Originally posted by South MS Bowhunter:
Garret,
Nice combo! What the storyline behind the compound to knives?
Shot compounds for years. Saw a knife maker on another forum offer a custom knife for a compound bow in a trade. We worked out the details. The compound that I hadn't shot in a couple years after getting my longbow got traded for other tools that I would actually use to match my bow. It was a win-win for both of us. My bow wasn't worth a lot, his materials weren't worth a lot, we both got into something that we wanted and would use for minimal monetary investment.
The bushcraft blade was just one of his base woodlore models with a slightly enlarged false guard. The hunter/skinner was my design based on all the things I liked from the 20 or so production hunting knives that I had and optimized to my preferences. I drew up a design with exact specifications for everything like you would for a CAD program or blueprint and sent him a model. He created that model for me with the materials that I wanted. At the time I traded with Mark, he had 7 different hunting designs of various sizes and shapes on his website. He liked my design so well he made one for himself exactly like mine. Then, shortly after he used my design on a few animals, he dropped all of his hunter lines and replaced it with my knife and a slightly enlarged version of my knife. It doesn't look all that special but when you get to using it, it just works perfectly on everything from squirrels to deer. His larger knife was made to work well on deer to large game.