This is part five of the series on how to make a push dagger or push knife. Either name is ok. In this part we finish the knife off.

Part1 (the beginning) of this tutorial is here.

Now it's time to polish off the blade. You do this with emory paper. You start with rough grit and work your way through finer grits until you have the finish you are happy with. And you don't have to do much on the handle part, that will be covered by the handle. Just do 100 grit on that.

About what grit to use.

The exact number of the grit isn't very important. Start with 80, 100 or 120 and get the knife all cleaned up. Then move through grits at approximately 100 grit intervals. I went to 220, then 320, 400, 600. And I finished with 1200 then 1500.

Adding the Handle

Now we need to secure the handle to the blade. Easy enough with some good two part epoxy glue. I used 5 minute gorilla glue. And remember when we made wooden pins so we could shape the handle? We now replace those with the permanent brass pins.

I am using quarter inch brass rod. It is soft and easy to work with and you can buy it at any hardware store like Lowes or Home Depot.

I measured the brass rods to be a little bit longer than the wooden pins you can see on the work surface there near the clamp. This way they stick out of the knife handle and we trim them down flush.

Mix your glue thoroughly and according to the directions. Pretty easy to do.

Apply a liberal amount of glue to the knife handle halves. Spread it evenly and throughly.

Apply the handle halves to the steel blade and pin it with the two brass pins.

Clamp it down and wipe off any excess glue. Clamp it on the wood handles and not on the brass pins. Let it sit like this the recommended workable time. This glue was 30 minutes.

Now we trim the pins down so they are perfectly flush with the handle. My pins are very long so I trimmed them with a hacksaw to get them close to right.

Then gently file the pin ends flush with the handle.

Clean the handle and blade of any excess glue. Mineral spirits works well for that. Then polish the handle with multiple coats of tung oil. You are now Done!!

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