John Drewes has been a long time customer. Sending us photos of his custom knives every now and then, we have started to urge him to let us sell some. We often display his work on our Social Media Pages. After asking a number of time, he is ready to sell some of these beautiful pieces. Quite the creative craftsman with just beautiful hand finished work.
Number 19
This is a hat sheath knife (Hattutuppipuukko). This type of knife/sheath has a long history with an obscure origin. A very old relic of this type was found with the Bocksten “Bog Man” in an archeological site in Sweden, and it dates back around 700 years. It’s origin goes back much farther, I’m sure. This project is my imaginative version of this age-old type with some unique, time consuming, and rather detailed leather tooling added to it. The Hattutuppipuukko was quite common in Finland in the 19th century.
The blade is a Lauri rhombic 95 HD (Finland). The handle is part green ash wood from my neighborhood and part stacked birch bark I harvested here in Minnesota. The ferrule and bolster are stone-washed nickel silver.
The sheath is made of Finnish veg. tanned steer hide and is hand stitched. There is a wooden core inside the lower part of the sheath, and the knife must be inserted with the cutting edge oriented correctly. The opening of the sheath is egg shaped, as is the cross section of the knife handle. A small arrow on the back side of the sheath serves as a reminder of the direction for the cutting edge. Reversing the direction of orientation and inserting the knife forcefully will damage the sheath! Be mindful of this!
To properly remove the knife from the sheath, pull about an inch of slack on the braided leather cord on each side as shown on one of the photos. Then remove the knife from the sheath. If the cords become difficult to pull, a little leather dressing (chap stick works real well here!) will allow them to slide through the holes nicely. To reinsert the knife, reverse the procedure, always keeping the cutting edge properly oriented and away from the leather surface.
Blade Length: 3 5/8"
Overall length: 8 1/4"
