I found this old fillet knife literally in pieces.

The blade was bent.  The tang was warped.  The handle was too small (in my opinion).  And the mechanical connection of the tang behind the handle was destroyed.  The edge being useless was an obvious condition based on the state of all of the components.

I carefully straightened the blade and tang without messing with the heat treat.  Then sanded the blade to 2000 grit.  This removed the original circular grinding marks that seemed to almost a feature in the other fillet knives I have from this manufacturer.

While I was working on the blade, I ordered a nice piece of Koa wood for a new handle.  I was thinking fillet knife...  fish...  water... (I need a handle, so probably something land based) island...  Hawai'i... Koa!  Yep.  Koa only grows on Hawai'i.   I found a distributor of Koa wood that would work with me a little bit and he found me a small piece of very nicely figured Koa wood.

Making the handle that was a touch over an inch longer, made the tang too short for a through tang.   So I needed a different type of mechanical connection.  I just cant rely on epoxy to hold the tang in place.  So I carefully drilled a hole for a nickel silver cross pin.  Next, I did a 'burn in' recess for the tang.  Burning that in was an absolute bugger, while keeping everything straight, centered, and aligned with the hole I drilled.  I ended up making a 'dummy' tang out of a scrap piece of metal and used that to heat to a cherry red and burning the recess.  Each time I burned in the 'tang', I progressed the hole about 1/8" is all.  Talk about tedious!

Then I carved a little boss on the front of the handle for the original bolster to fit over.  Keeping the bottom surface of that perfectly flat was a chore as well.

I figure pretty much everything I did on this was unorthodox.  Simply taking on this project was anything but normal.  I spent as much on the wood for the handle as what a new fillet knife would cost.  And that is not even counting my time.  It was one of those thing that you do just because you can.   LOL.

Anyway.  I posted photos of the end result in my photos.  You should be able to use this LINK to go directly to the first of them.

After putting wax on the handle, it feels amazing!