Five Ways Custom Handles for Knives Can Improve Your Knife

No matter how often you reach for your knife or what you use it for, you will be in contact with the handle. The handle will be in contact with some part of your body when you carry the knife, and whenever you draw it and put it to work you will be, well, handling the handle. A knife with an excellent temper and heat treatment, ideal edge geometry and perfect balance is a great tool. If that knife has a handle or scales that are impractical or uncomfortable, you have just lost a valuable degree of utility from that tool.

A knife handle should not only be comfortable to handle and manipulate. It should allow for flexibility in the grip used, it should offer good traction, it should fill your hand properly, and ideally, it should be resistant to contaminants and debris. There are far more traits you might consider in knife scales, and there’s more than one way to go about securing those features in a knife. You could just look for a knife with a handle that fits your needs for a particular blade, but that won’t do you much good if you already have an everyday carry blade that you lean on.

If you have a knife you already thoroughly enjoy and meets your needs, there’s another way to get more out of the grips. You can add custom handles to a knife to get more functionality out of a knife and improve it overall. We offer many custom knife handles for many models that all types of outdoorsmen can use to improve the utility and functionality of their knives. There are many ways that a given blade can benefit from the addition of custom handles for knives - here are five big reasons.

1. Custom Handles Can Fit Your Hands Better

There’s a lot involved with this first reason, and it’s not all so easily summarized. If you pick the right set of custom scales or handle for a knife, you can really get a better fit and feel in the hand. A knife handle that’s too small or too large can be very difficult to handle and manipulate which can be quite a crutch when you are using a knife for a fine task or any job requiring a lot of control. A handle that is too large or too small, either in length or circumference, is going to be equally tough to use to carve a notch in a dry stick or to use as a chopping or splitting instrument. A handle that doesn’t fill your hands or is too large doesn’t just limit the practicality of the blade, it can also reduce the comfort of the tool.

Here’s another consideration. Handle length and circumference are only two factors to consider. Oftentimes knives will have ergonomic features like palm swells and finger grooves. These features can give the knife better natural indexing and can also improve the security of your grip. They can help you develop muscle memory with the use of your blade. These are great when they fit your hands, not so much when they don’t. Any ergonomics that don't match with your hands can become anything from an annoyance to a blister-inducing hotspot.

Take too much comfort away and soon that handle will wear on your hands. If you’re calloused and used to the handle, that’s fine, but if not, that handle is going to cause blistering or tear your skin. If you’re camping for a night or two, that’s a minor pain. If you’re on a trip intended to last several days, you don’t want to be dealing with the risk of infection. Even if you’re not really at risk of hurting yourself due to a poorly designed knife handle, that’s no reason for you to settle for an average design when you could have something much better.

Custom handles for knives can make it so much easier for you to create the right design and profile to fit with a blade blank to get more comfort and practicality out of the tool. If your current knife handle isn’t ideal because it’s too long, too small, or has poorly matched ergonomic features, a custom knife handle can turn that all around. Custom handles can transform the ergonomics of your knife to make the tool much more comfortable in your hand and make it easier and safer for you to whittle, chop, baton, filet, quarter, or anything else for which you could possibly use your knife.

2. Custom Handles Can Improve Traction
A big part of the functionality of a knife’s grip is the traction that the handle offers you, which is why this is a category all of its own. Grip is important with basically any tool, but even more important with a knife. At any given time, your hand will be only inches (or less) away from a blade that you may have honed to a razor’s edge. Considering what you’re working on, your fingers might even be looped over the guard and have no interposing protection from the edge. As a result, it’s not only important that a knife’s handle fits the contours of your hands as well as possible, but also offers traction.

Traction will protect you regardless of the grip you are utilizing for any job, and it will make you significantly more effective when you are working with your knife. If you are whittling feather sticks, a sure grip will make it easier for you to control the angle at which your blade cuts, and if you are cleaning a harvest, it will make it possible for you separate hides and cuts of meat with greater efficiency - but there’s more even more to it than a matter of efficiency.

Speaking to that end, a knife with a sure grip under ideal conditions can become an ice cube of slipperiness when it gets wet or greasy. Hunters and outdoorsmen are going to be handling a wet or greasy knife handle more or less with certainty. It’s only a matter of time before the rain comes or a handle gets coated in blood or fat. If your knife’s handle is great otherwise, but slippery under adverse conditions, that’s only one more thing you can improve upon with custom handles.

Handle material drastically affects the performance of a knife in this respect, and our custom knife handles are made with G10 and Micarta, which are both renowned for their ability to provide superior traction without grating on hands. They’re also admired for the fact that they are durable, stable and will not absorb moisture - a plus in the rain or in humid environments where those conditions will not only make a handle slippery but can make it deteriorate over time, which is another way that custom knife handles can benefit a knife.

3. They Can Increase Longevity
In the outdoors, where a large majority of work with knives occurs, there’s little protection against the elements if any. Extremes of temperature, shifts in humidity, bombardment with solar radiation will all affect your knife’s handle and construction. At any given time, your knife and other gear could be contending with some pretty rough conditions.

Some natural materials flag pretty rapidly under adverse conditions. If it’s too wet, too hot or both, that environment could spell doom for some knife handles. That’s another thing to consider altogether. Our custom knife handles won’t just help improve the grip of your knife, they will add longevity to the tool. Especially in environments where natural materials might break down in a matter of months, our custom knife handles are nearly impervious to decay.

Micarta and G10 are not magical materials, but they certainly do set the bar fairly high for resistance to wear and expected lifespan. There’s no reason to believe that synthetics like these won’t last a lifetime of use with almost no maintenance.

4. Custom Handles Can Improve Indexing
You might consider this a component of filling out and fitting your grip better, but it deserves its own category under improvements. There’s nothing wrong with a knife that doesn’t index naturally, as knives with round handles are very popular for a variety of reasons. That being the case, there is work to be done that can be done much more effectively with the use of a knife that indexes well on its own.

Any time you’re working to clean game and you can’t see the edge or point of your knife very well, natural indexing will make the knife an extension of your arm and hand. If you’re working with a knife at night with limited light, natural indexing will offer the same benefits. It allows you to orient yourself without the use of your eyes, and in fact, it can be even more effective at enabling you to gauge the angle of the blade than by sight alone.

Custom handles for knives can improve the indexing of a knife that already indexes well. The right custom handles will not only fit the contours of your hand and offer the previously mentioned benefits but can make it easier for you to feel where the edge, point and spine are without needing to see them, giving you a heightened level of dexterity.

5. They Can Improve Aesthetics, Too.

Custom Knife handles also offer you the ability to get the aesthetics you want from your knife. It might not matter to you in certain situations, but depending on the level of visibility you expect your gear to have it can add another layer of value.

Consider the custom scales featured to the right for a Becker BK2 or BK9 in blaze orange. You might not have a need for such blatant visuals, but if you do, they can work in your favor. If every other piece of gear you have is camouflaged, this knife handle’s contrast might help to keep it within sight. That might have implications for safety but it will definitely also help prevent you from losing the knife.

Now take a look at custom handles for the same knife in a different pattern to the left, this time green and black. This version is as muted as the previous one is bright. For someone like a bowhunter who needs to remain invisible at close range or for tactical low-visibility scenarios, customizing gear to match with your camouflage pattern can help keep you hidden when it matters.

Take A Look At Our Custom Handles For Knives
These are five reasons that custom handles for knives can improve the look, feel and function of your blade, and you can realize them with any of the custom handles that we offer. Even so, our custom handles offer even additional benefits on top of these. For example, take a look at one of our custom handles for an ESEE Knives PR4 below:

These custom scales don’t just offer many of the benefits explored above, but they offer a few bits of added value here and there on top of everything else. Consider the fact that the scales leave the lanyard hole area partially exposed so you can take advantage of the lanyard hole feature. Note that there is a bow drill divot in both scales. If you’re ever in the wilderness and are in sore need of a bearing block, here it is - for both right-handed people and southpaws.

So there you have a few of the big reasons why custom handles for knives can improve the look, feel and function of a blade, and right here at The Knife Connection you can make that a reality. Take a look through some of the many custom knife handles we offer that you can use to give yourself some of these benefits, and probably even more. We offer different stylings and selections for many popular models of knives. If you’d like to give us suggestions or you just want to hear a little more about what we can offer, give us a call at 1-866-336-2834 or send us a message at support@theknifeconnection.com.