Hand-Forged Hunting Bowie, Clip Point

Yes, and we say so here because we refuse the description on some of our other knives. A knife for field dressing has to be held several different ways: a full grip for the long pulls, a pinch on the blade for fine work around the head, choked up for joints, reversed for opening skin without going into the gut. That is why we tell buyers our ringed knives are not hunting knives, whatever their shape suggests, and why we point hunters at this instead. There is nothing on this knife that locks your hand into one position. The guard stops you sliding forward and otherwise stays out of the way, the handle is round enough to rotate in the palm and shaped enough to index, and the belly does the actual work. It is the pattern a century of people who skin things converged on, and that is a stronger recommendation than anything we could write.

It is not leather wrapped around something. The handle is built from a stack of leather washers, each punched with a hole in the middle, driven onto the tang one after another under real compression, and then locked at the butt so the whole column is squeezed solid. Once it is tight, the stack is turned and shaped exactly as though it were a single piece of timber, which is why the finished handle has a continuous shape with the layer lines running across it. The reason it was used on knives from Marble's onward, and on most military knives of the last century, is that it does three things at once. It grips better wet than dry, because leather swells slightly and the exposed end grain of every washer bites. It does not go cold in the hand at low temperatures the way steel or dense timber does. And it absorbs shock, so a hard cut does not ring through into your palm. Almost nobody makes it now because it is slow, and that is the only reason.

Not if you look after it, and it is repairable if it does, which is more than most handles can claim. What loosens a stack is water getting between the washers and then drying out fast: the leather swells, then shrinks past where it started, and the column is no longer under compression. So the rules are simple. Do not soak it, do not leave it wet, and above all do not dry it quickly near a fire or a radiator. Wax or dress it once or twice a year and it will outlast you. If a stack ever does slacken, it can be tightened at the butt and, if it is far gone, the handle can be turned down and refinished or the washers replaced entirely without touching the blade. Genuine 1940s stacked leather knives are still in service with their original handles, which tells you most of what you need to know.

The clip is the section where material has been taken off the spine as it approaches the tip, leaving a concave or straight sweep instead of a full-thickness back. Two things follow from it. The point drops toward the centreline of the blade, which puts it much closer to the axis your wrist rotates around and makes it far easier to steer accurately, and that matters enormously when you are opening a hide and trying not to go through what is underneath. And it removes mass from the front of the blade, which quickens the knife in the hand without shortening it. The trade is that a clipped tip is thinner than an unclipped one and therefore easier to break if you pry with it. On a hunting knife that is the right trade; on a digging tool it would not be.

Not as standard, and that is a deliberate decision rather than an oversight. A sharpened clip is a false edge, and in a number of jurisdictions any knife with a sharpened edge on the back of the point counts as double-edged, which puts it into a much more restricted legal category regardless of how the rest of the blade is ground. Since almost nobody hunting needs a sharpened clip, we leave it blunt by default and let buyers who want it ask. If you do want it sharpened, say so at checkout, and please check what it means where you live first. We would rather have that conversation than have a parcel stopped at your border.

Because belly is what skins. The curved section of an edge is the part that can follow a contour, and an animal is nothing but contours, so a knife with a long straight edge and a small curve at the front spends most of a skinning job with only an inch of steel in contact. A deep sweeping belly puts a continuously changing part of the edge into the work as you draw it, which cuts more cleanly, keeps the point away from the hide, and lets you work with the flat of the blade following the shape rather than fighting it. It is the single feature that most reliably separates a knife designed for hunting from one designed for fighting, and if you are ever choosing between two knives for field work, compare their bellies before anything else.

Promptly, and this is the part most people get wrong on a carbon steel knife with a leather handle. Blood is salty and mildly acidic, and left on high-carbon steel overnight it will etch a permanent grey shadow into a polished blade. So wipe the blade down in the field with whatever you have, and properly clean and oil it the same day. For the handle, wipe rather than wash: a damp cloth and then a dry one, working across the layer lines rather than along them. Do not run the knife under a tap, do not soak it, and never leave it to dry near heat, because that is what shrinks the washers. Once a season, oil the blade properly and put a wax or leather dressing through the handle. This is the honest cost of carbon steel and leather, and it takes about two minutes a day of use.

Reasonably, though the word covers a great deal of ground. There has never been an agreed definition, and the knives associated with Jim Bowie and his imitators varied enormously in size, guard and blade shape. What most people mean by a bowie today is a large single-edged knife with a clip point and a guard, and this is that. What it is more precisely is the twentieth century American hunting pattern that grew out of the bowie tradition: the same clip point and belly, scaled to something you can actually carry and use, with a small oval guard rather than the long crossguard an antebellum bowie usually carries. If a crossguard is what you picture when you hear the word, our crossguard bowie is closer to it.

We cannot answer that for you. At 8.5 inches this blade is above the everyday carry allowance in a good many places even though it is single-edged, and rules for carrying a hunting knife in the field while lawfully hunting are frequently quite different from rules for carrying one in a town. If you order the sharpened clip, some jurisdictions will treat the knife as double-edged and restrict it much more heavily, which is why we leave it blunt as standard. Import rules differ again from carry rules. Check all of it for your own address, and if length is the obstacle, a 6 or 7 inch build costs no more and is a more practical size for most game anyway.

5160 high-carbon spring steel, the same stock our smiths use for kukris and swords, forged down from leaf spring in the Nepali tradition. It is oil-quenched and then tempered back, giving a blade that holds a working edge but stays tough rather than brittle. For a hunting knife the practical advantage over stainless is sharpening: carbon steel takes a keen edge quickly and brings it back on a pocket stone at the end of a long day, where many stainless alloys need more equipment and more patience. The trade is that it is not stainless, it will take a patina, and it will rust if you leave it wet.

If the knife is going to be used, take the satin or the dark forge finish. Both cost the same. A mirror polish is bare steel taken through progressively finer abrasives until it stops scattering light, so there is nothing between the steel and the air, and on carbon steel every fingerprint, every wipe and the first contact with blood leaves a mark. After one season of real hunting the polished blade will look like a used knife, which is honest but is not what the photographs promised. A satin finish hides handling almost entirely and a forge finish hides it completely, and neither affects cutting in any way. The polish is the right choice for a display piece or a gift, and the wrong one for a pack.

Close, but not identical. The blade profile is drawn out by eye against a pattern and the clip and belly are ground by hand, so the exact sweep varies a little. The handle varies more: leather washers differ in colour and density from hide to hide, so the banding through a stacked handle is genuinely individual, and the shape is turned by hand. What does not vary is the specification: length, steel, construction, heat treatment and sharpness are held to the same standard on every piece. Our kukri machete page explains in more detail what can and cannot differ between two blades from the same bench.