Crafting A Hidden Tang Knife Handle

[Music] hey everyone welcome to crafting a life I want my name is Sean and I'm super excited to be bringing you my first video of 2020 we're getting on towards the latter parts of January and it's been really frigid here in Maryland so I haven't been able to spend a whole bunch of time out in the shop at least not for extended periods of time I have managed to accomplish a few small projects like a storage system for my two by seventy-two belts as well as a storage system for the axes that I collected and refurbish there's still a couple of other projects in the shop that need to get done but I wanted to get a video out before too long one of the big things that did get done in the shop is I got some additional lighting that will hopefully allow me to produce better videos for you all but this video is actually about completing this hidden Tang knife that I forged I forged this out of the end of the farriers rasp that I used for my brother's knife it's going to be a brute - forged knife that's actually going to be used for dustin over the other craftsmanship his birthday present this would be my first ever hidden Tang knife and I look forward to bringing you along I spent some time off-camera working on the design for the handle I started off by tracing my knife which you can see here and then I drew the handle design I wanted around where the Tang was to make sure everything would fit I does look like I'm a low close clearance wise here towards the back so I'm gonna opt to shorten my tang and then other than that it's just a nice swoop to the back and a little bit of a coke bottle shape for the the bottom portion of the handle and then from the top-down perspective a couple of facets towards the front leading to the the mid handle palms well and then some curves to the back handle palm as well so I'm gonna go ahead and cut down the tang before I do that I did transfer the Tang drawing at the right angle to the block and to do that I set up my block where it would cover my entire drawing and because I had that slight downturn in the handle I had to cut the front of my block at a slight angle so then once that was done I traced the Tang and then transferred those lines at the top of the block finding the center with a pair of digital calipers so that darkened area in the middle is where I'm going to drill into and it's gonna follow these lines on the side angling into the block so the next step is to take you over to the drill press get set up to drill those holes and start boring it out I went ahead and started with the holes just my hand drill I basically got it through the brass and as far down as I could staying in line with the Tang now I'm gonna finish off the depth with the drill press well I screwed up I was working off the directions that were going to do a hidden Tang with an integral bolster I don't have an intrical bolster so the problem is that when I made that hole a little too big which would allow everything to sit down tight I don't have any way to close up those holes because the plan was for the knife to sit like this and I don't know if you can I can get this so you can see it but you see all the gapping around where the blade enters so I've decided that I'm going to be adding another piece of brass to the handle so tomorrow because it's nighttime and cold here I'm gonna go ahead and flatten this out and then carefully cut the hole so that it meets up with the handle as well as the knife smoothly so that there's not a ton of gapping there so I will bring it back tomorrow and show you how I'm gonna do that good morning everyone it is cold here weather tells me it is 23 degrees outside and I'm not excited about spending extended periods of time in my shop today I was hoping to at least beyond a grinding for today but instead I am figuring out how to do that brass piece so I've got it all set up I took some time to lay out with some calipers last night make sure I'm nice and centered leaving it a little smaller than what the final dimensions going to be but I will get you set up in the tripod and I'll get started drilling so I hollowed out the hole a bit using a hand drill to the point that I can fit some of my smaller files in there I did a little bit of work realize I should be videoing it so I got you set up and now I am just doing a continual test squaring up this hole both directions and then constantly testing the fit of the night [Music] you can see some tiny gaps at the top of the bottom so I'm just gonna keep working the radiuses from the front side bit by bit until this fits flush see ya our gaps almost entirely closed up I want to see if I put a pipe on the tang and hit it a couple times if I can get it to just mold or Bend the brass [Music] [Music] see those couple hammer hits allowed it to shift just enough and I don't around the tang to close up those gaps all right come back inside where it's a little warmer and I'm gonna start the process of betting the Tang a couple things are gonna happen here I'm going to bed the Tang in the handle I'm also going to glue the piece of brass that I just got done shaping onto the top of the handle and then I am going to while it's embedded in before we pull it out I'm going to drill the hole in the handle that goes through our Tang so I've already traced the Tang on the handle roughly where it's gonna be and now I'm going to be following Liam Hoffman's steps for betting the Tang so I have some teflon tape Johnson paste wax and I'm just gonna wrap the Tang in the teflon tape and then coat it in the paste wax and that will be what we put inside the handle what I put inside the handle no actually worked out better than I expected all right so that's covered and now I am going to coat that in Johnson's paste wax and because I'm gluing that piece of brass I'm also going to make sure we get a nice even coat all around this I want to make sure is that your handle is oriented the correct way with the knife so if there was any play in your Tang you want to make sure your knife and handle are oriented correctly all right so at this point what's gonna happen is I'm gonna let this sit up this is five minute epoxy it should be set up in well five minutes but I've never seen this to set in five minutes so I'm gonna let it sit for most of the rest of today and then hopefully tonight I'll be able to come back and drill my hole through the tang and the handle for the pin and then I will be able to remove it from the handle and start shaping the handle so I will bring you back for that hey everyone welcome back to the shop I let that epoxy set up and before I'm gonna remove the knife from the handle and start doing the finished shaping on the handle I want to get the eighth inch hole drilled for the pin that I'm gonna use I went ahead and marked it with just a spring punch and I did that after I I cut out my outline of the knife and laid it on there with how the knife is bedded in the handle just to make sure everything was still lined up so I'm going to get the drill press set up and attempt to drill that hole I'm a little concerned that the Tang will be too hard to drill through without wondering so I might just go through the first layer of wood and then touch the Tang pull the knife and then worry about drilling the hole through the Tang and then all the way through the rest of the handle separately I am sorry everyone I totally forgot to hit record once I got the drill press set up and worked my way through that hole the good news is that the Tang was not hard so I was able to get that hole drilled all the way through see the see how it goes all the way through there and then here's the corresponding hole in our knife the bedding went great came out with very little effort and now I'm able to just put it back in and there's no there's no movement once it's in there and more importantly the holes all lined up so you can still kind of see see all the way through which will allow the pin to go through as well so the next step is I'm gonna let that finish finish curing entirely overnight and then I'm going to bring you back tomorrow and we'll start doing the rough shaping of the handle good morning I came out early this morning and was doing some just quick cleanup work of the epoxy that had squeezed out just some rough shaping making sure there was no wood overhanging my brass pieces and that everything was set to go I wasn't doing anything overly aggressive and ended up finding out exactly why you don't use a five-minute epoxy for handle construction works perfectly fine for betting a tang but when you use it for handle construction this is the kind of stuff that happens so I think I can fix this because I bed the Tang there is a little bit of epoxy that will align everything correctly so I'm gonna go ahead and buy some new epoxy some better stuff clean up the pieces and do another glue up so I will bring you back when we get back to this place hey everyone welcome back it's the next day a couple of things have happened since I had the handle fell apart on me I decided I am done using five-minute epoxy for anything but betting the tang I seem to always have failures with it so what I did is I took apart the rest of the handle which is what you see here and I bought some west system G flex 650 B or 658 sorry 650 - 8 two-part epoxy which gets really good reviews and I'm excited to give it a try today so I read the instructions and it says for metal to scuff up to 80 grit which is what we see on our brass bits here I went ahead and reflected everything after I took it apart and then scuffed it up with 80 grit and now I decided that to do the final glue up and now so I took my knife back out and I sharpened it up what you can see here I also got to use my surface conditioning belts from combat abrasives and it looks really good helps smooth out any of my sanding errors things like that particularly in a brute to forge finish I also took my grinder and some files and filed some notches in the tank so that it gives an epoxy connection from where we bent the Tang in and then I took the hole and used a countersink bit and did that in the hole for this just to make it easier for the pin to get through so at this point I am ready to do final glue up so I'm going to stop stop talking for the moment I'm going to get some gloves on and then I'll get started with the final glue up sorry about that my son wanted to show me something all right so just like with our other epoxy from mixing equal parts hardener to resin this says we have about 45 minutes of work time once it's mixed I should be enough certainly won't take me 45 minutes so if it's not enough I'll be able to mix up some more and keep going so that pin was basically the exact length we needed it to be grab a hammer I'm sorry I'm gonna grab a hammer right so with the pin in everything's locked in place you can see it there and then on the other side you can just see it at the tip so once what that means is once we get everything ground it'll be perfectly flush and good I am going to try to clean up yes well I want to clamp it at least vertically hey everyone how welcome back it's the next night and I'm finally finding some free time in my weekend to bring you all back to the shop and get started on the final steps of the hidden Tang knife handle that we're working on so I promised you just a minute ago that I would bring you back when we unclamp this thing and that's what I'm doing now so let me get you set up in the tripod and we'll get going on this all right so now is the moment of truth I'm gonna go ahead and unclamp it and see what what I got looks like I've got a nice good bond everywhere and should considering how much extra extra epoxy I had on there so I went ahead and taped up my blade this allows me to you know hold on to it without cutting myself I put a brand new 80 grit belt on just to make sure we're cutting clean and now I'm gonna go ahead and get started [Music] [Music] [Music] so I got the rough profile done I'm gonna go ahead and square up or clean up the two sides I won't need the lines anymore so I will do that now [Music] all right I do love those combat abrasive belts they're great that a great job through here I think this is enough for tonight I'm getting tired and I don't want to make any mistakes because I'm tired particularly at this stage of the build so the rough profile is done and I've cleaned up the the sides tonight I'm gonna go in and retrace the the profile that we want or that I want on from the top down profile get that on there and tomorrow I'll start working on that so I will bring you back to that hey everyone it's the next morning and I'm back in the shop getting ready to grind the profile on this knife I did get the you can see that here I got the top down profile marked out on the handle and so I'm gonna get my p2p on TV on and we'll get started serving that grinding [Music] [Music] focus there we go all right so the rough profile is done it's looking pretty good for now before I move up to that 120 grit belt I'm actually gonna head back inside and draw out how I want my facets and curves to occur on this handle so I'll bring you back when I start grinding again all right so I did come back out and just spend a little bit of time making my handle a little more symmetrical I it was just bothering me trying to draw designs and something wasn't symmetrical having taken bunch of measurements so I then went through and marked my centerline and then just started drawing out where I wanted to remove so I'm gonna do a similar styled handle to the farriers rasp nice knife I did for my brother I'm gonna do kind of a curved groove here with my two inch contact wheel or too much idler wheel rather and then these corner spots are basically just my way of indicating where I'm going to round over the handle itself they're they're very conservative it's probably gonna go a little farther than that but I wanted to just play it a little conservative while I get going here the one thing that I would have done differently with this knife is that had we not had that catastrophic failure where my five-minute epoxy failed what I would have done is done almost all of this shaping on the handle before I glued it to the knife and that would have given me a little more freedom with angles and contours and stuff like that as well as movement without having to worry about nicking the blade or something like that but I'm gonna go ahead and get started and I I not entirely sure how this will work this is a an older 120 grit ceramic belt I'm gonna try to clean it up a bit with the eraser and we'll see how it works I might move over to the 220 grit a little earlier if that's if that's not working well [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right I am pretty happy with the progress I've made so far it's obviously still pretty chunky I have a lot of a lot of meat to still remove particularly in this middle section which I'm sorry particularly in this middle section where I'm having a hard time getting the finish I want I might switch over to some hand files to do some more of my shaping we'll see I'm actually I'm unexpectedly I'm really enjoying the faceted back here rather than a curved back so I'm gonna keep working on that and we'll see how it feels as I progress right now I'm not getting you know that the handle itself is still pretty chunky but I'm not getting any hot spots I don't think I mean might be a little bit of hot spot here but I think this is still a little lighter than this side so like I said I'm gonna take a little break I'm gonna think about how I want to move forward with the shaping on this but I'm really happy with how it's progressing I know you saw in there I did make some mistakes trying to use the slack portion of the belt got some grooves but fortunately it's early enough on the process as it will take care of that without getting too far into into the wood I do need to be a little careful with this shaping usually again this is my first this is my first hidden Tang handle so I have to make sure I'm conscious of where that's at because right me here might be getting a little close to where that tange is ending up so I'm not gonna go too much more narrow in that section there we'll see I'm gonna take my template and laid out there and just make sure I know where my where my tang is coming down to it all time so I pay attention to that but like I said I'm really happy one thing I am gonna have to pay attention to that I haven't figured out yet is that these portions up here because of the angles that I'm grinding are some pretty sharp edges so I'm also going to take a file to those or figure out how to get the grinder to round them over so I will continue to think about think about this I do have class tonight so this will probably be the last last filming for today I'm actually taking a class in Adobe Premiere and After Effects so hopefully my video editing will be more streamlined and higher-quality here in the next makes couple of months but I will like I said I'll bring you back the next time I'm working on it all right it is feeling a lot better in my hand I took off a good deal of girth here and if ever redo these and I'll clean these up in the next stage as well these lines are not gonna be sharp I'm gonna be hand sanding some of those I hope the curve through here feels great starting to feel much much Aaron Louise in this back out so I'm gonna feel much better in the hand he's got a lot of that girth out I'm getting better wrap I do have a couple hotspots these corners are so a little sharp so I'm gonna take a little bit more off that and then we'll probably switch over to a 220 grit belt I might even just switch straight to hand sanding but like I said I'm gonna take a little bit more off these top top facets see if we can't get that feeling a little better in the hand all right I pulled these angles in a little more tried to keep them nice and even and equal across it's feeling really good in the hand I have a couple hot spots here where this is still a sharp corner on the side as well but I think at this stage I'm going to switch over to hand sanding so I'll get set up in the vise and we'll just start started finishing this thing off I spent about five minutes the grinder with a 220 grit belt at a real slow speed what I did is I evened up some of the brass transitions and cleaned up some of the divots and the brass up around around here basically getting everything to a 220 grit finish so that now that I'm back to hand sanding I'm just getting all of the scratches going in the same direction [Music] and as I said before my favorite part of any woodworking project it's fantastic you see if I can get a little more on camera for you guys [Music] there we go alright so I am actually going to I'll take it most of the drips off I'm going to put this in the vise gently and let that oil sit on there and go ahead and let it dry but that is that is our hidden Tang handle I'm really really happy with how this all turned out I really hope Dustin Dustin likes is his birthday present even if it is a couple of weeks late I am still going to make a sheath for this this although it's not gonna be on camera because I just I just did a video on how I make a sheath but I will bring you back for some exit video as well as just kind of talking about the project and what I learned in the process alright that's a wrap on this project I am really excited with how this handle turned out that black walnut and the brass look great together the curves of the handle and the flow of it it feels great in the hand and I'm just I'm really happy and excited to be able to give this to Dustin over the other craftsmanship he's been a great friend to me over the years and he and I share this love of making things alright hey everyone I am at Dustin's house I have his gift with me kind of ambushing him in a shop he doesn't really know I'm coming over but I wanted to get his genuine reaction on him opening his gift so if you haven't go over to his channel and subscribe hey no it's like we can have sorry but happy birthday I would try to record your genuine reaction to it this is what happens when you surprise somebody in their shop and they have no idea you're coming over [Music] all right you will bare minimum need a screwdriver for expediency sake you'll probably need a drill alright he's gonna go get a drill I'm gonna turn you around so I can do this better alright so apparently drills got left at school so we're gonna watch them suffer through with a screwdriver to open this don't worry Dustin there's only one two three four five six at ten ten screws holding it together they're only inch and a quarter drywall screws stop if they go very far I made that box of like thirty two minutes on the Wednesday before Kate came home intending to bring it over with that night cuz and that was the night that she fell and had to go the hospital thanks for one lesson have a hinge but I suppose I could have had you flip that over I think there's two less on the other side why don't you just do that just finished up heat treating my blade and on the other side of my table to see how long that 2 by 10 was alright because there you're adding some rigidity to your table yes to unboxing for here I mean how often do I get to record my own clients unboxing video client client is relative everyone lace sheath I love this like variation of color on it and I always love leather that has little like character works yeah and I think I was trying to use that piece of leather for like a strop at some point which is where that particular character came from so you obviously watched me for most of that night and was was giving personal design pointers that I'm not sure at the time he thought he knew he was getting the night very - awesome man thank you so much thank you I love this like the single pin with the hidden tank that's I'm just working on a hidden small him day-night them right inside - what I want to do I always really do like the little single pin is nice I hope you enjoy it thanks yes thanks love thing Justin's reaction as he opens that present I have been editing this for a while now just been watching that over and over again I just it makes me smile every time I do want to apologize for the delay in getting this video out all the recording has been done since January but didn't have time to get the editing done with class and then my wife and I actually welcomed our second son into the world a couple weeks ago and so it's just it's been a really busy life lately so if you've bared with me and are still subscribed - really appreciate it this knife handle was a lot of fun to make I know I talked about this a little bit ago but in in retrospect it was just a lot of fun it was a great learning experience I love the shape of the handle I love the look of the black walnut with the brass and I just I had a ton of fun learning how to do this I do hope to streamline that whole process so hopefully it takes less time in the future but I again want to thank you all for watching and if you haven't please subscribe I hope to be getting more videos out as things kind of settled down in my household but the new one so thank you for watching and I hope you'll stick around for future videos [Music] you

Channel: Crafting A Life I Want

Views: 933

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: hidden tang knife handle making, hidden tang knife making, hidden tang knife handle designs, how to make a hidden tang knife, rasp, rasp knife, custom knife, clw, crafting a life i want, crafting.a.life.i.want, imake, maker, hidden tang, hand forged, blacksmithing, blacksmith, hidden tang knife, knife handle, custom handle, brass, brute to forge, BLO, boiled lindseed oil, epoxy, knifemaker, knifemaking, knife maker, knife making, making a knife handle hidden tang, knife handle hidden tang

Id: fJkfw9tCHtM

Length: 38min 11sec (2291 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 17 2020