Bushcraft Knife & Leather Sheath | Knife Making

alright guys so today I think I have a pretty cool build video for y'all I'll be making this bushcraft style knife and it will incorporate a coke bottle style handle coke bottle shaped handles are new to me and I'm really enjoying playing around with sculpting handles so this is probably the third one that I've done and I was very happy with how this one turned out the first steps like always is to trace out our pattern and get it cut out on the bandsaw you can see there that I am making sure that my work rest is Square to my platen before grinding off the rough profile of this knife I have some one-inch belts that I got from the gentleman who sold me this grinder a while ago and I'm still getting through those one-inch belts I decided to use them so that they're not just hanging in my shop so that is why you don't see a full 2-incher on the machine I get two holes marked out and then I'm marking out the center hole on this knife I will be using a Corby fastener in the center so that's gonna be a number 13 hole and I'll be using to my card out pins which are going to be an eighth of an inch each I'll also have a lanyard hole towards the back of the knife these quarter inch holes you see me drilling here are just for weight reduction and also to give the epoxy some space to move around while we are gluing up the handle I'm putting the file guide on this knife in order to have a backstop for my checkering file this checkering file has done a great job so far and I really like the texture that it leaves for your thumb to grab onto on the finished knife I then make sure there's no burrs from all the grinding on the flats of the knife and I put a very light hollowing in the handle a knife for weight reduction I do too normalizing cycles on this blade however I only show one I heat the blade up to somewhere above 1600 degrees Fahrenheit and then let it cool to room temperature this allows the stress to be taken out of the blade on my third heat cycle I will heat it up to its quenching temperature quenching in the oil parks 50 for around four to five seconds and then put it into my straightening plates as quickly as I can so that I can end with a nice straight blade I've been asked a few times if I feel like there's any risk to the blade cracking when using these straightening plates since the blade is now hard if you get it into the plates before the blade drops below 400 degrees Fahrenheit I do not think this is an issue however if you were to let the blade get all the way down to room temperature or below 400 degrees put it into the straightening plates and clamp down on it you would run the risk of cracking the blade what you just saw me complete was two tempering cycles at 214 degrees Celsius each of those tempering cycles lasted around two hours after the tempering I come over to my surface grinding attachment and work up the grits from a 120 grit ceramic belt to a two hundred and eighty grit Gator belt and then finally to a 220 grit cork belt and this is the finish that I was able to achieve to get the other side done without scratching the side we just did I'll lay down a layer of duct tape and put that side against a magnetic Chuck even though this Chuck is made from aluminum I have found that it will scratch or finish the same belt progression is used in this case and we get it all the way up to a 220 grit Corp finish using a 220 grit j-flex belt I'll make sure that the spine of the knife has brought up to 220 grit and then using some 320 grit sandpaper I'll sand the edge of the blade and I'll sand the sharpening coil so that everything on the knife is at least up to a 220 grit using my height scribe I will mark off the center lines so that I have an edge target when grinding my bevels I generally start off with a worn belt so that the abrasives are not sacrificed at this steep angle of the beginning of my bevels that edge has a tendency to knock abrasives off easily on a new belt once I have my bevel started I'll move on to my newer belts and get the bulk of the material removed this here is a 60 grit ceramic belt finish in this case I went straight from a 60 grit to a 150 grit Hermes J flex belt this belt allowed me to get into the plunge lines and have a nice radius on my plunge lines and is at this point that I want to get my plunge line symmetrical so that when I am moving up to higher grits I will have less work to do after the 150 grit J flex belt and end up grinding up to a 220 grit finish which I did not show in this video after a 220 grit finish I hit it with the scotch brite belt and this is the finish that I was able to achieve at this point I will etch my maker's mark with my DIY edging machine this thing has been a tank since I built it and I built it off of Chris Crawford's plan so go ahead and look him up because this machine is excellent when I plan on stone washing a knife I will only etch on DC because I want a deep edge I'll edge it about 12 times for 1 second increments on DC power I'll then clean up that edge with a scotch brite belt after it's been cleaned up it's into the ferric chloric acid where I H it for around 10 minutes and then put it into my stone tumbler and tumble it for around 12 to 15 minutes I've gotten a few questions on what type of media that I use in my stone tumbler and I must say it's nothing special in this case these are just decorative rocks that I stole from my wife but you can pretty much use any rocks that you want or you can use ceramic tumbling media which is probably a better option this is some sweet micarta I got from pops knife supply some my card a pen and then a stainless steel corby fastener that I'll be using to fix this handle these are 3/8 of an inch handle scales first thing I'll do is I'll use a can't twist clamp to clamp the entire assembly together and drill my eighth of an inch hole through my knife and into the micarta I'll then place a drill bit into the hole that I just drilled in order to make sure nothing moves around while I am drilling the other holes the center hole I will drill a number thirteen size hole for the corby fastener and then I will match the sizing of the lanyard hole using a scribe I'll trace the outline of the blank one tune of micarta and then cut it out roughly one spot where I need to be delicate is where I cut off the lanyard bulk material or the bulk material around the lanyard hole I'm just trying to line up with the tangent of this hole when I'm cutting off the bulk of materials then I'm off to the 2 by 17 belt sander with a sixty grit belt just to grind down to my scribe line I'm going to be using a small wheel attachment to get into that lanyard area this small wheel attachment was purchased from Origin blade works and it has been working great for me thus far I do however wish I had some rubber wheels but these wheels have been doing a good job thus far I'll mark off where I will grind at my front bevels on these handle scales down to not only on the front but also on the back where the lanyard hole will be using a 45-degree angled block I will grind it down at these front Devils I took the same approach on the lanyard hole area grinding down a bevel on the back of the knife then I'll work up from 320 grit paper to a thousand grit on both the front bevels and the lanyard bevels on these handle scales one side note is I wish I would have ground these bevels a little further towards the center of the knife or I guess the inside of each scale because when I do my handle shaping later on it makes my front bevels a little bit shorter than I would have liked but you'll see that later on to get into this recess I actually used a small wheel with some sandpaper wrapped around it these are the results that I was able to achieve with the hand sanding on the phone in the back and then I try to figure out how long my Corby fasteners need to be in order to have the appropriate fit up on this knife happily I found the head-to-head distance need to be around 0.4 inches which means that I do not need to modify this Corby fastener I then counterbored both holes to 3/16 of an inch deep and then took the eighth of an inch micarta pins down just a little bit so they'll snugly fit into the holes the first step in every glue up is to clean off all of the components I'm using alcohol to do this rubbing alcohol and then start lathering on at my G flex epoxy and start preparing it to get the Corby fastener lined up now make sure to put a little bit of G flex inside of the counterbore where the head of the Corby will be and I'm very careful not to get any epoxy into the female side of the Corby fastener because this could cause problems when mating the two halves together you can see there I coated my micarta pins with some epoxy and lightly tap them into their homes once it has had 24 hours to dry I cut off the bulk of the pin material and then we get to the grinder to flatten both the sides step one is going to be the flat enough the sides and then it's you grind the handle material down to metal tang of the knife once this is done we can start the shaping process I want to give a major shout-out to Rob McKibben he helped me out immensely when it comes to the design of a coke bottle handle and how to grind it his methodology is to grind a taper first tapering towards the tip of the blade and then grind in your hollows towards the back that drawing obviously was not the scale but I think it helps get the concept across so the first step here is grinding a taper towards the blade side of the knife I think I could have gone a little further on this tapering but that is the taper that I achieved and then before grinding in my hollows I went ahead and rounded these scales on the sides it's just a little bit like I normally do on a handle using a five-pound plate with an 8-inch diameter I tried to scribe in or draw in some guidelines on where my hollows will be and then this is the only contact wheel that I have a two inch wheel so I'll be using this two inch wheel to attempt an 8 inch diameter hollow it does work out pretty good in this case but I do want to get some larger contact wheels and try those out as well so being very careful with this two inch wheel I attempted to get both sides symmetrical and this is where I ended up after we have the hollows roughed in I use the two inch wheel again to knock off the edges and try to smooth out the transitions between the flats on the side of the scales and the spine of the knife the last operation I do on the grinder is taking it to a spec belt to have an even greater gradual transition between the sides of the handle scales and the spine of the knife this just kind of smooths everything out just a little bit more this is how the knife came off the grinder and then I work up the hand sanding grits from a 320 grit paper to a 600 grit paper and then finally to a 1,000 grit paper the top and the bottom of the knife are fairly simple to do but I take great care in these sides of the knife because I don't want to dome over that stainless steel core P fastener the stainless steel is harder than the micarta and you run the risk of doming that and you will feel it when you hold the knife in your hand so I use a hard backing to my sandpaper in this case a piece of metal that has been surface ground and I do not run into the issues of doming that pin using the wind water-cooled sharpening system I put around an 18 degree secondary bevel on this edge and then I strop it with the power strop and a little bit of compound this results in a blade that is shaving sharp and it doesn't take that long to achieve these results my only gripe with this wind water cooled sharpening system is that the knife needs to have a sharpening coil otherwise you will easily come up your plunge lines with that stone but most of my knives do have a sharpening coil so that has not been an issue for me I then wax and blade as a method of protecting it while I'll be making the leather sheath now I want to mention here that I am NOT a pro when it comes to making leather sheets and I'm still learning this process one thing that I have been becoming aware of is that the quality of the leather goes a long way and this was actually told to me early on by horse right and I I didn't listen like I should have in bought imported tooling leather so this is a slab or a shoulder of imported leather and I find that as a look dry and it's also a little thicker than I think I need I think it's around a nine ounce so I'll be looking to get some higher quality American leather that is around a seven to eight ounce leather for my she's in the future so we'll see how that works out the first thing I did it was cut out my pattern in my welt and then I tried cleaning up the edges a little bit and then I'm taking it over to the grinder to make sure that the radius is towards the belt loop are nice and round when I'm cutting it out with a razor blade sometimes those corners I get a little squared off I'll then be dyeing this sheath and I'm marked off where my belt loop will land in order to avoid getting dye where I'll be gluing however I forgot to do the same at the top of the belt loop so I did get a little guy in the glued area towards the top of my belt loop I'll be using some contact cement to glue down at my belt loop so I put a little bit on both sides wait a second or two for it to get tacky line it up and then give it some nice wraps with the hammer and then for about ten minutes I left it clamped they're using pricking irons I will mark off where I will be drilling my holes to do this stitch and I will be using a finishing nail in my drill press to put these holes into the sheath I find that it does not remove any material like a drill bit does and I feel like that's a good thing when it comes to making a leather sheath all this does is push material out of the way kind of like a punch wood once I have my holes pushed through the sheath I use a groove ER to put a groove where my stitches will be laying I want these stitches to be inset into the sheath a little bit so they don't get hung up either on the inside or the outside the sheath I just got these John James settlers harness needles and they've really upped my game when it comes to doing the saddle stitch I was using sharp pointy needles before and they were of a size that didn't really work out for the stitches that I was doing so I'll put a link in the description if anyone's looking for some nice saddling needles once I have the belt loop stitched on I will be folding the sheath over and gluing both sides together first thing I want to do is put the contact cement on one side and get that welt in there and then I can wet the center of the sheath so that I can fold it over and meet both sides together after I get all these sides lined up I will put some material in between my clamps and the sheath so as not to Mar the sheath and I left it clamped up for about 45 minutes I intentionally cut my welt so that I have a little extra material sticking out it would have been smarter of me to cut this material away but I went straight to a 150 grit belt on my belt sander to grind this material away I end up grinding a B profile that I wanted the sheath with a hundred and fifty grit belt and then finishing it off with a 220 grit belt and this is the result that I achieved using an edge beveler I knocked off the edge around the wealth of the sheet and then I grooved where my stitches will go my groover got away from me a little bit and it is not a 100% straight or even stitch line however I will get better in the future using the pricking irons I set off where my holes will be pushed through this sheath with the finishing nail and then carefully with a block of wood as an offset to keep the bit straight I punched these holes through the sheath this finishing nail technique I think has been working pretty good I at least get nice straight holes with this method I then groove the back of the sheath with my groover I don't know if this is a necessity since the subtle stitch pulls in fairly tight into the sheath but I did it anyway there and actually kind of gummed it up a little bit in the process as you can see in this shot here I found that a good measurement for your wax thread is around nine times the length that you'll be saddle stitching that has worked out pretty good for me thus far I'm using a soldering iron it to melt these pieces and the first one I cut a little too long and the second one I cut just right so I'll be cutting them shorter in the future this is how the stitch turned out I tapped down the stitch so that the stitches lay a little flatter and then I use a little bit more dye on the edge and burnish it with a burnishing tool I think I want to get a power burner sure in the future I think that may help me get a little bit more of a glossy result I went the sheet and then wrapped the knife in plastic after oiling it generously and then carefully push the knife into the sheath and push around the knife when it's in the sheath to try to wet and hold it this sheaths probably could have used for a little bit of a larger pattern this knife has a pretty tight snug fit in there but I think it's gonna wear in pretty nicely with time one other thing I think I would do is angle the top of the welt so that the little finger guard on this knife kind of slides into the sheath a little bit more effortlessly but this is how it looks on person and I'm pretty happy with the way that she turned out some of the last steps on the sheath is going to be to finish diet so I want to just touch the die up and make it all nice and as even as I can make it here I also want to pay special attention to the top of the belt loop to make sure that it is thoroughly died and then I wipe down the entire sheath with neat's-foot oil so this is how the entire package turned out when it comes to the knife I am very happy with how the knife turned out this micarta was very cool the micarta pins had a really nice touch to them and I think the overall feel of this knife is is great and I'll probably make more of this design when it comes to the leather sheath I definitely have to up my skills when it comes to leather work but I am encouraged with how this sheath turned out so thank you all for watching I hope you really enjoyed this build and got something out of it if you have any questions on my process on building this knife please put them in the comment section below and I'll do my best to answer them you know we're all learning together here so don't be afraid to ask questions into the next time I'll catch you all on the flip side [Music] [Music]

Channel: Red Beard Ops

Views: 130,763

Keywords: red beard ops, knifemaker, knifemaking, knife maker, knife making, bushcraft, bushcraft knife, how to make a bushcraft knife, how to make a knife sheath, how to make a bushcraft knife sheath, how to make a knife, best bushcraft knife, edc knife, how to make an edc knife, knife for bushcraft, camping knife, hunting knife, coke bottle handle knife, coke bottle handle, leather bushcraft sheath, leather sheath making, alec steele, how to make a camp knife, diy bushcraft knife

Id: 05oRi4XEGno

Length: 21min 57sec (1317 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 10 2020