Reaper Hunting Knife – Handmade San Mai Damascus with Pine Cone Handle & Leather Sheath

The Reaper Hunting Knife

This one's a looker, but it's built to work. The Reaper is a full-tang hunting knife with a 5.75-inch San Mai Damascus blade, a stabilized pine cone handle nobody else is going to have, and an Italian leather sheath with a skull tooled into the front. It runs 10.5 inches overall, so it sits in the hand like a proper hunting knife — big enough to do real work in the field, controllable enough for skinning and caping.

If you've been looking for a Damascus hunting knife that isn't another mass-produced factory blade, this is it. Forged, ground, and finished by hand, and because of the materials, no two come out the same.

What San Mai actually means

You'll see a lot of "Damascus" knives online, but San Mai is a different build, and it's worth knowing what you're paying for. San Mai is a three-layer construction. There's a hard cutting core down the middle — ours is VG10 — and it's clad on both sides with pattern-welded 15N20 steel.

We build it this way for a simple reason: you get the best of both. The hard VG10 core takes a keen edge and holds it, hardened to 59–61 HRC. The softer outer layers wrap around that core and give the blade toughness, so it flexes and absorbs shock instead of going brittle the way a fully hardened single steel can. On a hunting knife that gets used hard — working a joint, cutting through hide and cartilage — that matters. You can see the line where the core meets the cladding running down the blade; that's not printed or etched on, that's the actual San Mai laminate.

One practical thing worth knowing: the VG10 core is a stainless steel, so this blade shrugs off the blood, moisture, and humidity of field work far better than a plain carbon Damascus would. A wipe and a light coat of oil now and then is really all it asks for.

The pine cone handle

This is where the knife stops being just another hunter. The handle is made from real pine cones, stabilized in resin and then ground and finished by hand. Look close and you can see the actual cone scales locked into the resin, with blue, amber, and deep red running all the way through it. The cone decides the pattern, not us, so every handle is one of a kind. It's dense and solid, fills the hand, and won't crack, swell, or shift the way natural wood can when it gets wet — which is exactly what you want on a knife you take outside.

Set into the handle is a copper Masonic skull pin. Small detail, but it ties the whole knife together with the skull theme that carries through to the sheath.

The sheath

The sheath is hand-stitched from premium Italian leather, with a skull tooled into a shield on the front and a basket-weave pattern worked across the body. It's not just for show, either. The belt loop is removable, and the sheath is set up for both horizontal and vertical carry — so you can run it on your hip the normal way, or lay it flat across the back of your belt for a cleaner carry on the trail. Most fixed-blade sheaths don't bother giving you that option.

Specifications

• Knife Name: Reaper Hunting Knife (full tang)
• Blade Steel: San Mai Damascus — VG10 core / 15N20 cladding
• Blade Hardness: 59–61 HRC
• Blade Length: 5.75 inches
• Blade Width: 2 inches
• Blade Thickness: 5 mm
• Handle: Stabilized exotic multi-color pine cone, 4.75 inches
• Handle Pin: Copper Masonic skull
• Overall Length: 10.5 inches
• Sheath: Premium Italian leather, skull-engraved, removable belt loop, horizontal and vertical carry

What it's built for

This is a hunting knife first. The 5.75-inch blade with that wide, sweeping belly is made for the real jobs — field dressing, skinning, caping, and general camp work. The strong tip lets you get into a carcass without puncturing what you don't want to, and there's enough belly to skin cleanly in long strokes. A lot of people will hang this one on a wall too, and it earns that — but it's a working knife under the looks, and the San Mai blade is built to be used.

Made by hand in Canada

We've been making knives at Stag Steel Knives since 2001, and this is a team effort start to finish — forged, ground, fitted, and finished by hand in our Canadian shop. There's no production line here, which is exactly why the pine cone handle and the San Mai laminate come out the way they do. Set it next to the factory "Damascus" hunters that flood the market and the difference shows up fast, in the way the laminate runs down the blade and the way the resin handle is finished.

If you want to see the rest of what we make, here's our full range of handmade hunting knives, and since this is a Damascus blade, it lives in the Damascus hunting knives collection alongside the others. New to hunting blades? Our guide on what hunting knives are used for walks through the types and how to pick one. And once yours arrives, the how to care for a Damascus knife guide covers keeping a San Mai blade clean and sharp for decades.

We make these one at a time, so when this one sells the next won't be identical to it. If it's the one you want, don't sit on it too long.

Free shipping across Canada, with affordable shipping rates to the USA and worldwide.