This is a project to modify the inexpensive and commonly imported ghurka khukri to something a little more user friendly.
It seems like a neverending quest for me to find an adequate general-purpose blade that can do basically anything. Pocket knives are generally good for small tasks only like carving or cutting rope. Hatchets work for chopping wood but fall short on whittling. Machete's are for hacking brush but have flimsy blades and are too long and cumbersome for many applications. The Kukri seems to have a good blend of knife, axe, and machete, all in one package. Unfortunately a good one will set you back well over $100.
While the khukri has a very strong and thick blade, its clear that the imported ones are only $20 because they blew $19.97 on the blade and then splurged on a 3-cent handle. Whoever designed this peice of chintzy crap must have been a sadist or assumed gloves would be mandatory. It has an unnatural inward curve with a thorny ring-shaped protrusion I can only assume is specifically designed to rip your palm-pad off if you take a swing at something. The old tale about an "unsheathed khukri having to taste blood" is definitly true if you leave the original handle on.
So, I set out to rectify the situation and put a more comfortable, functional, and aesthetically pleasing grip on this otherwise great knife.
The first step was to get the abomination from hell off the nice blade. The ghurka is a full-tang knife, and so the scales are held on by some steel crosspins that are peened and then ground and polished when the handle is made. Drilling out the peen and then popping them out with a punch is easy enough. Then the scales can be pryed off with a screwdriver, and that nasty reddish-brown glue can be cleaned off. The pommel is a little more difficult to remove. The tang has two pins cut into it that are also peened in place. I eventually was able to work this back and forth until it broke.
After getting the handle removed and making up some scales from rubberwood, it slowly became apparent that I wasn't going to be able to keep the knife full-tang. The tang narrows so much in the middle that I cannot achieve the shape I'd like. Guess I'll keep those scales for another knife :) So I decided to go with a stick tang, which opens up a world of possibility. Unfortunately this means making a guard. Which isn't so bad, I guess. Most knife makers make guards from either nickel or brass, I don't have either so I decided to use some 1/8" CRS stock.
