I made several different types of these blades for my Mother to make splints and decorations for basket weaving. All my blades are made from old files. I wish I had a video camera back in those days. I made them about 30 years ago and she still uses them today. My Mother turned 73 on the 13th of December and she also does a lot of bead work. We are Mi'kmaq First nation from Nova Scotia.
what a nice and functional piece! I can't believe the piece of wood was sitting there for 10 years and just waited for this project to happen ,can't wait to make one and added to my carving tool collection.
It's refreshing to see a historical knife being made which isn't a weapon! There were so many tools used on the frontier which were either hand made or trade goods. I can just imagine using this style of draw knife to make smooth stringers and frames on birch bark canoes. Thanks Walter for another fun and informative video!
Recently 'Samurai carpenter' interviewed a native carver. It amazed me how similar one of his tools was to Japanese Yari Ganna (a pear-like two-handed draw tool for rough removal of wood).
We used sinew and pine pitch mixed with charcoal and deer dung. I've not made pitch myself but I listen to what the elders say. Natural sinew is applied moist and when it dries it shrinks giving a tighter wrap.
hey, big fan. saw you on Forged in Fire. it was an unfair competition. obviously the 2 easier forge welding techniques advanced to the final stage. awesome video sir
An interesting little tidbit is that the Mocotaugan was the only trade item that the Hudson Bay Company ever listed in their catalog under its Indian name. (Yep, it's the same Hudson Bay Company that still makes top quality wool blankets to this day.) One thing though, it does need the crooked end on the blade. The Mocotaugan was said to be the most important item a Native American of the time owned, and it would be used for everything from making canoes to making spoons, cups & bowls. It was basically a do everything wood working knife, and without the bend in the end of the blade you lose a lot of that utility.
Guess who I saw on Forged In Fire the other night??? I could not believe what I was seeing...so sorry for you, that was so strange...you're STILL my go to guy for knife stuff...Thanks and keep up the video work...
Great Video, Dogwood is hard enough that they used it for splitting wedges when they couldn't get steel. I admire your patience working with that wood.
My father had a mocotaugan. Used it for making snowshoes, paddles, axe handles and wooden spoons. It had about three inch blade and the tip of the blade was about 90 degrees from the rest of the blade. The knife was excellent for hollowing out wood. I was really hoping you'd put a good bend on your model. Good job though! Oh and I saw you on Forged in Fire!
Put the bevel on the underside of the blade. Placed on top you can not plunge into a cut and then back up and out. Try a chisel bevel up and down on a piece of wood as a test. Bevel up and it will have to break the wood out to bring it back out of the cut. Gouges are ground on the under side except for a specialized gouge that is ground incannel. Try a gouge for something like a spoon or bowl and then regrind the gouge with the bevel on the inside. You won't like that at all. Using Dogwood was an excellent choice for this project. It has an interlocking grain and is extremely tough. The more you us it the more polished it becomes. It's traditionally used for shuttles used in weaving cloth. As it slides back and forth on the warp threads it becomes glass smooth without any real wear. I've used it for tool handles, carving mauls, gears in wooden clocks, shuttles for net weaving, tuning pegs and there are no finer wooden wedges for splitting out planks than Dogwood. I just learned of your videos tonight, I have enjoyed them very much.
Ray Mears and his indian mate made a canoe out of birch bark using a crook knife, it didn't look like this one mate, it was bent in a couple of different angles, smaller blade too. i do enjoy your videos, relaxing voice
pure bitumen/asphalt is a great alternative to natural pitch, that can be hard to find and quite expensive .. even though it doesnt smell nearly as nice. find a friendly road worker to hand you some scrap material, and you're set for years to come.
I was going to agree with the people below that the knife should have a crook near the end. I first saw this knife when I read the book, "The Survival Of The Birch Bark Canoe". Thank you.
Loved it! Awesome project and beautiful result! I'd love to see some more "recreation" type vids like this where you simply use hand tools 👍. Thanks for sharing.
Hello Walter. Very good video again! Could you please (a 1000 times) explain how you would have straightened the blade after quenching? I tried this two times before and my blades both broke. I also want to build a japanese yanagiba with a one sided bevel from one peace of carbon steel. I know that you would normally laminate two steels, but i don't have an anvil or borax or a real forge, so i have to do it with just one bar. However i am afraid that the knife will heavily bend because of the one sided bevel. How do i prevent from this or how do i straighten it?
Great job on Forged in Fire. If you wouldn't have had catastrophic failure. You would've won the whole thing. Hopefully they bing you back. The kid that one got lucky.
I really enjoyed the video. The link for the book is not good anymore. But I found your video kind of late in the game. I just found out about mocotaugan's the other day myself. So I don't have any equipment to make such an instrument but would love to have one to try. Would you consider making one for me?
dogwood shrinks more radially than in other dimensions . Warping , twisting and cracking as it seasons. you might be able to take a log center section and make a plane body as I've made mallet heads and hammer and adze handles. I have a three foot stack of shellacked dogwood 5/4 boards of various widths. some with black central stripes, all with minds of their own. been drying for 7 years. under the weight of an anvil stand log. cannot be joined for boxes but makes lovely plaques. have pictures
Perhaps a foolish question, but do you ever wear ear protection working in the shop? I would imagine there would be enough noise during normal work over time to cause some amount of hearing damage.
I promise I will one of these days...but honestly it'll probably be next year before I get around to it. I haven't made folders for quite a few years, so I want to get some practice in before I do any demos.
DveevD water cools faster than oil. Generally steel manufacturer tells you what to quench with. In my shop i have water hardening, oil hardening and brine hardening steel. with unknown steel i quench with oil first, if that doesnt work then i reheat and quench in water.
Just the pressure of the other threads. It's waxed so the thread is tacky and that keeps it from moving much. It might unravel eventually...but it would take a long time!
Wyatt Hopkins he did not, there was a blade failure during one of the test. the knife was good looking, however it was a little thin for abuse. I hope he does a redemption episode.
I greatly appreciate that you're paying some respect to the craftsmen of the period. I think it's good practice, when making a historical blade, to point out what parts of the production is anachronistic. If only to educate numbskulls like me :)
william collins makes them and ben orford , about a hundred bucks though. I'm making my own. I got about 4 hours into shaping the blade , so far and an hour in the handle . so far. I expect another 2-3 hours to finish..... so , a hundred don't sound so bad.Fun project though. I agree with a previous commentor. Walters blade is awesome but it's not the crooked knife I want or am making. Look on ebay , you'll see that there is a million different designs. The originals were made with beaver teeth! Never seen one of those though.
Cool project. Question: On the draw you used a palm up when you pulled on the knife. It looks awkward. Would palm down be a better technique to control the knife. Thanks for the video. Very interesting.
I have never seen them used palm down. Typically the wood being worked I believe is held by the other hand at the "far" end and the knife cuts palm up on a pull stroke.
It's not actually. Very comfortable and strong since the hand and arm are completely in line with each other. You can get some really strong strokes with that grip. Ray Mears has done several shows in which he uses one. Several Episodes of Northern Wilderness; episode five in particular (he makes an axe handle near the middle of the show). As well as Birch Bark Canoe. Look them up.
"Walt's gonna be on F'd in fire", I hear. Pity the poor bastards that have to compete with him. Some ignorant parameters may be placed so he can't win or qualify, like when Trent Tye's build was too heavy to be use frantically by a spastic expert. Bro! I'm waitin on you to embarrass a panel of experts who, along with the rest of us, know where to go for the best vids on the subject. Thanks! and keep up the great work!
It looks scarier on camera than it is in reality. You keep your arm clamped to your side and the blade out at a 90 degree angle to your body, so it's almost impossible to cut yourself.
remembers that Europeans have been here for 500+ years. From all of the research I have done in this tool (which is quite a bit), they (native americans) would use old axe files and make a lot of these blades themselves. As a lot of us know it doesn't take much skill or tools to do a stock reduction knife.
Absolutely marvelous piece of mineralized Dogwood! You did a very nice job of wrapping, BTW! After better than 40 years of research on Native Americans and their tools, etc., I have found more of the crooked knives with crooked blades used for hollowing out the bottom of bowls, with the straight upper portion of the blade being used to smooth and thin the sides of the bowl after getting it sufficiently deepened. I have seen both straight and crooked blades on these wonderful tools but, by far the most I've seen and seen used by Natives is the more crooked bladed styles! I've never thought to make one but, you have inspired me to try to make one in my forge! Thanks, Walter for the video! It was informative!
Great video. That dogwood is incredible, almost like ebony. I enjoyed learning about the east coast crook knives, I have made west coast style for years. They are also used palm up, but with both sides of the blade sharpened. They are incredible carving tools.
I'm part Ojibwa of the Algonquin Nation. I can tell you flat out that the knife can be either left or right handed, that it does in fact have a crook at the end for gouging spoons and such. You can craft everything from canoes to snowshoes with it. As to what metallurgy is behind it, I cannot say, but it is flexible/ductile. Serious pain in the ass to find a proper slipstone for it without going to the Lee Valley catalogue or Garret Wade. Yes, it can be drawn toward you with your elbow locked towards your midsection. Your elbow is the stop to prevent injury. Your execution is exceptional, your quality is equal. Your research on this particular item is not up to scratch. I very much enjoy your tutelage, but you made something else. Elk or Reindeer horn make good handles too. Natural curvature. Like Ashley Graham... I digress... my bad! Overall, thumbs up, but I'd like to see a do over... with a hook! Better than I can forge, but not what a woodwright, or my ancestors would use for the same tasks it was intended to use. Thank-you for your time all the same.
I'm neither a historian , nor a metallurgist m'Lady. I could recommend Roy Underhill of Colonial Williamsburg. His Gung-Fu (translated as "skill") is remarkable as a historian, woodwright, blacksmith, craftsman and by my account (without meeting his family) probably a gentleman of quality. He could answer your questions based on the time frame apparent. I only know the tools I've worked with. Smelting of various ores was done in North America before my whitey ancestors came, but it was based on ores that had lower heat requirements, such as copper derived from malachite. Green tinged stones sitting in depleted streams. Not the hardest material, but it hardens as you work it or strike it. All the same, I'm not sure if they ever added tin to the copper or understood alloys in any way until steel was given by way of carbon/iron bonds that we use to this day with very specific measurements that give us cast iron (which has high carbon without ductility, thus breaking easily), wrought iron, which is my favourite for withstanding abuse, and tamahagane (the best steel based on carbon content used by swordmasters in Japan). I can be long winded, but I hope this directs you towards your answers Rachel..
Like I said at the beginning, I have zero expertise in this...so I'm not making any claims to any deep knowledge. The main source I used -- the book that I linked to up in the description -- has photos of a number of very old Mocotaugans, and most of them have straight blades. It could be that over time or between different parts of the country, etc. there may have been a fair amount of variation. Just speculation on my part.
Does anyone know if there is some difference between what is referred to as a "Crooked Knife" and a "Mocotaugan" ??? They seem identical except for the curve near the end of the blade. So I think they are one and the same.
Respectfully, my work is more on the organic end of things. Happy to fit a haft to the eye though (which is a skill better learned than offered. Makes hiking/camping that much lighter and less bulky when going through the sticks). Besides, the whole point of using a tomahawk was that it was light and versatile during a time when there wasn't a lot of steel traded. These days you want a long handled felling axe, a set of gluts (wooden wedges), a maul and a hewing axe even if you're minimalistic to build a cabin. If you're looking at just basic camping though, yup, a tomahawk head in your pack is pretty damned sweet.
I think Crook knife doesn't just come from the crooked handle but it would have also been made from a crook or fork in tree branches where the grain would naturally follow the bend and be very strong.
Brian Pierce .......No!, him not big Chief Suckerface. Him not tough enough, him wanna be seen here and have big pride think good things of himself......wait!, is that an eagle feather hangin out-cher-ass?? U in big heap sky-bird trouble!
