Sasquatch-Style Butterfly Knives

Perhaps the most valuable Randall knife is the big Sasquatch recurve designed by Doug Kenefick.  They sell for about $1100 to $1300 per single knife on eBay.  I have one on order from him, but meanwhile I got to thinking about what a nice Wing Chun chopper an enlarged, modified Sasquatch style blade would make.

The blade started out as a 15 mm thick piece of 9260 (carbon) spring steel.  This was then hammered down to 5/16″ using a power hammer.  The hammering aligns the crystaline structure of the steel to improve resilience.  We used a regular carbon steel for these sharps because there is another company out there chortling over their new luxury grade carbon steel blades so I wanted to play too.  Normally we use weapons grade stainless, or D2 (a really great semi-stainless carbon steel) but the spring steel should be more resilient even though it needs more maintenance.  While there are less spring steels out there, a famous U.S. katana maker chose 9260 for his top-end swords, so we tested it along with a number of other carbon steels and our forge recommended trying this. The final shape was then cut and ground then professionally heat treated (vacuum heat treatment).

This is the most complicated grind we have done; I can tell you that getting those curved grinds to meld together takes a lot of skill and patience and my hat is off to Randall for putting out their Sasquatch knives.  We lost six blades to cracking during heat treatment, which is a pretty expensive hit but these are really special knives.  It was also a major pain welding the carbon steel.

There is a wide, deep hollow grind with a sharp primary edge.  The spine swage is unsharpened and the knife flippable to the reverse grip.  Randall originally decided to make their Sasquatch knife using a Satin finish because there were a lot of big glossy finish knives floating around and they wanted to do something special, so these are Satin finish blades.  Blades are around 12″ in length.

The D Guard is AISI 304 stainless.  We had to make a thicker version of the Hung Gar sword D Guard to accomodate the extra thick steel.

The handles look like gorgeous wood but are actually a subtle paper micarta that takes a great glossy shine.  Eight pins and glue hold the scales to the full tang.

Each product consists of two knives and a nylon 2-in-1 sheath.  There is a special edition logo on this run that includes, along with Ali made, a logo showing Vulcan holding a hammer.  He is the Roman’s blacksmith god.

These need to be kept oiled when not in use.