Fit a Guard like a Mastersmith Without Breaking the Bank: 15" Bowie Part. 2

welcome back to the knife studio in this video we're gonna be fitting the guard the front spacer and the wooden part of a handle to the blade if you want to see how we got to this stage so far check out part 1 so since this knife is for our special online course that we're working on I wanted to see if I could use some simpler more budget-friendly tools and get the same results with a perfect guard fit I start by cutting the right length of 4 16 stainless that we're gonna need for the guard the block of wood I'm super gluing to the guard is so I can hold it better while it's on the grinder and the disc sander it's really easy to get rid of the piece of wood after I'm done with it I just heat up the metal and the superglue let's go of it need to get a good layout for where to make the Tang slot in the garden I'm using my sketch is a reference for where the ricasso goes and where the top and bottom quillin's of the guard need to be [Music] use the calipers to scratch some center lines in the guards so I can figure out where the middle needs to be for our tank slop [Music] you [Music] I pick out a drill bit that's just a little bit smaller than the thickness of the tang near the ricasso and I'm just kind of roughing in where each hole needs to be for the Tang slot on the guard I'm just kind of eyeballing the drill bit spacing I'm using a sharpie to kind of keep track of that so I know where each hole needs to go if you get the holes too close to each other the drill bit will wander into your previous hole and if they're too far apart you'll have a lot more filing to do I like to start out by having nice sharp drill bits and the disc sander is really good for sharpening bits I like to pilot each hole with a smaller drill bit and then go through it with the larger drill bit after I have a nice hole started I normally use the milling machine to cut my slots into the guard but since I'm trying to do way more of a budget-friendly version right now I'm just using the drill press and I'll connect those holes with a file to make my slot it's time to start connecting all these holes with a round file so we can get a flat file in there and start making it more of a rectangular slot I like to take my time with files and slowly expand the slot on the guard to make sure I don't overdo it anywhere and then I keep fitting with the blade over and over again until that blade fits about 1/8 to 1/4 of an inch away from the ricasso once I got the guard fitting about an eighth of an inch away from the ricasso I can move on to hammering the guard on further and that'll really get a nice fit but I also do some filing as we go I like to wrap lots of layers of tape around the blade so I can clamp it super tight in the vise without scuffing up the blade here's the hardened steel flat plate and the special punch I made to Hammer my guards on I like to use a fair amount of force with a hammer but once everything stops moving I have to hammer the guard off and selectively going with your file on those places and gently remove just a little bit more material [Music] there's some metal that got squished up from hammering the guard onto the tang and it's easily flat in the back out on the disk sander [Music] we're getting closer and closer I keep removing the guard filing away little bits where you can see the Tang was rubbing really hard on it and then hammering it back on I put a little bit of a bevel right on the top and bottom of the slot to help the guard fit further and further now the guards fitting good enough to where I can go around the ricasso and lightly scribe a line onto the guard I'll later use this line as a reference for where I need to remove material because I want the ricasso to fit into the guard so I'm gonna remove material everywhere that ricasso is gonna touch the guard with a little dental burr I normally use an actual dentist tool for removing this metal and a microscope that costs over $3,000 since I'm doing this knife though for the special online course I wanted to make it more accessible to a wider range of people that may not have access to some of those expensive tools so here I'm using a hundred dollar rotary handpiece and a cheap optivisor instead of the microscope [Music] the trick here is to get right up close to that line we scribed around the ricasso without going over the line if you go over the line with that burr it's gonna be very noticeable on the guard fit I have to keep going back in with files and lightly remove some more material here and there if the guard is going on too hard I like to use a sharpie at this point to kind of help me see where the guards hitting and be able to adjust and file away or use the burr to keep removing some material and get that guard to fit over the ricasso 5 to 20 thousands of an inch or so rinse and repeat as many times as it take to get that perfect fit on the guard I also want to make sure once that guards fit all the way to where it needs to go that it sits nice and square onto the blade if your guard does it fit nice and square onto the blade it'll probably cause problems as you try to fit the rest your handle [Music] that's how you get the perfect fit on a guard without breaking the bank total costs and equipment used to fit this guard $300 compared to my normal setup which is over six thousand dollars and the guard fit is just as good as what I normally get yes it took a little bit of extra time a little extra effort but no different in the quality of the fit the next part in the order of operations for my handle assembly is the front spacer I got a big chunk of 416 that we're gonna go ahead and cut down and grind the thickness I do some layout on the front spacer so we can know where we need to make the slot for the Tang [Music] and again I'm using the drill bit to kind of layout where I need each hole to go I don't want to get them too close so they run into each other and we want to get them nice and close so we have less filing to do it's a fine balance I like to have nice strong Center punch marks can really help the drill bit get started in the right place [Music] pilot the holes with 1/8 inch drill bit and then I'm going through it with our larger drill bit after that the spacer is quite a bit thicker than it needs to be so I need to grind it down to thickness and then get it flat on the disc sander make sure you don't breathe those fumes from the burning superglue it's probably not good for your health just like a drawing from my childhood let's connect the dots coffee break hmm Montana Ridge Arabic coffee my favorite comment below with what your favorite coffee is not a sponsor I slowly worked the front spacer with files until it fits right up close to where it needs to go and then I like to hammer it on the last little bit just to get a really snug fit we want to be able to take the front spacer on and off without using a hammer but we also don't want it to have a lot of play in it I like to mark the top front side of my pieces so I put them back onto the knife the same way every time I probably should have used my little super glue would handle trick right here because this part almost flew out of my hands [Music] and there we are that's the front spacer fit up right where it needs to go we can move on to fitting the beautiful block of wood for this handle next to start out with I go ahead and make some reference lines on the sketch so I can line the handle of the sketch up that allows me to mark a line on the front of the wood that has just the right angle for where the wood meets the front spacer [Music] once I get the angle ground on the front of the wood I can then butt it up against the front spacer and kind of hold it over the sketch and double check to make sure that we're going to be able to get the right handle shape out of the wood it's a good idea to make sure the angle on the front of the wood is right where you want it I put the block of wood back on the sketch and draw a line for the angle on the back of the handle [Music] [Music] I leave a little extra material just so I'll have some wiggle room later for the final fit up just about an eighth of an inch should be plenty it's time to start doing layout for the Tang slot on the block of wood I can't see the lines on the side of the block very well due to the shiny finish so I rough it up a bit on the grinder now I can clearly see my lines I transfer those lines for the tang onto the end of the handle so I know right where I need to drill [Music] and then I mark out the center of the block so we can make sure the groove comes out right in the center of the handle [Music] since this is a through Tang design my drill bit only needs to go through the block about half way then I can flip the block over and drill the other half from the other direction make sure to spend time getting the drill bit to be just the right angle to only drill out the area where you want your Tang slot to be you don't want that drill bit going anywhere else because you might end up with a hole on the side of your finished handle [Music] it's a good sign once we connect our holes and see daylight through there because that means our drill at least went somewhat straight [Music] I carefully used some side pressure on the drill bit then connect the holes there's only a little bit of material to remove because I got the holes really close to each other it still takes a couple of minutes you have to be careful not to break your drill bit off since you're kind of doing something it's not designed to do [Music] I've got all that webbing removed using the side of the drill bit so I now have a solid slot going all the way through the handle I have a couple homemade brooches that I use I have one made out of a file and the other one is just a piece of 5160 and different widths and I use those just grape away material inside of the slot for the Tang and it helps me fit the Tang in there because right now everything is really rounded but the Tang is more of like a rectangular shape and the broaches helped me scrape that out and selectively remove some material to get that nice arching curve inside of there that the drill bit couldn't get because the drill bits just gonna go straight it takes quite a bit of fitting and a lot of Selective scraping to get the block of wood to fit just right I also have to take it back to the drill press a couple times and use a little bit larger drill bit diameter it's getting there we're about three-quarters of an inch away from fitting to the front spacer [Music] here I'm using a file with the end ground at a nice solid 90-degree angle I use a sharpie to cover the Tang with some ink that way when I put my handle material onto the Tang I can see where it's scraping on the inside of the wood and then I can go in and better remove material with the broaches in the right spot I'll be betting this handle and epoxy later so I want a good fit right now but it doesn't need to be a perfect glove fit because that'll come later when we do the betting there we are nice snug fit all the way up against the front spacer the last thing I'm going to work on here is getting a nice tight fit between the wood block and the front spacer I throw it on the disc sander and get a really nice flat surface and then keep holding it up to the light and make sure no light shines through any of the corners between the wood and the metal and that is how I fit my guard my front spacer and my wood block for the handle in the next video I'm gonna be working on the pommel and we're gonna fire up the lathe to make the pommel nut so stay tuned for that if you're new to the channel consider subscribing we're all about making functional art mostly in the form of custom knives hit that thumbs up button it really helps us out thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next video bye-bye [Music]

Channel: Kyle Royer

Views: 616,578

Keywords: knife making, how to make a knife, how to heat treat a knife, how to make a bowie knife, how to make a bowie, knives, kyle royer, kyle royer knives, making a knife, sharp, how to make knives, bladesmith, master smith, blades, damascus, knifemaker, diy knife, anvil, forging, custom, knife, great content, steel, bowie build, bowie knife, 10 inche bowie knife, blade, knifemaking, knife maker

Id: WPXiWLP7Bh4

Length: 15min 52sec (952 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 07 2019