After 6 Months, This Knife Is Finally Done ✅

I've been working on this knife for six months it's definitely one of my all-time favorite knives houon we have a problem whoa look at that what you are about to see is a project that I've poured my heart and soul into this has got to be one of my masterpieces it's even better than I imagined I already have the blade done that's why the next thing is to fit the guard onto the knife I love fitting guards because it's fun to try to get as close to fitting the guard with the mill as I possibly can without using files if you want to see me make the Damascus for this knife the link is in the description for part one where I Forge the Damascus for this massive buoy I'm using the new Precision Grizzly Mill that we purchased I say new but we've had it around for about a year now it's quite a large upgrade from my old milling machine what I love about this milling machine is its variable speed which means I don't have to stick my hands up inside the frame to change belts to different size pulleys that's really nice because you can change the speed very quickly and you don't end up scuffing your arms up when you're trying to pull belts over other pulleys and loosen this and that and tighten things back up makes it quick and on the fly now that it's so easy to change speeds on this milling machine I find myself using a wider range of speeds more often for this operation cutting out the slot in the guard I've got the milling machine turned up pretty fast all right time for more math so the final size I've got here 51 let's make it 250 even 250 minus 125 well the 125 divided by 2 is a 16th inch 62.5 62 I'm going to go 62 Leave Myself 2 th000 of an [Music] inch dad installed a drro onto this machine which tells me exactly where the table is it's very accurate down to like half a thousandth of an inch having the drro there to tell me the exact position that my guard is in is very handy in the past I've done Milling without the drro using dial indicators that works really well but it takes more setup in order to get the dial indicators all set up where you need them I'm still widening out the slot in the guard I'm going down one side of the Guard all the way to the end then I go over to the other side and come back the other direction I'm just taking a few thousands of an inch off at a time and when I get really close to my final pass I'll only take off like 1,000th of an inch just for a final clean pass if my math was correct the slot in the guard should now be approximately 1 to maybe 1 and a half thousand of an inch narrower than the part of the Tang that I want it to slide up onto so that should make it so it just hammers on and has a beautifully tight fit with minimal filing hopefully see how that fits oh I think it's going to fit beautifully so so now that I've got it about an eighth of an inch away I want to hammer the guard on and hopefully have a beautiful tight [Music] fit was probably enough that like 10 ft of tape whenever you're hammering tape down like this on a blade you've got to make sure your Hammer has carbide tips on it if it doesn't have carbide tips it will not seat the tape properly my friend corn from Australia makes and sells these hammers they are gorgeous they are the best tape setting hammers I've ever used who that is a big blade I would like more offset jaw for this actually I love that Vice in Australia for this they had the the jaw was completely offset then you can put the blade like right in the middle of it and not have to worry about it hitting anything [Music] uhoh uhoh Houston we have a problem the punches won't reach uh maybe it's time we can trim the excess off the end of this Tang that we don't need cuz I have to now about that much can't really use the band saw because it'll destroy it chopa blades worn out and short torch oh that'd be fun that'd actually be fun for the video I decided to grind that excess length on the end of the Tang down using the 2x 72 grinder with kind of a worn out 36 grip belt it's pretty satisfying to grind away so much material so quickly on the endend of the Tang there also you can see how much heat is being created by this as the end of the Tang is heated up to a blue/ gray color that'll be fine cuz later on we're going to normalize the end of the Tang anyway and soften it up more so we can thread it all right we're going in for take two trim some off the end of the Tang there got it pretty much to the uh the Finish length it'll need to be see if we have any oh oh no that one's that one's going to bottom out okay closer think this one might have a little more room yeah there we go there we go this one will have enough room that should work beautifully okay that should be about enough and now we repeat the process of guard on guard off with a little filing in between now you can see a little polished area right here towards the top of the Guard where the Tang is rubbing on it so I can go and selectively remove a little bit of material and then hammer it on again until we get closer and closer to fitting up to the ricasso after a little bit of hand filing and some more fitting now I can go in and make a relief about 15,000 of an inch deep with a small inm bit the reason I need this relief on the face of the Guard is so that we can continue fitting the knife into the guard in this case I'm actually going to inlay the ricasso of the knife into the guard about 10,000 of an inch I like to make my guards like this they fit like a glove onto the blade and you'll never see any kind of gaps or daylight or anything shining through between the blade and guard fit up for this Milling operation I'm just Milling it by ey I have some scribe lines where I marked around the ricasso onto the face of the guard and I'm just trying to get close to those scribe lines and not actually go over them after that Milling operation is complete a little more hand filing is required I'm going to put a bit of a bevel where the Tang of the Guard meets up with the blade the reason I'm doing that is because I find a lot of times there'll be a little bit of extra material right there so having this bevel will just get that material out of the way and make it easier for me to fit this guard up after removing that material with the mill the ricasso now is beginning to leave an outline right around the edges and I can go in with the high-speed Dental bur and the microscope and remove some of that material right up to where uh where the ricasso is not hitting anymore and then we'll slowly get this to fit up over the ricasso about 15,000 of an inch it'll fit into the guard about 15,000 of an inch cuz that's how deep that recess is I just made on the mill so I'm going to keep eating away at the sides and hammering this on and eating away at the sides of the dental bur until the rest of the ricasso hits on that little flat area that I just milled out as the relief the high-speed Dental bur in combination with my engraver microscope is an amazing tool to this thing turns at 320,000 RPM for reference your regular run-of-the-mill Dremel tool turns at 35,000 so this thing is screaming fast but it hardly has any torque at all I went between the high-speed Dental bur hammering the guard on hammering it back off and then the high-speed Dental bur probably four five times and I think I'm done fitting the guard it fits beautifully tight now I also o did a little bit of filing to make it so it's not on there quite so hard I don't want to have to to bang on the end of the tang with a sledgehammer in order to get it off I want it to be nice and tight you know tight enough I can't pull it off and push it on by hand but not tight enough to where I got to hit it really hard to get it on there and I think I've got it at that perfect sweet spot that is good to go for the rest of the knife I need to make sure that it's nice and square looking because the entire handle is going to be built kind of based off this guard so if something's out of whack here with the guard then that can kind of lead to compounding problems as you go down the rest of the handle construction but as far as I can tell in the first quick look it's looking so good and so tight that ricasso is literally inlaid into the guard literally literally literally literally literally literally literally literally literally literally literally literally literally literally inlaid into the guard now it's time to begin working on my second ever Stone handle this handle is going to be made from lapis lazuli I've got a gorgeous piece of lapis lined up for the project it's got a very rich deep blue color and the lapis a lot of times will have many layers where there's nice blue color and then there'll be a lot of gray or White Rock in between well this piece is special because there's hardly any of those gray layers the thing is almost solid blue with only a little bit of that grayish white streaking through the middle of it first thing I need is good layout lines I need to carefully layout my two handle segments I want to keep both of my handles segments running in the same direction on the stone as well I don't want the grain of the stone to be going a different direction on one piece of the handle versus the other once the layout's done I can begin cutting out the pieces on a regular tile saw this tile saw is one that Dad happens to own from doing years of remodeling and new home construction I was a little nervous going into cutting up this lapis I'd never cut it up on a tile saw before I was worried that big chunks of it could break off but the tile saw did an amazing job and the chips I got from the saw blade were very tiny and very minimal I was able to pick up this gorgeous piece of lapis lazuli from the Tucson gy and mineral show last year I went there with my mom and brother Josh and we had a great time buying all sorts of cool rocks now comes one of the longer and tedious Parts shaping this blocky Square chunk of rock down into a nicely shaped handle I'm using one of Covington's Rock grinding machines and I've got a wheel with 60 grit diamond on it that I'm shaping this down with this wheel might be a little bit on the fine side for doing all this shaping but I didn't want to get a wheel that was so coarse that it caused giant chips of the rock to break off as I shaped it also you might notice the fans blowing right on me it was very hot outside when I was shaping this handle I finished shaping the lapis lazuli handle and it is looking absolutely amazing I love how this handle is looking I took it all the way up to 1,000 grit so it has a 1,000 grit kind of satiny finish on it right now the only thing left to do to finish out the stone portions of the handle are to put the final polish on the stone I'm not going to do that right now though I'm going to probably do that after the engraving and stuff is done we'll come back and do that final final polish as a little sneak peek though to see what the final polish would look like I H practice polishing on this scrap piece of lazuli and it's going to be incredible once we get that final polish on here I've also spent a few days practicing the engraving for this knife this knife is going to get engraving covering both sides of the Guard pretty much covering all the way around the front spacer the middle spacer and the back Pummel spacer and we're going to do some on the end of the Pummel nut Too part of the reason why I Nam this knife star Knight is because of the blue handle with all the little pyite gold specks in it really look a lot like uh van Go's Starry KN but also because of the engraving theme we're going to do we're going to do this shooting star style uh engraving all over the fittings and that's going to involve some big stars with like a shooting star tail on them all done in 24 karat gold and then in the background we're going to have a bunch of little dots of stars you know light years out into the distance really tiny ones really really far away and those are going to be a combination of 24 karat gold and argentium silver kind of spitter spattered and mixed in there I think it's going to look absolutely amazing I did a bunch of practice on this piece I've got a couple different uh Styles and I've got one that I'm very happy with with a bunch of bright Cuts all over it so it just shimmers and shines in the light and actually looks like a bright star keep in mind when you see this practice piece it is just silver that I used for the main stars the real thing is actually going to be gold so that minor change but the concept is the same I'm inside of my engraving setup I've got some layout lines on my guard I'm going to go ahead and cut in the border around the guard before I start working on the actual design for this I'm using a carbide Graver with a point on it and I've got my microscope so I can see super close what I'm doing and I can rotate and move things around in this Vice right here there's something so satisfying about cutting away steel with a chisel just having that Burr pop up and seeing that metal being physically removed with a chisel it's really kind of mesmerizing I make tons of little adjustments as I cut away the material I have to constantly be correcting the Chisel to make sure that it doesn't Veer too far to the right or too far to the left but what I'm doing even more is correcting the depth I'm constantly tilting the Graver up and down tilting it up a little bit will make it dig deeper into the metal and tilting it down will make it go shallower if you go too far down it'll come out so shallow that you'll end up popping out of the metal and skating across the top you might even put a giant scar scratch right across your part if you're not careful PR this line I cutting the Border all the way around the guard the next thing I want to focus on is creating the big stars on the ends of the Guard these are going to be extra large compared to the rest of the stars on the project just because these are going to be the main stars and there's a lot of area here so we can do nice big ones I've already got a little bit of layout I'm going to start cutting these in using my pointed Graver here the deeper I cut with my Graver The Wider the groove will be that's how I can make these Dynamic cuts for the star the cut starts out extremely shallow and towards the center of the star it gets very very deep and widens out these are eight pointed stars that I'm cutting in first I like to just cut the grooves in not super deep and then I go back through each one making them deeper and deeper I'm using a 90° point on my Graver right now once I get the grooves deeper I'll widen out the groove with 105° Point start with the up and down points and then I'll do the side points and then the 45 Dee angled points I want to keep going over these cuts to to make them deeper and deeper so they have more of a taper they'll be less skinny and they'll make the center of the star have a lot more gold in it right now the guard's clamped in the middle of the guard and the ends of it where I'm engraving these stars are kind of free floating even though the guard's pretty thick I'm making some very deep aggressive cuts and the vibration is causing some of that power to be Lost in Translation I have to give the hand piece some extra gas with the foot pedal to make sure I cut these grooves deep and wide enough I finished making all the grooves as deep as I need to go for the star the next thing I want to do is widen them out a little bit so I've got a different Graver here that has a different geometry on the edge I'm just going to pop that in here and we're going to widen out all these grooves these stars on the ends of the Guard are going to be what your eyes drawn to right away they're kind of the main highlight of the entire engraving so I want to make sure these stars look exactly how I want them to because they're going to really catch your attention the first Graver I was using was a 90° point the Graver I'm using now that is a wider geometry is 120° point even though 90 to 120° doesn't sound that different it is enough to make a noticeable difference in the end and how wide and full these grooves are going to look especially when they're filled with gold I'm done cutting that large star on the end of the Guard next I have four small stars that I want to cut on the side of the Guard I finished cutting in all of our stars we've got the large ones on the ends of the guard and then I went ahead and put in some little ones here in this little flat area on the side of the Guard the idea behind these Stars was to make them look as organic as I could get them so they're all different sizes and they're all kind of laid out differently and on the other side of the Guard I just have three stars and again they're different sizes laid out kind of a random order the next thing I need to do is add in the Tails of the stars that make these two big stars look like they're actually shooting stars so they're going to have these big sweeping tails that go all the way down to here on both sides when it comes to the tail of the star I'm actually just drawing it in by hand first I just take this clay and tap it around on the metal and it leaves a little bit of a residue and that residue of the clay on the metal makes it so my pencil will show up a little bit better you can use a pencil on the metal but this just makes it show up a lot better and if I need to I can erase it tap it back on there and do my line again so I'm going to handdraw in the middle part of the tail I'll cut that in and then we'll add in all the little flared bits that come off the middle here's the center tail of the shooting star I'm going to go ahead and cut this in before doing any more layout stay on target stay on target almost there oh can't see cannot see what I'm doing can't see what I'm doing there's a giant burn in my face hopefully that's right here's the center of the shooting star cut in I've also done the layout for the little side shoots and I can go ahead and start cutting these in what I need to do is make sure that everything Blends right in with that Center Line here that's going to be the trickiest part I finished all the dovetailing down in the grooves what the dovetails do is actually widen out the bottom of the groove so the very bottom is wider than the top of the groove and so when I smash the gold down into the dovetail it fills out the wider area at the bottom and it mechanically locks the gold in place so it can't move our groove are now ready to inlay the 24 karat gold into I'm going to start with the large star here on the end and the way I want to do this is by melting a ball of gold I'll just take this small wire and we'll use a torch to melt a ball and it's a really cool process we can make a ball however big we want to and then I'm going to fill out the middle of the star with that ball and I'll fill out each little tip of the star with little pieces of wire another cool thing about inlaying 24 karat gold is you can smash different pieces together and when it's all sanded down flush and finish it looks like it's all one piece of gold you'll never see the seams or anything it's really cool here's the gold ball for the center of the star it took about 1 in of the gold wire to to make the ball this big this is a really big star so I needed as much gold as I could get if I made the ball any larger it was probably going to start to fall off the wire and hit the ground and just splatter and disappear so it's about as big as I could go uh with this size wire at least I'm going to smash this right in the middle and start to get this to fill out the star it's not going to fill out the entire thing though with smaller Stars you can get it to fill out the uh the whole thing but this star is so big that I'm going to fill out the tips using individual wires I've got a brass rod on the end of my handpiece here and I'm going to use that to smash in the gold the 24 karat gold's nice and soft so I can just use this old razor knife blade to cut off the wire I'm going to let this gold stick up just a little bit it'll help me blend in all these little pieces I'm going to add for the star next I'm going to go ahead and melt a little tiny ball on the end of The Wire just to help me fill out the area where the gold meets and then we'll start sticking individual wires into each one of the little tips of the star Smashing the 24 karat gold into the grooves is one of my favorite parts of Engraving it's so satisfying to see how soft the gold is in comparison to the metal around it 24 karat gold is relatively hard compared to some other things like I don't know wood paper or Jell-O but it's a lot lot softer than something like this stainless steel that the guard has made out of I said smashing the 24 karat gold in place is one of my favorite parts of Engraving well that's not entirely true 100% of the time well sometimes it's not my favorite part and that time is when I've made the grooves too large for the gold wire that I have on hand in that case it's not fun at all because I either have to buy some larger gold or grind the surface of the material material down to make the groove smaller or what I end up doing most of the time is smashing that wire into the groove that it's just a little bit too small to fill and that makes it so the gold wire goes below the surface of the metal just a little bit but normally it comes out looking 100% good I just have to hand sand the surface of the metal down until it reaches the surface of the gold the most fun I ever have when I'm in laying gold is when I've made just the perfect size Groove to utilize the entire thickness of the gold wire that I purchased for it without making the groove too big and running a little low on gold wire to fill the groove or without making the groove a little bit too small and end up having a lot of wasted gold on the other hand sometimes I can make the grooves a little bit smaller than the gold wire will fill and when you smash that gold into place you'll have more wasted wire on top you'll have extra gold up on top of the surface of the material that you end up sanding off and uh most of the time it ends up on the floor and it's just a little bit sad because I could have made that Groove slightly bigger and then it would have been perfect something I always strive for and it's really fun when I hit it is when you make that perfect size Groove to where the wire you purchased for the project fills the groove in just right the groove isn't too big it's not too small to where you're wasting gold it's that Goldilocks middle there was so much engraving on this knife that some of the grooves I made were that perfect size and some of them were a little bit too big and some of them were a little bit on the small side I find most of the time what I end up doing though is making the groove ever so slightly on the large side not large enough to where I need to use a larger diameter wire but large enough that it just annoys me a little bit because I'll have to sand the surface of the metal down just a little more than I would have had to you may have noticed the little rod on the Graver hand piece I'm using looks like it's gold or something kind of that color well it's actually brass I like hammering the gold in with something that's a little bit soft that way if I kind of go off the gold and hit my guard it's not going to ding up my guard or really uh round over a corner or something like that if I mess up a little bit I do have some other rods that are harder or softer depending on what I'm doing but most of the time I like the brass Rod to smash the gold into place it's normally only when I'm inlaying harder materials like silver wire inlay that I have to use a harder rod on my [Music] handpiece all right that's it golden lay on the guard is inl hey guys ready to go out and get picture pictures you ready to go get some of those moving pictures of me hand sanding the guard now some of them moving some of them new fangled moving pictures from the director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy an unexpected Direction by Peter Jackson who thought he wasn't going to have to direct the movie but it turns out the guy that was going to direct it mysteriously fell out years into development so Peter Jackson has to pick up where he left off with only weeks before the shoot begins there's not time to change anything it doesn't matter though it'll make $3 billion because the Lord of the Rings the gold inlays looking really good the next thing I need to do is take some 220 grit sandpaper start sanding off all the excess get everything sanded down flush and flat again and then we can move on to cutting away the background those pieces are almost big enough to save overall I would say I had to do a medium amount of hand sanding on this guard there were a lot of areas that had just the right size grooves with just the right amount of gold filling them and they were easy to handstand and there were a good number of areas too where the grooves were a little bit on the large side and I had to sand down the surface of the Guard just a little bit in order to get back to Flat fresh playing field on everything now that I'm done rough hand sanding the guard the next step is to begin cutting around the border of all the gold inlays this is the first step of removing the background and all the negative space areas of the engraving design little did I realize until too late that the design I created for this knife was going to consume a lot of time in background removal the background removal was by far the most timec consuming part of this entire engraving that I did because the design I chose does have a lot of background and there were a lot of steps in order to get the background looking how I wanted it for now though this part of the background removal is pretty fun because all I have to do is go around the border of the gold and cut in some nice deep lines stage two of the background removal is pretty fun too this is where I get the high-speed Dental bur back out and we remove all that extra material out in the open areas of the background the Graver in the previous stage was good for creating a border that I could cut up to and now the dental bur can just go to town and hog out that material the thing I need to be most careful about right now is trying to keep the depth consistent it's going to be kind of impossible to keep it all perfect but overall I want to keep the background depth consistent across the project I removed all the background with the high-speed Dental bur but it leaves a really rough background area there's a lot of high ridges and a lot of low spots and I want to smooth it all and flatten it so I started out using a flat Graver and cutting it flat but that was taking a ton of time I wanted to save some time so I was trying to think of what I could do well I recently got to see Sam alfano do a sculpting class where he literally sculpts leaves using a small punch and so I had the idea I could make a couple small punches and flatten the background I'm not going to be sculpting anything per se but it works amazingly well to flatten out all these high and low spots and make my background look super smooth and even here's a section that shows the dental bur finish you can see how rough and coarse that is and then up here on the rest of the Guard I've already gone over it with the punches and smoothed out the background got a nice flat smooth back ready for texturing flattening the background with this idea that I got from watching Sam Alano do a demo was so satisfying and rewarding it was really fun to just see through the microscope this rough cut up background smoothing right out and get nice and ready for texturing I flattened a couple of the areas of the background using a big wide flat Graver and that worked really well as well but it took me three four times longer than just going over it with the this flat punch smoothing everything out all the background's nice and flat one of the final stages is to actually texture the background so for this I've got a carbide Graver Point here it comes down to a really fine point and then it's rounded off just a little bit so it's not a sharp point it's kind of like a a polished ball Point pin only a little bit smaller and I'm just going to take this and start covering the entire background with texture something else I had to play around with a bit in order to get set up right was the stroke speed of the Graver hand piece I'm using if the speed was too high I noticed my little point would just want to dig in and make a Groove into the metal and it wouldn't kind of bounce around and make nice texture if it was too low it would make nice texture but it was bouncing around too slowly and it was just taking forever in order to cover everything in texture and now a word from our sponsor Kyle Royer I just made a course where I teach you everything you need to know to pass your journeyman Smith performance test with confidence if you're interested then become a member of learn knifemaking.com today the link is in the description and here's a look at how the finished texturing looks on the background it's got a nice Frosty look to it and I think when we darken it it's going to look amazing next up on the agenda of things to do in this engraving is to once again go back to the high-speed Dental bur and start cutting in a bunch of random little holes into the background I say random because I'm trying to keep the locations somewhat random and make them look sporadic because we're going to fill each one of these little holes with some 24 karat gold the reason for that is these are supposed to look like stars when it's all done little tiny stars distant in the background I'm going to fill each one of these little Dental bur holes with silver or 24 karat gold mostly 24 karat gold with only a few of them being silver I'm making the hole deep enough that it doesn't need d tailed or anything you can just smash the gold or silver into the hole and it'll go so deep that it'll never be coming out you could even be picking at it with something like a little tiny point and that gold or silver will not come out the tool I'm using to drive the gold and silver in place has a little tiny Dome on the end of it that'll allow the gold or silver to be domed up just a little bit above the surface of the background and being round they should reflect light very nicely because they'll be kind of Polished in the end too my hope is that these little stars will twinkle or reflect light just a little bit in the background and really resemble some distant stars to inlay one of these Stars I take my 24 karat gold wire and I melt a little tiny ball of gold on the very end of the wire with a torch then I can take my domed punch and drive that little ball of gold down into the hole I cut in the background that'll simultaneously inlay the gold and make the top of the gold that you see visible have a nice D to it as I'm inlaying the Gold Dot the punch kind of cuts the gold wire right off and I don't even have to cut it off with another tool after I'm done punching the dot into place I can take a really fine pointed carbide scribe and scrape away a little bit of excess gold right around the edge of the dot just to clean it up a little bit one of the trickiest parts for me in laying all these dots was trying to keep the pattern really random and sporadic for the way I do things I'm used to having grid orders and keep keeping things really orderly and in line so making these Stars kind of random was more of a challenge for me than keeping them all orderly it was a fun challenge for me and that's something that I want to improve on as well I want to get better in my knife making with doing more organic things that aren't perfectly ordered the engraving is almost done but I still need to Bright cut all the stars and all the little shooting star tails to do this I'm going to use a round carbide Graver I'm going to put a little tiny bit of a heel on it and and I'm going to make the Graver super polished and shiny because whatever finish I have on the heel of this Graver it's going to leave that finish on the gold because it's a rounded Graver it's going to cut out a rounded little Groove into the gold which will help reflect light and make everything sparkle and shine even more every couple minutes I repolish my Graver just for a few seconds on the hone and that keeps it nice and shiny so that all the gold ends up nice and shiny too it's hard to even show on video how much of a difference this actually makes to the final engraving you can see side by side one of the hand sanded gold stars right next to the freshly bright cut gold star and the bright cut one is so shiny that the video has a hard time capturing what it truly looks like I finished bright cutting all the gold on the guard and it is looking amazing The Next Step I need to do is darken all the background for this this I'm going to use this Rustoleum two times satin finish two times coverage this stuff is really thick and it'll darken the background beautifully if you're wondering like I first was when I used this paint if it would be durable enough to hold up in the background of the engraving it absolutely will this little logo that I etched onto my calipers that I use all the time has held up wonderfully and I've had it on there for almost a year now and the paint hasn't faded or scratched or gotten eaten Away by acetone or anything yet it's holding up very nice so that's been a great durability test on my calipers that I use in the shop all the time I'm going to hose this guard down with some acetone get it nice and clean and then we're going to give it nice even Coatings of this satin black rustoleum on both sides going to let it dry for a minute and then we're going to wipe it down with this microfiber cloth I had to try a bunch of different microfiber cloths and paper towels and anything I get my hand on the problem I was running into was stuff left fuzzes down in the paint and this was the best thing I found so far that wouldn't this brand of microfiber I start by cleaning off my part really well with acetone and then I blow everything off dry with some compressed air next I can take the two times coverage paint and put a medium thick coat on both sides of the Guard both sides of the guard that have engraving that is then I need to let it dry for about 30 seconds to a minute and start wiping down the guard with acetone on a microfiber cloth getting just the right amount of acetone on the cloth was key to success here too much acetone and it runs all over and you end up wiping the paint right out of the background and without enough acetone I wasn't able to remove enough of the paint off the surface of the engraving wow that's really coming to life look at that it's my first time seeing this look at all that background removal I did I finished wiping down the guard with the microfiber cloth and acetone there's still a little bit of black on the large Stars on the top and bottom here I'm going to go in with a fine pointed Q-tip and get rid of that that last little bit of paint besides that I need to let this set aside for an hour or two for the paint to dry and then I'll go in and polish the little tiny dots in the background that represent Stars I'm going to use a carbide scribe with the end of it rounded and Polished and it'll make each one of those Stars kind of have a nice Brilliance so they'll stand out and Sparkle a little bit now that the engraving is pretty much finished I want to focus my attention on the blade I still have a little bit of hand sanding left to do and then we can move on to revealing the pattern through the feret chloride etch and the coffee darkening process I'm in my kitchen I've got the feret chloride all set up in this tube I need to get my blade cleaned up really nicely and then we can dip it in the acid to actually etch the Damascus I got the blade clean it's going into the feric chloride Edge 6 minutes light towel my Blade's been etching for about 6 minutes I'm going to go ahead and take it out and have a look wo look at that it looks so good looks like it's etching beautifully even so far wow that's going to look amazing once we get this fully etched and coffee darkened it's going to be incredible need to go ahead and get this rinsed off and we're going to get it into some neutralizer and then I'm going to sand all these Ides off with some 3,000 grit sandpaper then we're going to put it back in the edch for another cycle and we'll do that multiple times you want to sand all those oxides off just to get a nicer cleaner etch cuz the oxides can build up on there and kind of uh kind of resist the chch after a while so I like to clean them off every couple minutes now the Blade's going to neutralize a little bit in some baking soda water just for a couple of minutes took the blade out of the neutralizer and now I'm sanding off all the oxides on the blade so when I put it back into the feric chloride it can get a nice clean Edge the Blade's done etching and neutralizing now I'm going to put it into some instant coffee mixture here this is just a little bit of water with a bunch of instant coffee I'm using uh some decaf coffee this time Dad was trying it out and it worked really well for him so I'm going to try it on on this blade I've got it suspended in here I'm just going to hang it on these wires and I'm going to let it soak for probably 4 to 8 hours this is going to darken up all the 1084 on the blade and make it look amazing 8 hours later the etch on the blade is finished I left it in the coffee for about eight hours then I took the blade out let it sit overnight I like to let all those oxides solidify and get really durable and then I rubbed over the entire Blade with some sunshine cloth it's just got microabrasive in it just to polish off all the tinted yellow that was on the 15 and 20 get everything looking really good and then I applied a coruba wax finish to the blade it makes the dark finish even more durable adds a protective layer to the blade to protect it from oxidizing and rust and stuff like that and it just looks absolutely incredible I love how this blade came out the Damascus pattern etched so beautifully it's got so much contrast and chance when you moved around in the light it came out awesome now that the blad's done and the fittings are done we have one more component to finish and that is the lapis lazuli handle these handle pieces need polished they're currently sanded out to 1,000 grit and I've already done a ton of practicing on this little piece of lapis from the same Stone to get the the perfect polish on this that I want it took me so many hours I don't even want to think about it in order to get this polish on the stone I hope it works on the real thing I tried so many different compounds and speeds and types of belts and polishing pads and all sorts of things the thing in the end that ended up getting the best shiny finish with the minimal amount of orange peeling texture for me was this 14,000 mesh Diamond compound applied to a 2X 72 leather belt on my grinder running at a low RPM I tried so many different types of belts and compounds and grits in order to get the best shine I possibly could on this lapis one of the problems I ran into was that some things would make it pretty shiny but they would also give it a horrible Orange Peel so you had to balance how shiny you wanted it to look with how much Orange Peel you wanted to get on the stone this brand new leather belt without any oils or anything on it was the best thing by far that I found with just a little bit of 14 ,000 grit Diamond uh Compound on it it was able to get the stone looking very nice and shiny with minimal Orange Peel at long last I am done polishing the lapis lazuli handle pieces for the star night buoy I spent so so much time polishing these handles just as in life I find a lot of times practice doesn't really go the same as the real thing a lot of the times and it was definitely the case when polishing these handle pieces I practice on a piece of lapis from the same rock as the handle material and I got the Finish looking beautiful nice and shiny polished but then when it came to the real thing it wasn't happening the same I couldn't get the same Sheen I had to try so many different things I spent a couple days trial and airing my way through it trying to get the absolute shiniest deep Sheen I could on the handle material one of the problems I ran into with polishing the lapis is that you can easily orange peel the texture so if you polish on on it too much it'll actually start to get a lot of texture on the surface and that's not what I wanted I wanted a smooth glassy surface or as close to it as I could get I went through a couple different belts trying different compounds and Diamond abrasives and all sorts of things and I think my main belt that I'd gotten the process down with I think it just got too much oily Compound on it so I had to buy a brand new belt and use some really fine Diamond spray on it and try to keep everything nice and dry and that did the trick I got it really shiny and I'm very very very happy with how this lapis looks it's incredible it's so shiny it's so deep blue there's so many little details to look at here we've got the little pyite pieces of gold and there's a bunch of little white streaks here and there that just add a lot to look at all mixed in that deep blue sea I love how this handle looks and I can't wait to see how this looks on the knife all put together at long last it's finally time to put the star night buoy together they're all done the components are finished we've got this beautifully etched ginormous blade we've got the pommel etched the handle material is polished and shaped and all the gold and inlaying has been done on the fittings let's get all the pieces put together the first piece is blade guard front spacer front lapis handle piece front piece of lapis lazuli handle middle spacer re lapis lazuli handle piece so beautiful next the Damascus pommel needs lineup pins lightly tap lineup pin add second lineup pin tap into place add Damascus Pummel to engraved stainless pommel add pommel assembly to lapis handle add the final piece engraved stainless pommel nut tighten up pmel nut good and firm and it's done wow wow it's even better than I imagined oh my goodness this this has got to be one of my m Master pieces this is incredible because of all the detail in the engraving and this blue lapis handle and this massive massive double-edged blade this is one of my favorite pieces of all time it's got to be this one there's so much gold in the fittings all those little dots all the bright cut all those lines of gold are bright cut which makes them Sparkle and dance in the light it looks so good with the blue handle so good I have not seen this all put together last time I put this whole knife together the blade wasn't finished the fittings weren't engraved and the handle wasn't polished so it is such a treat to see it all done and together wow this took so much more time than I was planning I probably spent nearly twice as much time on this knife than I was thinking I would and most of that comes down to the engraving it was very very timec consuming it looks so good oh Little Star on the pommel nut there with the Damascus pommel incap wow the only time I've ever gotten blue colors on a knife were when I used uh like dyed and stabilized Woods before but even then it wasn't a natural deep blue like in a stone this is incredible that this exists in nature the finish on the blade came out so good it's so Chitto one of my absolute favorite parts of the staring night buoy is the engraving I love the shooting stars that are all bright cut shiny and Chitto all the little tiny silver dots I added in I just added a few in there just for a little speck of silver color and then a ton of gold dots two different sizes we've got big ones we've got little ones just taking up the entire background and also I Love How deep the background is and how black it is anywhere that aren't stars and the relation between all the engraving and this lapis Luli blue handle is incredible seeing this thing all put together is just I just want to sit here and keep looking at it even though I've spent the last five six months looking at this knife pretty much every day I just want to look at it all put together and finally finished mom you want to see this woo wow that's got so much going on that's amazing love that engraving wow wow wow looks a lot more when it's all put together this up pieces I love it oh man isn't that blue handle incredible with the all the gold stone it's not even wood it's it's not diet or anything I hope this star night buoy can inspire you to make something creative I've wanted to do stone for 12 years and I can't believe I waited so long to do it this is my second ever Stone handle I was just able to do the first one earlier this year and once again I am blown away it's so cool to be able to work with something so beautiful that came right out of nature also when it came to the engraving on this project it took so much time and there were times when I thought I was never going to get it done but I'm so glad that I saw it through it came out really really cool push the boundaries of what's possible if you have cool ideas for whatever creative thing you're into then just go for it and see if you can make it happen if you can push through and see that creative idea to its end you might end up with something truly incredible and inspiring to yourself and other people as well I will see you in the next video May the forge be with you bye-bye

Channel: Kyle Royer

Views: 353,132

Keywords: knife making, how to make a knife, how to heat treat a knife, how to make a bowie knife, how to make a bowie, knives, kyle royer, kyle royer knives, making a knife, sharp, how to make knives, bladesmith, master smith, blades, damascus, knifemaker, diy knife, anvil, forging, custom, knife, great content, steel, bowie build, bowie knife, 10 inche bowie knife, blade, knifemaking, knife maker

Id: n7edC5JIIJY

Length: 50min 22sec (3022 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 02 2024