Ball Bearing Knife: Forging A Blade From A Steel Bearing, Bladesmithing, Knifemaking, Blacksmithing

and i'm not quitting my day job welcome back to the shop guys thanks for being here don't forget to subscribe hit the notifications bell button whatever they call that and today we are going to forge a knife out of a ball bearing this is an inch and a half steel ball bearing that i purchased off of ebay actually and it is 52 100 steel as most ball bearings intended for use and machinery are and so with a working with a sphere you have uh the initial problem how to hold on to it and i elected to weld a half inch mild steel rod to the to the bearing and that worked out quite well you could also try to use tongs i suppose until you get it smashed flat enough to hold on to but i don't think that's a very good way to do it so i did it this way if you don't have a welder to do what i'm doing here you know you can go to harbor freight and get a nice little arc welder for 150 bucks which is exactly what mine is my more expensive one had gone out this is a year or two ago and this is right before i was trying to build my forging press so my entire forging press and everything since then has been welded with that little harbor freight welder works great so i started out with the eight pound sledge on on the bearing here just because it's fun to smash it's kinda like when you're making the cookies you know you roll it up into a ball and then you smash it flat same thing but um yeah i didn't uh forge too long with the with the heavy hammer the power hammer that's my only power hammer but it is nice to it is fun to hammer that actually a five or six pound hammer would be about wouldn't be good it's a little heavy my other one's only four pounds so 52 100 steel forges quite easily if it's forged at the proper temperature and you can you can start to feel it stiffen up a little bit as the temperature drops and you don't want to forge it down at the lower temperatures it's got one percent carbon in it and one and a half percent chromium so with that high carbon and that alloy content it's it can be like any steel that's similar it can be more susceptible to damage at lower forging temperatures unlike something like 1080 or 1075 which is very forgiving so the craziest thing about this build of course is the state or the shape of the steel when i got it there's really nothing crazy about using this particular steel and i i did purchase these bearings so these so i know what they are it's not uh it's not like i'm guessing so you know it's uh you can go make a knife out of all kinds of stuff but uh the problem you're gonna have to deal with is you know figuring out what it is you're working with you know and therefore how to heat treat it and so forth and so it's kind of a neat project here but i'm not gambling on the quality of the finished product like you could otherwise be doing so i've got the the bearing drawn out to i'd say about three eighths by three quarter inches and i'm hand forging the blade and i start by forging down the tip so that i can form that and then begin to hammer in the bevel so i'm kind of guessing as to how big of a knife i can make my goal here is to make the biggest knife that i can make out of this piece of steel and in hindsight it could have gone a little bigger but i i wasn't you know i wasn't sure exactly how much steel this was or what this was going to end up looking like and this is an inch and a half ball bearing and i i think it's safe to say that it's a deceptively large amount of steel compared to what you might think and so the knife that ended up with is a decent little size like i say i could have i could have gone a little uh bigger i could have uh tapered the tang down a little more and stuff like that but got pretty close to using up you know using the all of the material efficiently so not a huge deal there i'm just uh forging out the tang a little more flattening it flattening it out and putting some slight contour in it or curves in it for comfortable use we'll go ahead and refine the blade shape a little bit here so this is a blade shape that i've made a few knives in or something similar to this anyway but it's kind of a miniature almost a miniature buoy knife style you could say it's got a clip point to it another significant feature is that the edge is continuously curve throughout the length of the blade and i find that to be an efficient an efficient blade design for cutting because it allows you to continuously draw the uh the edge through whatever you're cutting if if you want to or if need be which is a did i say efficient yet i think i said that a couple times so just refining the blade shape here and one thing about 52-100 steel is it was originally developed for bearings and so it's been around for over 100 years and some of the characteristics that you want in a bearing is strength and so in other words it's not going to be crushed it won't won't deform or squish and then you also want want some abrasion resistance you know as that bearing whether it's a ball bearing or a roller bearing is you know continuously rolling over other surfaces other steel surfaces you want it to be able to maintain its um dimensions as much as long as possible so those are a couple of characteristics and those both of those characteristics are desirable for most knives uh the the biggest difference between the application of bearings and the application of nut for knives in this particular steel 52-100 i think would probably be the heat treatment of it and if you if you watch a previous video where i forged a different knife out of some 52-100 i go into depth at length about the heat treatment process so i won't do that here but suffice to say you don't want to heat treat it exactly the same way as you would for a ball bearing anyway so getting the blade here forged in and and something else i was going to mention one thing i haven't quite dialed in yet is sort of how um how close to finish dimensions i can actually forge this without or and still leave enough material to grind off to allow for the decarburization the decarb layer and you know every steel is going to decarb as you're forging it which basically means the outer layer of of carbon is has been cooked out of the steel you want to be able to grind that off in your final product at least specifically near the edge and uh different steels will decarburize to a different level and i i haven't this is i think the uh maybe the third knife uh i've forged maybe the second or third knife i can't remember now that i forged out of 50 to 100 and so i'm still kind of dialing that in but it doesn't the the d-carb is not nearly as bad as like 80 crv2 which is probably the worst steel for that that i've used so it's not too bad so all that to say you can forge it pretty close to your finished dimensions and then following all of the normalizing cycles and heat treatment the d-carb layer isn't too terrible from what i found so what i was doing there is just basically trying to spiritize or soften the the tang on the knife and that is where you heat it up to a dull red below austenizing temperature you don't want to go you don't want to turn it to austinites and it'll turn into perlite which is not what you want and you can see here that i was mostly successful at that like got a few uh squeaks on the drill bit here going through the end of the tang and then up closer to the blade it uh worked out real well but if you notice the temperature of the steel and it's kind of hard to judge in the in the camera because it shows it uh it the camera always shows it uh hotter than it really is but you can see the difference in in color and so up closer to the blade is where the the spherizing actually worked well and i think i didn't get the end of the tang quite hot enough to effectively spiritize that but that's where you heat it up to that temperature about 1350 and it segregates balls up all the carbides or all the carbon into carbides in the steel and basically gets them out of the way of you know your ability to machine it doesn't there it's not integrated into the matrix of the steel to provide the strength that and hardness so makes a lot easier to machine or drill through so what am i doing here well uh as part of my continued uh journey into 52100 steel i went ahead and purchased some aaa quench oil and i'll just say off right off the bat here as a side note if you're if you're into making knives or you're getting into making knives purchasing a quality quench oil that's designed for the steel that you're working with is probably the single most one of the single most uh best investments that you can make if you're planning on actually making more than just a couple knives and so i could go into length about that but i won't do that here but anyway this is a quench tank for my new quench oil i have the parks 50 and the other in the other steel container so 52 100 steel with the one and a half percent chromium in it is a slow slow enough hardening steel as to be able to use an oil that is a fast oil instead of a very fast oil aaa quench oil is a 9 to 11 second oil parks 50 is a 7 to 9 second oil which is the fastest that i'm aware of it was originally developed to quench as quickly as water initially and then it's an engineered oil so as once you drop below a certain temperature it slows down so the aaa is not is not as fast but it is it is sufficiently fast of a quench oil to properly harden uh 50 to 100 and if you watch my previous video at 50 to 100 um i mentioned something that i don't think was entirely correct um and that is that you shouldn't quench it in an 11 second roll actually that should be fine but i didn't i didn't want to use i wanted to use the best oil that i could so i got this aaa and from what i understand that is the best oil you can use for 52 100 you can also quench it in parks 50 but i'm trying to dial everything in here in a manner that's going to be the best uh for this for this steel trying to get this quench tank finished up before i actually have to quench this blade here the inside was all rusty so i cleaned that all out and everything and i'm running the normalizing site or the normalizing cycle and then grain refinement cycles on the blade in the meantime so i normalized at 1625 and held that temperature for 20 minutes now early on when i first started making knives i think as a lot of people do i was real concerned about grain size and keeping that as small as possible and the more i learned the more research i have done learning that grain size is small grain size is good but you can go too far to a point where you have you could have a super fine grain size but then you end up losing characteristics such as abrasion resistance and stuff like that because you don't have the amount of carbon in solution that you need and so the key to that really is uh the balance between time and temperature and if you get your blade too hot at certain points in the process that is going to be much worse than keeping the blade at a slightly lower temperature for a longer period of time that's going to be the best uh solution so when you have when you're working with steel like 52 100 you're kind of walking the the balance between getting enough enough carbon into solution but not too much so after normalizing um because what i'm trying to say is with the chromium in there that slows things down and so you have to hold things at a longer period of time but if you go to to too high of a temperature then you're going to run the risk of uh somewhat grain enlargement and then too much carbon into solution and so forth anyway refining it at uh 1500 and then 1450 and then austinizing at 1475 for 20 minutes and then into the quench everything looks good and one thing about 52 100 is you do have quite a window of opportunity to to straighten it and to tweak it a little bit as it cools down temperature which is why i like to pull it out of the quench before it's completely you know down to ambient temperature since that is not necessary anyway and creates more stress all right so we have a couple of tempered tempering cycles on it as per usual now it's time to uh start grinding on it i haven't done any grinding on it so far completely forged to shape and the bevel's forged in and i mentioned the decarburization layer earlier and this is where you get to kind of see how deep that goes because as you're grinding especially grinding the bevels you can really feel you know where the softer steel is because the outer layer of course is going to be a low carbon or you know very low carbon steel and so once you cut through that and then get to the uh the good steel and underneath that you can really feel the difference when you're grinding so you always want to make sure that you grind a an appropriate layer off of the edge of the blade specifically where you're going to actually put the put the edge on so that you're down to good steel so here i'm using a ceramic abrasive belt granny belt from empire abrasives this is the 40 grit and these are the the best belts that i have used for actually grinding taking material off and you know whether you're grinding a bevel or profile or whatever but the thing that um where that really comes into play here is so this this blade is completely heat treated right here and you can see me dipping in water and so it's really important obviously to keep that blade from overheating particularly past whatever temperature that you tempered it at that's one reason why i grind without gloves and i'm continually feeling the temperature the reason i bring that up is because having a grinding belt that will remove material as efficiently as possible keeps the heat down which is really a good which is a good thing and helps to keep that blade from overheating at all and so these belts from empire abrasives are the best the best that i've used at that they work really well and further when you're grinding on a fully heat treated blade uh there's a lot of belts out there that i have tried before and used before a lot that just don't remove material um like these do so um yeah so there's a there's a link in the video description two empire braces if you click on that uh that's my affiliate link it helps the channel out and you can use the uh code fire creek for 10 off at empire braces and that also helps the channel out too so i really appreciate that so we've got this uh this ground down to final dimensions minus the hand sanding here and uh it it turned out guy i took out like i said i kind of took off more material than i should have had to but like i said i didn't really when i was forging it i didn't exactly know kind of where how far i could forge things initially and so when i kind of put in the the dimensions of the blade i should have made things a little longer thinner whatever point is that i ground off a little more material than then you might typically have to if you understand where you're forging to but that's better than having not enough material and ending up with too thin of a blade or something like that but it's got a nice distal taper in there should be a great little blade this is a piece of walnut wood that i'm going to use to make the handles out of this piece of scrap wood essentially from a fellow that made kitchen utensils out of all kinds of wood and the farmer's market that we used to go to you know he would have like i said all kinds of different woods but he gave me these pieces and uh it's kind of amazing what you can pull a knife handle out of if you're paying attention and so that little chunk there that'll be good for several more knives i actually originally drilled these handle pin holes for five thirty seconds and that is not a 530 seconds drill bit because halfway through i decided to use uh my loveless bolts on the handle instead of the 532nd pin so you can hear it kind of squeaking as it goes through the tang it's because it's cutting a little more steel and the steel is a little bit hard so i made it through though i think that speaking of decarburization levels that the tiny or the amount of decarburization level inside that hole inside the holes is what allows that bigger drill bit to actually go through the heat treated tang so decarburization isn't always bad so getting the handle skills epoxied and secured with these bolts handle bolts here loveless bolts one of my favorite uh handle fastening devices you know quite frankly you know the the full tang is a pretty simple design and here we are with the epoxy cured several hours later sometime later shaping the handle up but uh the full tang design as simple as it is you know it's really the strongest design of knife there is and one of the simplest it just works just works really well especially if you're going to make a knife that's actually intended for use which is what i enjoy doing so get this handle shaped up here the walnut works pretty easily on the belt sander just keeping an eye on symmetry and uh and all that kind of stuff here your little hands in and this style of hand this style of handle here is kind of a modified um broom broom i think it's been referred to as like a broomstick handle before it's not round though it's more of an oval but it's similar to like the old kephart knife handles only it's got a bit of a curve to it anyway it fits really well in the hand it's it's secure and comfortable and those are that's what you want in a using knife so i like i like how it turned out i'm kind of thinking about making more of these knives as kind of as a design that i'll be repeating we'll see what happens but there's the knife and there's the there's the ball bearing one just like it that it came from i'm pretty happy with how it turned out and i will be doing some testing on this knife with a cardboard cut test and stuff like that and that'll be a separate video so be sure to stay tuned for that but anyway i appreciate you guys coming along on this build hopefully this helps out helps you out in your shop and we will see you on the next video you

Channel: Fire Creek Forge

Views: 44,189

Rating: 4.8941398 out of 5

Keywords: ball bearing knife, forging bearing steel, bearing steel knife, fire creek forge

Id: 7yeiKXxtjLM

Length: 21min 46sec (1306 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 11 2020