Boning Knife

In the past few years my family and I have taken up deer hunting. This has provided me the opportunity to field dress, skin and butcher about a dozen deer. This experience has proven to be very useful in making hand made hunting knives. One thing that has been interesting though, is that by far the most time spent with a knife is during the butchering process. The field dressing and skinning hardly take any time at all. It is amazing to me how much emphasis is placed on the size and shape of a hunting knife when it is really used for such a short period of time. On the same thought is how little you hear about butcher or boning knives. I'm sure that a lot of this is due to the fact that many people have someone else do the meat processing for them. I was quickly looking for a good boning knife design and even better yet would be one knife that I could use for all three processes (field dressing, skinning and butchering). I noticed that many professional butchers will have a favorite knife that they use for just about everything. This includes skinning a deer when or if needed. Below is my first attempt at making such a knife. It worked quite well, but it is not my final revision. The blade is 1/16" thick by four inches long ATS-34 and had a fair amount of flex. It was a little too stiff and short for filleting some of the silver skin off of the larger cuts of meat.  The blade shape worked quite well for skinning. The up-swept point wasn't too dramatic for gutting, but I did have to be extra careful not to puncture anything that I would regret. The handle is canvas Micarta with dovetailed brass bolsters. It provided an excellent grip in all cases. A spent .22 magnum shell dutifully serves as the thong hole tubing. Hopefully soon I will be able to show you my next two revisions of this idea.