DIY Knife Sheath made from PVC

in a previous video I showed how I use common household PV typing to make a mask for this axe in this video we're going to do the same thing for this knife if you're interested keep watching okay before we get started on the design of our knight sheath let's go over a few of the tools and materials you're going to need for this project first off obviously you're going to need a knife whatever knife it is that you want to make a sheet for and I'll talk more about this knife in a minute when we get to this design of the sheath obviously next you're going to need some PVC so I have two different weights PVC that I'll be using today this one is in house vacuum tubing that I picked up at Home Depot it has a very narrow quite flexible diameter this is the two inch version and you can buy it I think an 8 foot lengths and I've had a number of projects from these tubes and it works very well it is not heavy duty by any means so therefore you need to back it up with something else so what I'm using it here is this is sewer pipe PVC also purchased at Home Depot so I have a length of that cut from a pipe I bought just for these per projects and we'll be using that for strengthening and reinforcing the sheath as you'll see in a minute what else will you need well you're going to have to have some way of flattening the PVC Oh first you're going to need to cut it so that you can make a flat sheaf go if it I'll be using a saw probably this saw I have a couple songs I could use but I'll just this off here then you'll need to be able to flatten the sheath out I'll be using a heat gun you could use your oven at home or a small toaster oven you do have to be very careful keep the temperature low enough so it just becomes pliable without actually burning the material and one other thing I would recommend is do this in a ventilated area PVC gases I don't know how toxic they are but they smell so you know they're likely they hasn't talked Zippity toxicity to them as well so do this in a ventilated area what else will you need for your safety leather gloves and I do mean leather and not vinyl gloves because you're going to have to manipulate with your hands the hot PVC piping and you can burn yourself quite easily and you can melt synthetic gloves so I'll be using a pair of leather work gloves you'll need a drill you code use a drill press I have a drill press I could use for this project but I just want to use a hand drill because this is not heavy duty drilling and of course to go with some the drill press or your drill is some small drills bits pop rivet I have some different size pop rivets all talking more both the size the size is also dependent on what type of PVC you're using so I have some my pop rivet tool some two sizes of pop rivets and some of the backup the ones that look like little washers just to reinforce the pop rivets when they go through something to mark with so that you can mark a note line of your design on the PVC material straightedge route and a ruler is helpful for making measurements as well as well American straight lines of course I have two optional things so you don't have to have depends on the design of your sheath this is an old heavy duty nylon belt it's about an inch and a half wide this is going to form the loop from my belt itself because I'm going to make this into a dangler style and I have an inch and a half harness ring that I'll be using for the dangler ring so those are optional but in my case I'm going to include them in the design okay that's all the tools and materials need now let's talk about sheaf design okay before I start showing you a few different sheaf designs that I could make for this knife one of the things I just want to mention is the reason why we're doing this at all of course if you have access to two Kydex or someone who can make Kydex and you don't mind paying out the money for a Kydex sheath Kydex is definitely the superior material to use or other than leather of course but if you're looking for something that's synthetic and very tough Kydex is just unbeatable it's a great thing to have but there's a cost associated with either having somebody make you a Kydex sheath or working with contacts one the material itself to a Kydex press now I've made a Kydex press and I may or may not use it I don't think I will be using at this project because I want to show that you don't have to have a Kydex press for using or for working with PVC and this knife well this knife I didn't pay very much money for this in fact I paid well it was on sale for I think it was $7.99 Canadian dollars at Canadian Tire and I picked it up for one reason very specifically I wanted to see if I could break it I know that sounds a little inappropriate but you know people have been saying that these are tough knives and I thought well you know the design isn't bad it's survival knife looking design but I bought this and I've use this another time I use a quite often around the house when I'm splitting and batoning wood down and I have beaten on this quite area now I haven't heavily abused it I haven't tried to bend it at a 45-degree angle or anything like that but I have wailed on it quite regularly to baton wood with and it stood up extremely well extremely well the only thing I may say is the scales are screwed on with some bolts and they have a like a hard plastic with a rubber overmold and I can feel the tiniest bit of movement in them when I'm batoning not just holding it I can't feel it now but when I'm baton and I can feel just a tiny bit of movement you know what they don't that's not surprised and really I could and I may yet take them off put some epoxy on screw them back down and see if that doesn't hurt the issue but the other reason I've wanted to work with PVC is or at least to create an alternative sheath is the one that came with it this is terrible yeah you know look at it it's it's all flexible the body of it is flexible it has no retention whatsoever look at the tiny little piece of velcro that comes with it to hold the knife in the sheath now if I just put this inside of my backpack maybe not initial but if I want to wear it on my belt that's a big issue so the sheath garbage will get rid of that okay so a couple of different style designs that I could make for this knife number one is what's known as a taco style sheath so this is a PVC sheath that I made for a small Mora as a neck knife I did include a little tiny bail clip on the back and that's something you can work with as well this is one of the earlier ones that I made with this same PVC material that we're going to use today and I set this up for neck meth carry and it works quite well snaps in nicely as good retention hasn't failed me and you can see I have painted it black with a flat well what you might call a paint that's good for plastics I guess all right here's another snipe this one is called pancake style which involves just two pieces of material Kydex if you're using that or PVC in this case pancaked one on top of the other to make a sheath and then of course pop riveted around the outside so this is also a neck and I've said if I have for a small Kershaw knife it makes a nice little neck knife and it also works just fine it holds it very securely it's not coming out and I have good faith in how that's working so we're going to make in this design a taco or fold-over style sheet and I have another one that I've already made and used extensively and this is the foundation or the basis for the design we're going to have today so the one that the knife that I have in this is a heavily modified buck Punk I had taken the handles off made some homemade in my cart at my very first attempt at my cart up Rees coped at them and you know what well of course there was a coating on the blade that I took off as well this is quite an amazing knife people I think underrate the buck punk 5160 spring steel really really really tough and I just loved like the design of this knife a lot but the sheath left a lot to be desired good quality it was just a MOLLE compatible type sheath and I wanted something that looked a little bit more traditional on my belt so I went with a PVC design first off to see if it worked and I liked it so much that it's the only thing I carry the knife in right now so you can see there are two primary components to this and this is what we'll be replicating for this knife today the main body of the sheath is made from that thinner PVC the one that comes from the in-house vacuum cleaning system and then we have a piece that wraps around it and forms the belt loop or up to this point it forms the point where I put the dangler on it and it is made from that heavier PVC the stuff that I have from bait from sewer pipe and you can see there are pop rivets in this case just for pop rivets going down the back and to pop rivets holding the fold-over on the backside of this there's a know I mentioned why now the different sized pop rivets so the pop rivets for this portion are this thinner type I forget what the size air but I will quote it in the moment or the shorter ones but I needed thicker ones to reach through because now we have not only the layers of the thin PVC but the two layers of the heavy PVC so you need a longer pop rivet to go through those I did not find it necessary to put the little washers on the back of it for retention I'm not sure I will with this project but it is an option if you want to make sure it's not going to pull out on you you could use the little washers now I also did decide I wanted a dangler style for this now I used an old piece of leather belt a couple of cheap Chicago screws and this is actually a circular carabiner that I use to put on we're going to be foregoing the carabiner and the leather belt today and using the harness ring and nylon belt for this design okay what's next alright next step I'm only gonna take a minute to explain this then I'm going to do it off camera the next step would be to cut a piece of this PVC and what I'll do is measure how long I want it against well let's just do that right now as we're talking so I'm going to you only need the PVC really to come up just a little bit past the hilt of the knife because it doesn't need to extend all the way up obviously and I want it to go down past a little bit past the tip so I'll probably put a mark right about here I'll cut that off I'm giving myself a little bit extra to work with because it's easier to cut off later again like working with other materials it easier to cut off access than it is to add it back on so I'll cut it right about here and then I'll have to split this down the middle you know this is thin enough I could use a pair of cutting shears to do that with rather than a saw however the PVC sewer pipe that's heavy so I am going to have to use a saw for that I'll put this in my workmate probably and just cut it down like that I will also be opening these but let them go flat under the heat of my heat gun so I haven't mentioned this already but I think it should be obvious but it's worth mentioning again safety always comes first I will be using gloves to prevent burns to my hands I'll also be using a surface that I know won't be damaged by the heat gun cuz they they can produce quite a bit of heat and I'll have a ventilated space in which to work so once those pieces are opened and flattened out I'll bring you back [Applause] [Music] [Applause] okay here are the two pieces of PVC that have been heating heat it and flattened out still quite stiff all right and there's the heavier one of the two we want to put the heavy one aside because now we're gonna work with the thinner one to form the body of the sheath and what I've done just to make a little easier is cut a piece of paper pretty close to exactly the same size as the piece of PVC is just to give you an idea of how what the next step will be so there are a few ways you could do this from my experience it the easiest way is just heat it fold it and get the generalised shape of the knife so although I have folded this in half what I wanted to show you was if you what you're looking to do what you're looking to accomplish at this point is to create that fold over on top of the knife but here's the thing you need enough room around the edge side to put that rivets in or the pop rivets and of course you I'm recommending you need an inch of space and I have just a little bit more of an inch as you can see from the center point the spine of my blade I probably have a little bit more than a quarter of an inch and that'll allow for the fold over to work and then to the outside edge I have about an inch and a quarter or so the other thing and that includes at the tip so you want to come all the way around about an inch the other thing you have to take into consideration is how high you want the PVC to come up over the hilt so the whole concept of the PVC sheath is that it will grab on to some area the hilt and that's where the locking will take place it doesn't wrap the blade it grabs the Hilty area so a hilt that has some type of a guard like this that it can lock on to is much better than one such as a pouco knife where it really doesn't have anything to grab on to it then you're looking for friction here it's actually going to grab and form a little bit around the finger guard there so I have not a lot of free space to work with but enough so you don't have to have come up very high over top of the guard you know and it's like working with other materials you can cut away extra you can't add it back on so if you come a little high at this point that's no problem because you can always make it a little shorter one of the nice things about working with PVC it's easy to reheat and reshape constantly to get just exactly what you want in fact that is both a benefit and a bit of a things thing you have to work around and what I mean by that is when you're working with Kydex traditionally most people use a Kydex press and I'm going to show you two homemade Kydex presses that I have here made with foam blocks and you know I've got some thoughts on it that's a small one I had a huge one that I've made with foam blocks and what you would do of course is heat your material up fold it over the blade put it inside the Kydex press put some big clamps on the presses to keep them shot and wait and you have to wait quite a long time because those same foam blocks that help mold the Kydex around the blade also insulated so it takes quite a while for the Kydex to cool off so that it doesn't lose shape when you open it up same thing can be said for the PVC it tends to lose its shape if you open it up too soon now here's the only here's the other thing that's only going to give you the initial form so I you know it works but the problem is when I go to reheat to get some shaping especially around the guard the rest of the thing tends to lose shape a little bit it's not quite as stable as Kydex is so it really doesn't offer you a whole lot of benefit to have a huge or a you know go through the effort to make it a Kydex press especially if you're only going to use it the once you can do a very good job just with your gloved hands but I do mean gloved hands insulated gloves in fact would be better than just thin gloves because what I'm going to do is you'll see is I'll fold it over I'll hold it in place until it's fairly firm and then I'll let it cool off and then then we'll go to the next step of shaping it around the blade so that's what I'll do now is I'll go to the Flor I'll heat this piece of PVC up I'll fold it over we'll get it in that shape and then I'll explain what the next step is [Applause] all right it's still just a tiny bit warm to the touch but it is easily manageable and you can see that it has grabbed on to the blade now I don't have any retention on it yet because I haven't formed around the guard and the finger guard up here at the top to get that retention but I do have the blade in the PVC fairly well now a few things one in full disclosure I did this twice and the reason I did is that the first time I folded over and held it in shape the blade shifted a little bit in this direction and it the spine wasn't as back as far on in the fold as it could be so easy enough just reheated it and moved the spine to the back to it the spine was touching the fold in the PVC and then I've got a much better shape on it now a few things I want to mention this does not look like what it would if it came out of a Kydex press in Kydex it doesn't have that clear definition around the edge of the knife that you might be used to seeing with Kydex and it's not two-sided like you might get with a Kydex press yeah that's true and I don't I'm okay with that because as I mentioned in the last segment when I start working around the top here to get the molded shape around the top of the guard it sometimes tend to lose some of its integrity anyway so to work so hard to get a really defined shape right now and then lose it later it's just not worth the extra effort the other thing that you'll notice is if you watch other people working with Kydex they wrap their blades and masking tape and I've done that in the past and the reason you do that I suppose for a couple of reasons just to protect the edge of the blade against scratching if there's any material inside the Kydex that you know might scratch out a nice to polish blade but more importantly it's to give you a little bit of room and what I mean is when you press Kydex down very tight to the blade it will get so close that it will start to pinch on the blade itself if you wrap masking tape or something that you can remove later then that gives you a little extra thickness to the blade so that when it's removed there'll be just a little bit of play inside of the Kydex and that's the reason and I suppose it protects you from a super sharp edge and that's always a good idea so I could have done that for my protection but it's more done to give you that extra thickness to the blade that'll give you the ability to slide the blade in a note of the Kydex I don't find that's necessary when working with PVC so what I have done at this point is I've given myself a rough outline of what the sheath is going to look like the finer details will be added in later now what I need to do is to cut off what I don't want left on the sheath and this may look a bit arbitrary but this comes from my experience as well I can feel the edge of the blade through the plastic right here and what I'm going to do is I'm going to run a parallel line along the PVC about one inch from the blade and that one inch is going to give me room to put my pop rivets in and I always recommend you back in from the osa edge about a half an inch because the the cap of the pop rivet will be a you know take it out to almost over to the edge so one half inch in will be that where the pop rivet is but if you start with a one-inch buffer around the outside and then place your pop rivets as we go you're going to know at the end of this you're going to be doing some sanding and I probably didn't mention that but you will want to do some sanding later on to finish off the edges and make it all clean and look nice so having a little bit of extra on the outside doesn't hurt because you can sand that away so what am I going to do now I am going to mark about one inch and I was just before I do that I suppose one other way I could have done that as well had the piece of paper and when I put the knife inside and fold it over I could have done it then I could have marked on the paper then I could have cut that it off and then used that as a template placed it right on top of the PVC and cut that that arc onto the PVC even before I folded it you know it's what's the old expression six of one half a dozen of another do it now do it later it turns out to be about the same thing I can probably do a little bit better than that okay so the trick now is to cut off the excess without the knife in it of course put the knife aside cut off the excess hacksaw whatever saw you're using if it's this thin stuff I can get away using those shears that I did to split it down the center so that's what I'll do and when we're pretty close to what we want I'll bring it back and show you the next step okay here we are I have the PVC you notice that I had flattened it out and I have made it into the shape and I've actually rounded off the corner as well I actually went one step further than I said I would do at the end of the last clip which is I used my sanding sandpaper to just give it a fit more of a finished edge I'm gonna be doing that again when they when the sheath is all assembled but I just thought it'd be easier to work that and maybe show you so you can get a better representation of where we are at this point I'll she even show you how I go about sanding sanding is messy business there's sawdust suppose everywhere so do it somewhere that's easy for you to clean up with a vacuum cleaner or a broom or something all right so what I want to do now is talk about how to decide where to place the pop rivets and about retention so I brought the original one back in to focus for this so that you can get some comparisons it does not take a lot of rivets to hold this together in fact this the lighter plastic it's not counting on the rivets so much that's just to keep it I guess integrity so the shape doesn't open up too much so the rivets I'm going to be using for this a 5/32 by 1/4 inch aluminum rivet and yes I know this is wider than 1/4 inch but you'll see why I chose a little longer rivet when I get to the riveting stage in a minute and then for when I use the reinforcing area I have a 5/32 by 5/8 inch aluminum rivet and that is more than wide enough to go across the extra thick area but there's a reason why they're longer then the material is already thick and I'll show you that as I mentioned when I get to it okay where do I want to put the rivets so what I did with this sheath and is what I'm gonna copy over onto the new one is I just place the rivets every two inches so I just decided where the first one was going to go and measure two inches around so I'm gonna do that now and then I'll talk a little bit about retention so I think I'll put the first rivet right about here and coming in a half inch from the edge of the sheath so the next one's going to go about here I gained a half inch in from the edge of the sheath next one right about here and the next one right about here preciseness is not an absolute critical factor in when this it's not like Kydex where you may decide you want to use at a clock or something to attach it to and they have to be specifically distance apart and this is just for holding the thing together okay so I have four points where I'll drill out in a minute for MI has this been going yes it has alright so I have four points already drawn or marked on where I'm going to be drilling and use putting the pop rivets in but let's just talk about retention for a second so when you're working with PVC or Kydex for that matter retention is a matter of two factors the stiffness of the material itself so and that's usually determined by the thickness of it so this material is quite thin I'm not going to be am i yes I guess I can you can see how thin it is and how flexible it is that doesn't provide a whole lot of tension against withdrawn the knife by itself you also have to get some tension by how close to the end you want to put your last rivet and I'll show you what I mean so I'm going to withdraw the knife and you'll see it's got a little bit of a split right here hopefully you'll be able to see this on camera and as I withdraw the knife you can see how the material moves apart and inserting it again and so it flexes open and closed as the guard the hilts where the finger guard goes in past the the PVC so this is just enough tension to hold this knife if I wanted to increase the tension I could do one of two things well I can't put a user thicker material but what I can do to this sheath if I wanted to increase the tension is put another pop rivet in closer up so that's what you want to decide how close do I want to put the last poverty' to the very top in order to keep some tension on what we could do and I may do this I'm not sure yet if I will is once I get the sheath formed for this knife and I have it inserted and I have it somewhat formed around here I could take a pair of vise grips and just work my way up the sheath here and decide this is where the last planned rivet is going right now but maybe I want to add another rivet and I'll know that by trying the knife in and out of the sheath to see if there's enough tension I can put a piece of a pair of vise grips right here and try the knife and move it up until I feel there's just enough or too much tension then back it off a little bit so that's just kind of an experiment experimental thing you can try to get exactly the right tension so I could in fact with this sheath add one more pop rivet right about here somewhere if I wanted a little bit more attention but in truth I don't think I need it with this one it's working out just fine okay so what I'll do now is drill out those four holes we're not going to do anything more with this portion at that point because for the next step we're going to have to cut into the big one to form the really yes strengthening peace okay I think of me have gotten ahead of myself just a little bit in that last segment I didn't actually drill all four holes I only drove the first two one here and one here with my 5/32 drill just to make sure that when I put the pop rivets in they will fit in nice and tight and we'll get to the stage of pop riffing in a minute from now but what I wanted to do is get to the stage where we're going to make the support bracket that goes around the the the sheath itself so just this is the piece we're going to be using but first off let's just go back to the design of the sheath that I already have made because this is the design that we're copying or at least based in the new went on and I'm going to save a little bit of time here so that the video is just a little bit shorter because I don't think I need to be at all that detailed for you to pick this up but what I did is off-camera as I took a piece of paper and I played around with the paper until I got to the point where I was happy with the way this was going to fit on to the knife something well alright let's make it match it up so it looks just the way we want it to when we're finished so I have a piece of paper that is about six inches long for me now you can see that it is overlapping the edges of the sheath and there's a couple of reasons for that one it again it's always better to have more material than you need cut it off afterwards but as well you can see right now everything is flat when I get the sheath formed to the knife itself it's going to start to gain some thickness this way and that's going to shrink the material back away from the edge plus because this heavy grade PVC the sewer pipe PVC is much thicker it's going to take up spaces it rounds this corner this is where you want it a little bit loose it doesn't have to be tight against the plastic it does here but not here for this to work so that's why I have a little bit of excess material to play with here and what I have here is the loop that will be bent over and where is that harness ring here's the harness ring that I'll be using so at some point this material will be bent over and that harness ring will be pop riveted on right about here so that and then I can put the make it a dangler so what I want to show you is make sure that these the edges of your heavy grade PVC do extend out past the edge of the sheath itself so that when it pulls back a little bit because of the fattening of the sheath you won't be too short away from the edge once we have that formed and ready to go on then we can drill the last two holes that will put those pop rivets in so what I'll do off-camera at this point is take this piece of PVC that I've been working with see make sure I get you in camera trace that on to the PVC and I'll cut it out cuz that's gonna take a bit of a time with salt as the thickness of this PVC and then I'll bring you back and we'll do the forming of the the piece around the sheath itself all right so when I cut out the PVC the heavy grade sewer pipe PVC into the shape I'd had very similar to the piece of paper that I was using this is a good time now to do most of your finish sanding I say no not necessary all of it but most of your finished sanding before you attach it to the body of the sheaf you want to get as smooth and they're just possible because it's a lot harder once it's attached it also helps if you didn't do a perfect job and I didn't sawing down the all the lines that I had drawn then you can bring them into alignment a lot better so what I have here is and I was very fortunate to find this as a piece of and I don't think it's marble I'm not quite sure I think I think it's granite a black granite that was cut for some reason but what it provides me is a glass smooth level surface and I have a piece of heavy grit sandpaper that I've laid on top of it and I can work the edges until I'm happy with them in terms of straightness and flatness and then I can of course use the sandpaper to go around the edges to round everything off get rid of all the little Curly's and things that are still attached to it so that you won't have to work at it afterwards so if this does take some time to do so I'm going to do this off camera get it as smooth as I can reasonably get it again it doesn't have to be perfect before we go on to the next step by the way this is messy this is quite really messy so do it as I mentioned somewhere that's easy to clean up with a vacuum cleaner or a broom okay once I've got this to a point where I feel I'm ready to attach it to the sheath then we'll go on to the next step okay to keep the video moving I did a few things off screen that I'll show you what I did and I'm sure you'll be able to follow along and copy what I did if you want to do this for yourself so the first thing I did is I took our piece of PVC the heavy gauge one and I folded it over with the heat gun I just really the only thing I needed to heat up was the center portion here so I got the fold even I then came back and I put the sheath inside of it to see where I could line it up and what I did then of course is I had drilled two holes in that folded over PVC so they came out both sides hopefully you'll be able to see the two holes there but in doing that or in order to do that I measured the two holes at two inch centers and then lined it up so that they're nice and evenly spaced I then inserted the PVC main body of the sheath into it lined it up got it to where I want it to be held the whole thing together like this and then drilled those two holes in as well now in truth I don't know that this is going to turn out as well as my first project done it'll certainly be functional I think what you'll find is if you get to this point you're saying I don't know if I like the look of this this is where the heat gun if that's what you're using gets to be very handy and gets to be your friend because you can continue to manipulate this and let it cool and manipulate it and let it cool until you get it in the shape you want at this point so this is where I'm at now the one other thing I have to take this apart in order to show you the rivets pop rivets are getting in the way the other thing I did is I gave it offset to what's going to become the first part of our dangler so there's an offset there otherwise when you go to form the opening to the to the sheath you you won't be able to get it because in all the way because that'll be in the way so there's an offset created there again that'll be formed a little bit more closely later so I skipped showing you this part where I put the two pop rivets in here but I'll show you now where I'm going to put the two next pop rivets in and I'm going to go in through the to the sheath now this insert' them interest into place all right so they're in place now and you can see there's going to be some work to do to fix this up to make it look nice at the end of it and I'm going to close those two off those two pop rivets then there's a little bit of a secret that I'm going to show you at this point right after that so I don't know if this is necessarily the correct way to do proper rivets but I like to rotate it around because the little ball that's deform in the back of the pop rivet right here I just like to see if I can get it to come make a nice even mushrooming as I go around so I loosen get it to come back a little further until it appears to be back as probably as far as I want to get and then I'll give it its final squeeze and come back one more and they're all right there we go so there now keep one of these little nail studs in front there from your project and I'll show you why in a minute let's get the other one done it's pretty much further back maybe one more there we go alright okay so I'm now pop riveted on the reinforcing piece that also becomes my belt loop the lower part of the dangler is on to the main body of the sheet so we're moving quite fair along in the project now now what you'll notice is that you have nice-looking pop rivets on the front but you've got the mushrooms on the back and what I'm going to do is actually inside of each of those mushroom there's a little ball that was on the end of the stud that creates the mushroom I'm going to tap it out using the nail or the left nail so you'll probably have to do it over something that has a gap I'm going to use a vice then and just leave it open enough and just take a hammer and tap that little ball out what I'll do then is turn it over and very gently just flatten the the mushroom stud out so that it flattens and widens out and grabs the material and looks a little bit better so when I've gotten to that point I'll come back we'll go to the next step okay I've done a couple of things off-camera I have the pop rivets all in I have the little mushroom ball pushed out and I have pinned over the mushroom so that it's acts like a well clamps it the material in a little bit better in the back this ends results in a little bit of a rough area here you could take a drum old tool or something to smooth that off I'll likely do a little bit of finish work after everything else is done just to smooth those over a little bit so that they don't catch and have any sharp edges on them so my next step is twofold I am going to do the final shaping of the body of the sheath so that the knife is secured in it with some retention on the top which I'll explain in a second and then I'm going to do some forming of this portion of the the dangler loop and this is more or less what it will look like when it's finished but there's a little bit of playing with it just to get the right length and the that's then again as I mentioned some of the nice things about working with this PVC if you don't like it the first time you heat it and bend it reheat it rebend it it works out quite well now let's talk a little bit about retention and getting the knife out of the sheath so I'm going to remove the knife from the other sheath so there's two goals I'm going to try to catch both of them on camera one is to get a pinch around the guard of the knife at this point right here so you can see with this knife there's a pinch point right here and that's kind of grabbing on to this portion of the guard at the same time though I folded it open a little bit just to allow for an ease of getting the knife in and out so it doesn't catch on that the other thing I did is I push forward on the front to give me a push off for my thumb so that I have somewhere to push to get the release going start the release from the sheet pushing it off one of the things I haven't mentioned so far is you don't want the knife so far in the sheath that you can't get your hand on the grip if your sheath came all the way up to here then you wouldn't have anything to get a hold of when you go to pull it out so it's just it's a balance between having just enough to go around what every area of the knife that you're using for the pinch point and deep enough so that it doesn't fall out so I'm going to be looking to try to come just above the guard this actually should work out quite well there seems to be two areas right here where the knife can pinch over a little bit to get some retention on it so those are the two things I'm going to do with the heat gun I'll try to capture both of them on camera there may be some finish work I'll do off camera and then we'll come back okay project complete well except for the painting of course so let me show you what I did off camera so I don't mind telling you it took a little bit of back-and-forth heating cooling forming or heating forming cooling reheating to get it to where I was happy with the retention and I'm going to share with you a trick that might make that easier for you but now you can see I have a thumb push off here I have it pinched back here and I'll show you what the knife in the sheath of course yet a little bit flared on either side to allow the hilt to pass inside the other thing I did off camera was finish the dangler portion of it so I used two more pop rivets on the inside there hopefully you'll be able to see that and I used washers on the inside now you're not going to be able to see the washers but those are the little washers that use with pop rivets just to display some are they the pull on it now honestly there's not much pulling this is thick PVC pipe so it was probably a bit of overkill to do that but make sure you put the ring the harness ring in before you finish that last pop riveting here and then they did the same thing with that piece of heavy duty nylon belt now here you're going to be able to see that the washers I did flatten the washers off a little bit you know it looks a little rough right now I'll admit that but that's what a little bit of sandpaper does and this aluminum does sand very easily but otherwise I have a very functional dangler sheath right now so here's the little bit of a trick when you're using a heat gun and you know I did say you could use an oven for this and you can or a toaster oven something I'm not sure about a hair dryer to be quite honest I haven't tried a hair dryer but maybe one of the high wattage hair dryers would do the trick but a heat gun is without doubt the easiest way to do this opening holding it over an open flame yeah you could try it I you know I caution you not to scorch your material of course but anyway when using the heat gun if I'm trying to do some bending back here on the dangler area because that's thicker I have to have the heat gun concentrated on it longer the heat then transfers through that plastic and it forms my sheath so and works both ways in fact if I'm trying to work on this sheath the opening of the most of the sheath I don't want the heat to transfer back here and lose that integrity as well so this is a silicone by a trivet placemat whatever you want to call it that you put a hot pot on and I was able to take this and just slide it between as a shield so I could work here without allowing the heat to come through or flip it over and work on the other side as well without allowing the heat to come through so how does it work that rattling of course is the dangler no that's plenty tension for me it adds a commode just nicely okay I'm not going to pretend that this is as good as Kai dock as Kydex it is not the ones that I have made have held up but they weren't exposed to heat I think high tech stakes a little higher heat than PVC to shape and form which also means that if this were to get really hot in the Sun maybe you know I don't know I haven't had that happen but it could happen but the nice thing again is when you get home reheat it reshape it and that's the that's the best thing okay would you say that was an improvement over this flexible cheap insecure nileen nylon sheath you know it wasn't an expensive project it isn't a beautiful project by any means but it's highly functional and that's all I was looking for I just noticed that Canadian Tire has these knives on sale again not as good a deal as I bought this one for but they're originally thirty dollars Canadian the right now I think it's $12 Canadian that they're on sale for so if any of my Canadian friends are watching and they want to grab one of these knives some people debate whether or not these are strong enough to be a dependable knife I can't say what it will be in the long term but I can tell you that I have beaten on this dot and I said earlier with the intention of breaking it that's not true I wanted to see how heavy a duty it would actually was and I have had no failures with this at all I do have other knives I wouldn't take this alone with me in the woods and count on this is my one and only but it's a very very functional knife and for the size of it and for the price of it I don't think you can do wrong 420 stainless steel heavily coated over with that grip for that exterior coating on it holds an edge reasonably well I won't say it's as good as oh one or any of the super Steel's but it's also very easy to sharpen one thing you can see I did do it to the back of it was to square off the spine a little bit for for ferrocerium rods and that works just fine okay but it's not about the knife it was about this sheath now the only thing left to do was spray-paint it with some flat krylon paint but we're in the middle of a little bit of a snowstorm outside right now so longer that's going to be left for another day all right let's wrap this video up all right there it is the finished project the only thing left to do now is to paint it when I when the weather improves haut doors do you know what I like about working with PVC is that it's very easy and very inexpensive you know it didn't seem to make sense to me with this knife that I didn't pay very much for to pay a lot of money for a sheath and it was obvious I needed to replace the sheath that came with it so the other thing I like about working with PVC is that I get the satisfaction of having made something myself so if you're looking for an inexpensive material that's commonly available easily worked with with commonly available tools then you might want to give PVC a try again it won't pretends as good as Kydex or leather but it's much more available to the average person and very less very much less expensive as well okay that's all I have for you in this video if you have any comments on the construction or the design or anything you think I could do to improve either then I welcome those comments in the section below but until next time get out and it Blore and take that path less traveled it'll make all the difference bye for now

Channel: Mark Young

Views: 67,074

Keywords: Mark Young, Shunpyke Bushcraft, bushcraft, woodscraft, survival, hiking, fishing, camping, hunting, foraging, DIY, homemade, make it yourself, cooking, plant identification, wild medicinals, medicinal plants, edible plants, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Blue Mountain Birch Cove Wilderness, product reviews, primitive skills, firecraft, diy, do it yourself, pvc knife sheath, diy knife sheath, budget bushcraft, budget knife, knife sheath, how to make a knife sheath, pvc pipe

Id: xtRCCfoiNiA

Length: 46min 24sec (2784 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 21 2019