I wanted a Gerber knife, but I don't have any money. What I do have are a particular set of skills, which I have acquired over a long career.

Unfortunately the skills department is completely lacking in knife making. I'm hoping that this project will change that. Although I've never made a knife before I use the same tools almost daily.

I searched for a 3d printable model and found 2. On GrabCAD there is a model of a Gerber mk2. Unfortunately when imported it into Fusion 360 the scale is completely off.
https://grabcad.com/library/mark-ii-combat-knife-1

I wanted a metal blade instead of a printed one. First I was thinking about starting with a piece of 1/4" plate. Then I found an old Harbor Freight file that was broke off at about 6-1/2".

With some searching I found that files can be made into a usable knife. Some say to completely anneal, modify, then reheat treat. Others say that it can just be tempered. With it only tempered it will need to be ground to shape while taking care not to heat it too much. I chose to just temper it. I put it in a 400 degree oven for a couple of hours then let it cool off.

Using an angle grinder I ground the file to the rough shape. It's still going to take quite a bit of sanding to get it to the final shape.

Then a few days ago I found that someone had modeled the knife correctly. It was only uploaded as a .stl, but I was able to convert it to a solid model in Fusion 360. At least good enough to make the internal changes that I needed. I added a cut-out for the tang of the file then combined the parts and split it for printing in halves.
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5449762

After printing and trying it on the blade it's starting to feel like a decent knife. The printable knife already had grooves for pins to align the parts. I'm going to use some steel rod to strengthen grip.

Military Carry Knives has a lot of information on the Gerber Mark II. They show in detail all of the different models. They even show the many clones.
https://militarycarryknives.com/MKKNIVES/MkKnives.htm

There are some pictures of the blade in its blank form. The tang looks very similar to the tang of a file. After seeing that I knew that starting with a file was the right choice.

I uploaded the modified grip on thingiverse.
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5645090