Crooked Knife

Step 2 Knife Details

I made this knife just that way, except I used an industrial hacksaw blade instead of a file for stock.
Some saw blades are made with hard teeth and a soft blade, but the back of this one is hard enough to hold an edge without any hardening/tempering.

I carved the handle from a chunk of an elm tree in our yard that was dying of Dutch Elm disease.
I wrapped the handle with a strip of elm bark to hold the side plug in place. The wood of the handle shrank and gripped the tang of the blade as it dried, so the whole thing is very secure.
The handle is a bit small, since my hand has grown a lot since I made it. It fit perfectly at the time.
Now that I've seen and used many crooked knives, I would make the handle much smaller where it meets the blade.

Elm is really nice wood. It's tough like oak but much lighter. Like oak it has transverse rays in the grain that prevent it from splitting. It's too bad all those trees died. The beetles were only in the inner bark.
The big trunks of those trees could have been sawed into boards to plank longships. But they mostly got burned or just rotted away in people's yards.