I am currently in the process of working with my Dad on making the knife, as best as we can, that Daryl Dixon uses in the Season 7 Finale. (There's a great profile shot as he sticks it right in Dwight's face) I haven't seen any pictures of him wearing it in the previews for next season, but the crazy thing about Norman Reedus on this show, you hand him a Busse Team Gemini bowie knife, or a Horton crossbow, then replace that with a Stryker, now a PSE Fang... the cost of that item friggin skyrockets until they can't keep it in stock anymore. His character is a geek merch machine.
Anyway, the blade my dad is largely helping me with... the guard I'm making out of Sculpy clay, then I'm going to use the packed sand method to create either a copper or bronze guard. That leaves the handle, which appears to be a custom (the whole thing is custom) leather handle using light brown, brown, and some sort of dark red with a brown tint... and I think just the natural tooling leather.
So here's my question... my dad says a leather handle requires something hard and thick (heh, that's what she said) like tooling leather, but the prices on dyes are, together, currently cost prohibitive. So I was going to wait a while... then I saw this listing on eBay. It pretty much has all the colors I'm thinking of using, and even if its thinner than the specific tooling leather width I was planning for (between 3.2 and 3.6mm), there's a hundred pieces... even if they were .08" thick, the handle is only 5 1/3" long (I know, odd size... the main part of the knife is 4.5", with a 3/4 inch cap covering the nut) it's only going to require around 67 pieces. (I know I'm probably better off just doing one solid piece... I want something that will help pack down the leather... plus if you examine the knife, it's entirely possible they took the same direction... I could do something like hollow out part of the handle and store some survival stuff in it)
Anyway, I am just curious what you guys think about using this kind of leather instead of tooling leather for the handle? At its thickest it is 1.75"x1.25", maybe even 1.5", so there's plenty of material there. I did send a request for the thickness size to the seller, but I guess he won't be back till Monday night. The listing will end before that but it says more than 10 available, he'll probably just relist it. But this would be a far easier price to swallow than all those dyes... (ironically the leather isn't so bad)
Now my other question, and I don't know if we'll have an option... we don't have our forge built yet. Our plan is to use one of the leaf springs from a '37 Chevy and just heat it with a propane torch and bend it straight as we go. Then we'll use my CAD drawing (or the prototype I'm building out of Balsa) to mark where to cut, and use a plasma torch to cut out the shape... then basically just use the grinder to smooth it out and sharpen it.
I guess my forge question is again about thickness... the thickness of the leaf spring is 1/4". Now the total length from point to tang is 11 1/2", height is 1 1/2" (I'm limited by the leaf spring, I could go higher but I'd have to use another, thicker leaf spring) Now I've got this other bowie knife, it's really just this generic piece of crap that I'm not even sure why I bought... but the total thickness on that is 3/16", and the length from tip to tang is 15". Is that mean the knife I'm making is going to look even weirder than it already is? Again, we don't have a forge, but we both want to build one... I'm almost curious if there might be a jury-rigged system I haven't read about yet. My dad is an auto-body mechanic and works at home so we've probably already got most of the tools... I've been looking at everything, trying to think of what we could use for months now...
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