through sharpeners, which are too coarse for a blade this size and will chew the edge rather than refine it.

A blade that lives outside gets more chances to rust than one in a drawer, so the routine matters more. Wipe it dry every evening, not just at the end of a trip, and carry a small cloth with a little oil on it for that purpose. Do not leave it sheathed overnight in a wet camp: leather holds moisture against steel, and a damp sheath will do more harm in three days than three months of normal use. Two places on this piece need a moment beyond the blade — the seams where the handle sections meet, and the cut lines of the texture, both of which a cloth drawn across the grip simply bridges. Work a little oil into both with the corner of a rag. If a patch of light surface rust does appear, it comes off with fine steel wool and oil.

Yes. We forge this profile from belt-sized blades up to two-handed pieces, and the bushcraft thinking scales with it in both directions. Worth saying which way to go: shorter blades gain control and lose reach, and below about 9 inches the kukri curve starts to work against you for fine carving because the belly puts the edge at an angle to your line of sight. Longer blades chop better and carve worse. If you tell us how you actually use a knife rather than just the length you want, we will tell you what we would build, and we will say so if we think a different piece in the range suits you better. Grip material, texture, finish and sheath can all be specified at the same time.