Blacksmithing/Forging A Wrench Into A Knife

[Music] hey guys Tim here big Doug Forge I got a special one for you this time around it's going to be a little bit of a longer video but I think you'll appreciate it at the end there's going to be something special so stick around and keep an eye out for that first a couple of sort of housekeeping things I've been getting a couple of comments about blacksmithing without the power hammer and I have been neglecting my anvil a little bit and I haven't been doing a whole lot of blacksmithing it's been a whole lot of fabrication tooling power hammer that kind of thing and I agree I need to get to the anvil and build a couple of things that are just good old-fashioned old-school kind of blacksmithing stuff and I think that I'm probably going to do that before the end of the week I'll come up with a project and put it together maybe below I don't know my name is Luis on one of the comments suggested that I remind people in Auto Bild dongs on an anvil and that's probably a good idea so maybe we'll do something like that we got time and I'm sure we will so anyway we get past that we're going to combine some a couple of things here today and we're going to use some old tools some old scrap and some newer metal and we're going to put together a knife and first thing I want you to know is I'm not a knife maker never claimed to be one got the tools to do most of it but I'm just not that great at it honestly sitting behind a belt grinder for that much time bores me to death and it just doesn't hold my interest enough to get really good at it so what I'm doing here today is to make sort of a point towards the end of the video so you'll see what that's all about and stick with it because I think that you'll be happy you did when you get to the end if you are a knife maker anyway so here we go guys hold on thanks see you soon okay guys we're going to start this project with a leaf spring off the old model a a Ford and we're just going to clean it up flatten it out and leave it to anneal here on the animal I'm not really sure what the composition of these older leaf springs is I don't know if it differs from modern leaf springs it seems to harden pretty well and doesn't seem to be a whole lot different they're pretty tough so for this project we're going to give it a shot all right so the material that we're marking out here is some 15 and 20 it's thin material so we're going to cut several pieces and stack three pieces per layer for the 15 in 20 and we're going to put a leaf spring between those stacks so we'll have a stack of three a leaf spring another stack of three a leaf spring and then another stack of three so in actuality there'll be 11 pieces in there but once those layers of three are welded together they'll essentially make just one so there's going to be a total of five layers to begin with on this thing okay and we ended up with 10 pieces we really only need one but one of them's a little narrow so that's alright we'll get these evened up on one side and then we'll grind the other side down to the width of the leaf spring okay here's our leaf spring it's all cooled off market at the proper length we're going to take this from that in there we go a little bit of a notch because of the hole but that's no big deal we'll weld our handle on that end all right knock the slag off these things with a hammer bud easier than a grinder a lot quicker do the final cleanup with a grinder here in a minute and we got it knock it off all these I won't bore you with all that go ahead and get these things cleaned up so it took the big grinder with a hard disk on it there's a lot of pitting in these leaf springs so I did take down quite a ways on both sides but they're pretty thick which I want to taught ya dummy anyway so it's one side clean up the other side and then take a soft disc to it have a nice smooth surface to weld to on both sides and we cleaned up all the pieces of 15 and 20 and I started stacking too but we're going to three so and alternating with the leaf spring and one to either side all right so now we have three I'll leave spring three more a leaf spring and then three on the opposite site and we'll given these up on one side and weld them up I'm going to put a lot of welds on these because those sections on the outside of 15 and 20 are pretty thin they're going to want to bow and buckle in the Forge as they're heating up on the outside flip it over and we're going to grind this down flat so we don't have anything uneven hanging out inside so won't have to deal with that we're forging all right I got clamp good and tighten of ice and we'll well this side up we clean up that end so we can weld that together we're going to win it opening up on the end and we'll weld our handle to the opposite end and that's where that notch wasn't that leaf spring from the bolt hole and you can see it there and we just fill that up in the world this is going to be a sacrificial end anyway I always lose a little bit with this stuff there we go it's two and a half inches wide about five and a half inches long and I think it's about inch and a quarter thick something like that now we get into the Forge and we get it up to cherry-red we'll get some flux on this thing all the way around on the seams and back into the forge and we're going to flex it a little more now it's a little hotter I want to take any chances I don't do this a lot not super familiar with it so get a real good knot and it will did it up three times I have a tendency to do that on pretty much anything that I Forge weld to make sure it's going together well but in this case I'm just not that sure of myself I'm not the knife maker I don't do a lot of pattern-welded stuff so you can see a dark spot developing on that and ended up being a bubble under the outside layer drove a chisel into it trying to open that up a little flux in there didn't help in work I ended up grinding that little spot off and only went through the very first layer you can see it there so what I'm going to do is take a an old axe head that I've got and I'm going to split this thing you know somewhere close to the middle I didn't have a chisel or cutoff tool that would do this sort of all the way across to one shot and I saw Jason with hij Forge do this on one of his videos and I thought I'll give it a shot and it worked out pretty well I was surprised but it worked really well yes you know anything can be a tool so it took a couple of heats actually to get all the way through this thing material is tough but I got it there and I cleaned up the backside wire brushed it really well and put some flux on there so I'm going to fold it over that way and I'm not really sure if you're supposed to flex these things or not I got all the scale off they could and I figured flexing it wouldn't hurt anything I was afraid it might create a little bit of a barrier in there and not let it well but I wasn't sure so in this case for me it was you know better safe than sorry and it worked out just they welded up pretty well I kept it welding temperature for three or four goes under the power hammer and flux it between each one and it welded up just fine I didn't find any inclusions or anything to indicate that there was any delaminations so that's what I worked it down to and it's seven and a half inches long about an inch and three quarters wide and about an inch and 1/8 thick so I cleaned up one side on the belt grinder and put some itching on this thing just to see if you know there's any contrast in this metals at all and that's what I came up with and right along that weld seam there was a spot that seemed to be a lot lighter than the rest of it I was kind of unsure about that what was going on there but it didn't seem to be anything to do with the problem with the weld so take over the bandsaw and I cut this chunk off and and that's the part we're going to use for the rest of this project so we're going to weld a handle on that guy we didn't need the entire billet for this but we have the rest for another project another time there we go and get this guy into the forge and work him out now what I'm looking for is something about six inches long and don't really care about the width but the thickness needs to be 3/8 of an inch and it took a few heats under the power hammer like I said this stuff moved pretty slowly it's a tough material but like I said I'm not really used to doing this it's not my daily thing for somebody that knows what they're doing it probably normal I would guess work it down I'm going to use a piece of 3/8 inch square as a kiss block to keep from going too thin so I need that 3/8 of an inch on that piece of material start rolling on the side so a little clean up here and clean up the sides and then take it back down to 3/8 a couple of times to square it up when I came out pretty well all right so we're going to set that side for a minute here's the other part of our project we got this old and I call them a monkey wrench and picked it up at a yard sale or junk store somewhere we've got half a dozen of these things let's get a little burger on it and take it apart they come apart pretty easily and we're going to set that aside and we're going to hold on to the end of that handle and we're going to cut the little upper jaw off this thing a little hammerhead looking thing you get it in the vise and there's a little step down right there just above that area we're going to grind that down the level with the main body Tyrael and as you probably already guessed this upper section of this wrench and grinding on now is 3/8 of an inch wide so the thing about these wrenches is that most of them that you run across that I wouldn't handles on them are made from wrought iron you can see the grain in there the thing about the wrought iron is is that it's got little to no carbon in it so when you H it it just stays completely silver so this is going to be a blade for our knife and we're going to weld it Forge weld it right to the bottom of that broad iron piece square everything up as best we can and we're going to tack weld this thing there we go you knife maker guys would probably call that a guard a bolster I don't know what you call it here under there we get this thing in the vise squeeze it as tight as we can we've got a couple of variations couple of gaps there but we'll take care of that just a bit all right we'll put some tack welds along the side you should be able to grind those out when we're all finished so they shouldn't show up but we'll find out all righty there we go I cut that bevel at the end of that thing to keep from having to try to weld that square corner down into that what will be the knife blade that ended up being a little bit of a mistake you can see the bevel on that upper piece there alright so we heat it up and we're just sort of forming everything together so there's no gaps between the two pieces now after I cut that bevel on the nose of that thing I realized that you can have a hard time hitting that with a power hammer at an angle like that to get it to forge weld so I was a little worried about a delamination right at the tip where those two came together but it didn't quite have it warm enough to get my flux to stick here dropping off with a melting talked very well so I just get it in the Forge for a minute warm it up see if we can get it to stick a little bit better there we go the flood still melt on there and stay all right and it didn't take long to get this thing up to welding temperature wrought iron welds at a lot higher temperature than most metals and of course carbon steel will start burning so there's kind of a balance it's a narrow window that you have to make the two live together play nice but again we got under there and kept it at welding temperature for three heats in the power hammer and of course if you're not dropping things you're not doing it right and things kind of started going sideways on me a little bit you can see that wrought iron in that picture there it doesn't scale up much at all because of the lack of carbon so I've got it at the anvil and I'm isolating where I want the blade to start anybody to stop I have to maintain that square shape so that a little guard will slip back on it and fit properly so I can't get that into the power and they use the sides of the hammer to sort of draw that edge of that blade out a little bit and my battery died and I thought I was filming you know shaping the tip and hammering out the bevels a little bit but I wasn't filming at all no battery so this is where we picked up and the tip of the blade shaped and just started hammering out the bevels a little bit so I don't know if I mentioned it before but not a knife maker and don't have tons of belts and that sort of thing so we're going to go after this thing and knock down a bunch of the hammer marks with a little soft grinder there and we'll get it over to the belt grinder and start working on it and I started with it's probably a 50 grit and after what seemed like forever and ever and ever I finally made it down to I think I had a 400 read something like that having a hiccup time keeping the bevel straight we got done with that and we had a little distortion so we had to fit that guard back on and I've got a couple of little areas have a couple little pits in it he was from grabbing it with the tongs in the wrong way or something so I did do a little more grinding that it didn't show here just got a little tedious we're going to get this thing into an edge if I can get this clamp on here right and we're going to see what this material looks like all put together and you can see that wrought iron stays nice and shiny because of the lack of carbon in it and then we have you can see the leaf spring the dark area and the 15 and 20 now my itching is at full strength and it tends to mute things because it wants to burn everything so I have to do very short edges and they don't come out super crisp but like I said it's not really my mainstay so I'm not real good at it but and we only folded this once so we came up with a total of like 10 layers you can see some of the layers of the 15 and 20 laying together in there but it's a very basic minimal layers just to find out what these materials would do together and that's just how it came out like I said not a knife maker but for me it's a victory at least it came out knife shape so anyway we'll get to get this guard back on here see how this all fits together and we got our little wooden handle it's the original handle I wanted to keep it that way I could turn a new one and put it on there but I just like the look of the antique used thing and a little nut it actually buggered those threads up a little bit in the Forge so I had to run a tap back over them but they they came out okay and tightened up real good and tight and there you have it one each kind of sorta pattern-welded wrench knife a rope wrench I'm not sure way you call it it was fun and I do like the way it looks all righty guys there you go okay guys so that was fun actually I had a lot of fun doing that the belt grinding was a little bit you know anyway so we got to build that guy lots of fun I kind of like the look of it I like the way the old fashioned and the blade kind of go together a little obstet right there reminds me of maybe an old war thing or something I don't I've seen other people make knives out of these old wrenches in the past and they'll just take the shaft and sort of just remove the material I saw a YouTube video where someone had done that and hard to quenched it most of these things are made from wrought iron depending on the vintage of the thing some of the newer ones are a little more modern steel but if you get an old one with a wooden handle there's a I couldn't even tell you what year they stopped making them out of wrought iron but there's a lot of them out there so if you're looking for something like that pick these things up I was going to do is grind along the back a little bit and you can see the grain come out if it is a wrought iron wrench and there's a lot of things that you can do with them so anyway this was fun and my inspiration was off a youtube video there was a young man making a knife simply by taking one of these wrenches and he did a stock removal and created a blade out of it and it was pretty interesting he did a good job of that and I picked up on that went now we can do something a little different with it so that's what we did so you guys are wondering why a guy who doesn't build knives built a knife out of this material well it was a very rudimentary knife and didn't have very many layers to it but it was sort of a proof of concept or to see how this material would react and kind of get that cross and I've wanted to do something out of one of those wrenches for a long time and I think maybe 50 cents for that wrench or something like that so it was kind of a cool little project kind of fun so real quickly take a look at this [Music] so that's the material I used along with the leaf spring to create the knife I comes from a friend of mine he works at a sawmill blade manufacturing plant they service people all across the country and they end up with a lot of this material and basically get it for free he called me up today come get it and I don't know how long the supply will last but I've got a lot of this stuff so I know there's some of you guys out there they could use some of this stuff and I've got way too much I don't even know what I would ever do with all of it so yeah someone could leave some comments and let me know how to figure out what material it is not super familiar with testing to see if you know it's 15 in 20 if it's high carbon steel blades whatever it is I'm assuming it's 15 and 20 because it's a wood band saw blades but there's no telling without trying to figure it out it seemed to work out okay and my knife as a contrast metal but there is no guarantee there so leave me some comments let me know what that is what I'm going to do is once I sort that out I've got some of these if it fits it ships boxes and what I'll do is we're going to start doing some giveaways to get rid of some of this stuff because it's overloading the shop so I'll be out with that and next video if we get enough responses try to figure out what that is let me know what your interest is and let me know how I can test this stuff figure out what it is and we'll put something together alright so thanks for sticking with me guys I know it's been a long video sorry about that I do appreciate you check it in with me and share like subscribe all that good stuff and I'm going to close it down now so take care be safe and thanks for checking it out guys like [Music] you

Channel: BIG DOG FORGE

Views: 27,949

Rating: 4.9477124 out of 5

Keywords: Blacksmithing, Forging, Damascus, Pattern welding, Rrench knife

Id: PLv09VobyIw

Length: 29min 32sec (1772 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 29 2016