Build a Custom Pocket Knife

The knife you carry is the one you use a hundred times more than any other, usually for something dull. Build it around that, not around the photograph.

Most pocket knives are bought for how they look open and lived with for how they feel closed. Weight, thickness and how it opens matter far more day to day than the blade shape does. Work through the steps below in that order and you will end up with something you actually keep in your pocket.

Lock or slip joint

A slip joint has no lock at all. A spring holds it open and firm pressure closes it. That sounds like a disadvantage until you realise it is the reason a slip joint is legal to carry in a great many places where a locking knife is not. For opening parcels, cutting string and everything else a pocket knife genuinely does, it is entirely sufficient.

A liner or frame lock lets you close the knife one handed and takes force on the spine without folding. If you use a knife at work rather than around the house, take the lock.

The blade shape nobody picks and everybody should

A wharncliffe has a completely straight edge and a spine that drops to meet it. Because the edge never curves, the whole length of it stays in contact with whatever you are cutting, and the tip is exactly where you are pointing. Boxes, cord, tape, a stubborn seam: it beats a drop point at all of them. It looks strange in a photograph, which is the only reason it is not the default.

What we would build

A three inch wharncliffe in 440C, slip joint, nail nick, buffalo horn scales with brass bolsters and brass pins. It disappears in a pocket, it is legal almost everywhere, it costs under two hundred dollars, and it is the sort of knife that ends up with somebody else in fifty years.

Questions people ask first

Please check your local law before ordering.