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Spyderco Mule Team Project and Leather Sheath

Spyderco have a product called the Mule Team. This is a blade blank available in a variety of steels and the idea is that you put your own handle of choice onto the blank.

This means that every Mule Team project which is completed is unique!

I decided I wanted one as they’re really nice! I don’t have anything like the skills to put a handle on one though so I bought a block of stabilised horse chestnut and let Quickbeam from British Blades handle it—he did an amazing job! There is a write up on how he goes about it.

I also had a matching fire steel made from the same block of horse chestnut by Pikebite from British Blades, who also sold me the horse chestnut.

I chose a wooden handle as I thought it would look the nicest but people have used many different materials including cord wraps, corian, micarta and so on. There is a Show Your Mule thread on the Spyderco Forums with many examples!

Once the knife and steel had been returned it was down to me to make the sheath!

Gallery

Creating

I had to think quite carefully about the design. The Mule is quite a handle-heavy knife and there isn’t actually a lot of blade to sheath, even though it looks big.

I didn’t want a pouch style sheath as I didn’t want to hide the nice handle, so I decided on a dagger style sheath. Also all the other Mule sheaths I could find that people had made were pouch sheaths so I wanted to try and make something a bit different!

I wanted to incorporate the fire steel into the sheath but I didn’t want to put it on the side, so I decided to draw up a design with the steel on the front. In order for the front of the sheath to be big enough for the steel I would need to make the sheath larger than the blade actually is.

Once I had finalised the design I cut out the three main pieces and then checked the overall fit of the knife and also the fit of the blade in the specially sized welt.

Once I was happy with the fit of the pieces I went about designing and making the fire steel loop for the front of the sheath. I made this quite detailed as I planned to use contrasting stitching later on.

I also fixed the press stud base to this piece rather than the front of the sheath so that it would not scratch the blade.

I had decided that I wanted a piece on the back so that the sheath could also be worn horizontally. To make this a bit special I vectored up a picture of a mule in Illustrator and then burnt him on the laser cutter at work!

Next I decided that I needed an additional piece in the sides of the sheath at the top. As you can see from the two pictures below, without an additional piece there isn’t enough space to accommodate the front of the knife handle when it is fully sheathed.

With an additional piece inserted, this creates enough of a gap at the mouth of the sheath for the knife to slide comfortably home.

The final piece to make was the retaining strap. Originally I cut a slot into the belt loop and the idea was the the strap went through the slot and was then riveted at the back.

Unfortunately once I made it I realised it was going to be impossible to unsheathe the knife without cutting the strap every time! Rather than start the back piece again I just cut from the slot out to the edge of the belt loop and made a new strap.

The new design works fine and I quite like the look of it; even if it wasn’t intentional!

Finally everything was sewn together (which took over 4 hours and I managed to snap a needle in my finger again!) and then the edges were cut, sanded and burnished before being dyed.

All that was left to do then was to fit the press stud to the retaining strap and polish the sheath.

All content © Ian Atkinson 2000–2010, not to be re-used without permission.

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