The Guide to Knife Templates and Designs
Knifemaking is one of mans oldest trades. From the first sharp rock to now humans have designed knives for every possible purpose you can think of. We’ve designed knives to open oysters, to create thin delicate slices of salmon, to chop through 2x4 in only a couple strokes.
Due to knifemaking being such an old craft means that there is really very little new aspects that people can design in their knives. The benefit of this is that we have a wealth of resources available to us at our fingertips.
Knife templates what are they?
Googling “knife templates” you’ll see hundreds of images similar to this.
Most of the time you can look up what knife design you’re looking for and if you’re lucky you’ll find what you want. From there just print it out and you’re good to go!
However if you cant find something you like it at least gives you a baseline for you to draw your own. Premade knife templates are the quickest and easiest way to get into knife design as a lot of design concepts can be seen from looking and what other people do well and not so well.
The Template Library
- Karim at Tharwa Valley Forge has templates you can access here.
- Tharwa also has a Tribute to Lloyd Harding and his collection of designs here.
- Pinterest has hundreds of thousands of templates available here.
- Jay Fisher has a library you can access here.
- DIY Knifemakers Info Centre houses plenty of templates available here.
If you know where there are any templates, please send us a message. The above are some of our favourites that we know of.
If you still can’t find what you want in all these templates, then its time to pick up the paper and pen and start drawing until you find what you want. Drawing your own designs helps you learn about the shapes and designs that work best in knifemaking. If it doesn’t look right, it likely isn’t.