Help with small knives

[Rasmus Kristens]

I'm planning to design some camping knives for my boys. They are 2 and 3, so i guess its about time ;-)

This lead me to a question i have been hanging on to for some time.

It may be a stup## question, but how do you design knives with small blades?

Larger blades is simple for me, because its easier to make a design where handle and blade match. But if you need a knife with a small blade and a handle for a grown man, i always make something that just looks weird..

[Doug Lester]

It kind of depends on how short the blade is. You could make a short blade with a handle that's about three fingers long or you could go for function over form and make the handle long enough to give you the control that you want for the job.

Doug

[M&J]

Design for the use and although the aesthetics may be visually off, that's not an issue. Certain tasks may not be suited for a shortened blade length though users can work around them in most instances.

[jimmontg]

Now as to design, I don't have a particular style that makes me stand out. It isn't like I'm going to come up with something that hasn't been tried before. I just get an ##ea of what I want the knife for and make it in that direction. I made 20 filet knives and no two of them were exactly alike and I used different handle materials and even the sheaths were all different, literally tooled and sewed differently.
I had extra material left over so I made a few knives that I just went with the shape of the scraps. I made a couple of wood carving knives with big handles and small blades, all with stick tangs. Stick tangs are your friend. Sometimes when I'm shaping a knife it comes out different than I planned. It chose its own final shape. I call it the Hippy Dippy method of knifemaking, or I made a mistake and fixed it.