Bolsters on a Full Tang Knife | Knifemaking

hey guys welcome back to the shop in today's video I'm gonna be attempting my first full tang knife with bolsters so this is the first time I've ever tried this I got a lot of my inspiration that from Dave at horse ride clothing make sure you go check out his Instagram page for some awesome pictures the guy's an excellent photographer as well and he also has some threads on blade forms describing his bolster process which I'm sure I've messed up here and there if you have any suggestions on how I can improve this process of installing bolsters on a full tang knife please make sure to put those in the comment section below I am definitely not a pro with this assembly method and I'm sure I messed up here and there or I could do them some things a little bit more efficiently also when it comes to grinding the handle on a bolster knife I found some great difficulties in this process so if you have any tips and tricks on how to grind handles with bolsters also put those in the comment section below lastly I wanted to mention that the surface grinding attachment video was an awesome success I want to thank you guys for that I'll have some videos down the road of my results with that system and how well it's doing for me but spoiler alert it's working out pretty good so with that I'll go on to my normal narration for this video and I hope you guys enjoy it so we get this blade profiled and drilled and then we're gonna move on to our heat treat before grinding our bevels have a whole video on heat treating but I did lose the heat reading footage for this knife specifically I went ahead and quenched it in parks 50 and I did two tempering cycles at 213 degrees Celsius for this knife so you can see that I am pulling out the knife here and cooling it to room temperature before doing this second tempering cycle after we get the blade heat treated we move on over to the surface grinding attachment and we go ahead and start trying to get a nice smooth finish on this knife after I get one side done I put some tape on it so as not to scratch this finish and then work on the other side I start off with a hundred and grid belt and then I moved up to an a 45 try Zack which is around the 360 great finish the turns on this table are very minut as I'm moving towards the wheel so that turn right there is only about one and a half to two thousandths of an inch after we get this blade nice and smooth we'll head on over to our next step which is going to be grinding out the bevels you can see it makes it really nice 360 great finish there first thing we do is we mark our scribe line in the center of where the edge will be or in the center of the blade and then we grind to that line I used to mark out my bevel lines but I've kind of stopped doing that and I look for those as I go along since I'm doing a full flat grind so in this case I started off with a 60 grit VSM ceramic belt I used an old one at first to knock down the edge or that corner and then I moved on into a newer belt to work the bevel up towards the spine so you can see I'm working on the second side here I'm gonna give you a cut away in a second of what the 60 grit finish looks like on the knife after this 60 grit finish we move on to the 120 grit j-flex belt at this point I'll start trying to radius my plunge lines and get them pretty close to lined up this is what the 120 grit belt looks like on one side and the 60 on the other lastly I'll head on over to a 220 grit j-flex and these are the results from that after grinding I'll head on over to my edging machine my DIY edging machine here based off of Chris Crawford's plans will put my stencil on there which comes from tu si industries and hit it about 12 on DC power after which I will clean it up with a scotch-brite belt then I'll clean the blade off and we'll get to acid etching I've been noticing in some of my edges there are some kind of specks that don't seem to get etched and I think it could be my cleaning process so I need to I need to up my game when it comes to cleaning these guys off making sure that they're completely dry before putting them in the acid so that I can get the nice even edge we take some steel wool and wipe the blade off baking soda to neutralize the acid and then put it in our Rock tumbling jig here for about 15 minutes if you're curious on how to make one of these Rock tumbling jigs go ahead and check out some of the other videos in my channel really simple build but I use this thing all the time now so spray this guy down and this is the finish that we were able to achieve you can see some of those specks towards the plunge line there so I'm still trying to figure out what those are but we're gonna move on to the bolsters here so I cut out two pieces of brass and then I flattened one side of each of them on our granite plate there and then scribe lined the center of one so that I can line it up to the center of these two holes in my full tang knife here and then I clamped the whole assembly together now that the simile is clamped I'm going to go over to the drill press and drill one 1/8 hole through the Tang and the two pieces of brass using the Tang as a drill guide put a drill bit in that original hole and then go ahead and drill the second hole as well this is how that came out I went ahead and marked the left and right and also the front just so I don't get anything mixed up and then back over to my surface plate to clean up the front of the scales ended up hitting them with a 400 grit cork belt this would have been a good application for a buffer using a tapered punch I went ahead and tapered the outside of the holes so as to have some space for my peening so I went ahead and just punched kind of gently just enough to deform the brass out a little bit at the entrance and then on the back ends I jammed the hole so that while I'm painting if the pin expands at all and will have some space to go I then took some mosaic pins and brought them down just enough so that they slide into these holes effortlessly then using some jb weld we went ahead and coated the inside of the bolsters and the tang of the knife then we drove our pins through gently and then tapped this whole thing together now I did make my pins a little too long as you'll see here so I went over to the belt sander and took down though the the length of the pins on each side to make the painting process easier so we went ahead and got it pushed together you can see my pins are a little too long here took it over to the belt sander knocked them down so that they're just proud of the bolsters and then came back to my mini envel here and started painting over those pins for a good measure I went ahead and put a light clamp on these bolsters as well before that you can see me there cleaning off the excess jb weld with wd-40 oh yeah and I also hit the whole thing with the belt sander just to see how I did and they look good all right so I went on to some liner material for this is g10 got this nice and flat this is gonna be going in between my brass bolster and Ironwood and then I went ahead and got my Ironwood flat you can tell when something's really flat when you put it on the plate and it kind of does that little skate at the in there also it will stick to another piece that's been flattened so these two pieces are super flat which I like went ahead and cleaned up the front of them where they'll be contacting this spacer so I'll mixing up a little G flex here we're gonna put on one side alone and then use the Tang as a drill guide to drill that scale after the epoxy has dried so this is kind of a long way to do it because I have to wait for the epoxy to dry on multiple times but I think it gets me pretty straight holes through to assimilate so it worked out but I'm sure there's a better way so we just get this thing glued in and then using some light clamps clamp it down after its dried up we're able to head on over to the drill press and use our tang as a drill guide for those holes so we get those two number thirteen holes drilled out because we are gonna be using Corby's and actually go ahead and drill out some of the center holes as well just so these can be kind of epoxy holes the next the next round of epoxy I do I think clean that clean up that side of the Tang with some sandpaper put some more G G flex on it and do the same thing on this side throw the spacer down put the Ironwood on and clamp it up this would be a good case to use some faster setting epoxy maybe maybe the one our stuff from combat I end up getting some of that but I just didn't get it soon enough so I'll go ahead and clip off the long pieces of g10 here I wanted to get the sides of the knife flat before doing some drilling and cutting so go over to a belt sander get it kind of flat there and use the hole the original holes on the other side of the scales as a drill guide and then we're gonna countersink our holes here on one of these I did not go deep enough and that I ran into a problem during to glue up later on but I ended up having to go back to the counterbore during the glue up which is never a fun thing to do well I'll just my Corby's down to about a quarter of an inch and then I used some combat abrasive rogue epoxy here to put in my core B fasteners I'm gonna be trying this stuff up down the road and I want to compare it to the G flex as far as performance goes but I use it in this project because I wanted a fast fast cure time so I fought with this until I went back to my drill press deep in that counterbored and everything worked out just fine but I definitely fiddled with it for a couple minutes there all right then we're just gonna get the sides flat and cut off the excess on the bandsaw I had a template of this knife so I was able to draw that template onto the outside here to give me a rough estimate of where to cut with this bandsaw then I took down the profile of the handle to the tang and then after I got everything nice and squared up I started a radius in the handle like this so I did that to both sides so that have a nice radius on both sides of the handle this is how that uh this is how that turned out now this is how that turned out so next step is to knock down these edges with a one-inch scalloped belt J flex belt the major challenge here is since the brass is harder not taking off too much wood and having a bump where they come together and do too massive public outcry we will have some epic hand sanding coming up [Music] [Applause] [Music] so while I was hand standing I noticed there was a little inclusion in the iron wood here so I went ahead and clean it with alcohol and then hit it with some superglue there to fill that in and then to get this finished smooth or at least all uniform I went over to the service conditioning belt and tried to get everything moving in the same direction I think this would been a good case if I had a buffer but go ahead and give me some suggestions in the comment section below I'm not super happy with the complete finish of the brass there but it does look decent and I think it comes out to around a 400 or 600 grit finish at least all the lines are going in the same direction and that's kind of what I was shooting for with that surface conditioning belt then we went ahead to the the stone sharpener here from wind the water stone clean the blade off and it is sharp so yeah this is how my first bolstered full-tang knife turned out all in all I'm happy with it it took me some time comparatively to what I normally do but that's part of a learning process here you know I think there would probably be a more efficient way to finish this brass bolster so that it's nice and shiny or shinier than it is here you know in this case it's almost a brushed finish and I think that a buffer would probably do a good job of getting in all the nooks and crannies there especially in the finger choil area I was kind of hard to get in there but I hope you guys liked this video if you did think about subscribing to a channel I'd really appreciate it and here are some other videos that you may like to watch next and as always I'll catch y'all on the flipside you

Channel: Red Beard Ops

Views: 55,316

Rating: 4.9473338 out of 5

Keywords: red beard ops, jkeetonknives, knifemaker, knifemaking, bolsters, bolster, how to attach bolsters on a knife, how to attach bolsters, knife bolster, knife bolster making, bolsters on knife, surface grinder, full tang knife, custom knife making, how to affix bolsters, simple little life, alec steele, walter sorrells, how to make a knife, home made knife, diy knife, horsewright clothing, cowboy knife, ranch knife, brass bolster, knifemaker explains, 2x72 grinder

Id: HxhBDqYUG74

Length: 15min 24sec (924 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 24 2020