As we described yesterday, Darrel Ralph was wrapping up the prototype for a 4” Gunhammer and we showed some images of it “under construction”. Well, here is the finished product. Darrel says the frame took about 40 hours of back and forth machining time plus a little over 150 hours of development. “The blade grinding was very intense,” Darrel said. “We have six process that had to be followed just to grind the blade.”

As for the ‘unobtainium’ tungsten steel we mentioned before, Darrel said, “Chad had to build a vacuum chamber in a twenty-two hundred degree forging furnace to weld the materials in the blade and frame together so that the atmosphere is oxygen free. That’s why this steel is so hard to get hold of.”

As for the cost of this one-off Stellite 6K core, 4” Gunhammer with 3D carved lightning strike carbon fiber and copper inlay frame? It was more than your average E6 makes in a month, for obvious reasons. As much as we like it, we’ll be waiting for the more mundane version to come out. Check out the knives made for us normal mortals on his website. They’re quality work and worth the investment, whether you’re carrying one or admiring it in a case.

-David Reeder

Tags: Darrel Ralph

This entry was posted on Friday, November 18th, 2011 at 20:30 and is filed under Knives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.