FITTING A HIDDEN TANG KNIFE HANDLE. HOW TO FIT A KNIFE HANDLE

in just a few minutes so hey folks welcome back today I'm gonna be drilling in broaching the hole for the tang of this chef's knife this is a Chechen piece of wood and this is a mosaic Damascus integral chef's knife that I've been working on for I guess close to like seven months now so I'm gonna make a little bit more progress on this thing and take you through how I get a perfect fit with a hidden Tang knife let's do it in preparation for drilling the block I have marked out the profile of the actual tank so I'll set this up on the wood and then trace the tank it's that simple this is just a visual reference for you now on the top here this is more important this is the actual width of the tank and the center of the block so this is how wide your slot needs to be where you need to drill and of course it needs to be in the center of the block so to do this you simply measure the width of your tank put that up against where your Tang is going so just like that so you measure that width I'm slightly oversized and then you simply Mark a centerline so this is how I mark a block of wood in preparation for a hidden Tang it's also important to know that this block I have ground square and flat on all four sides and also the top ends here are nice and flat now the reason that I've traced this in the area that I have is because of the shape of the handle that I'm going for so I know that when this knife is sit sitting in this block of wood like this I'm going to want to come out with a with a palm swell right there so I have to have more material on this side then on this side if I were to do it like this it wouldn't leave me any room for a palm swell here or a hook on the end and there's really nothing that's going on up here on the handle everything will be sloping downwards slightly or straight out I've got my drills here that I'm gonna be using we using this little center drill just to start my holes and then finish with this quarter inch bit now these are both wider and these are both larger and diameter than the thickness of my tank you can see that my tang is probably under a quarter inch maybe a little over three sixteenths two hundred thousandths or so and then this is a 250,000 spit so there's going to be wiggle room and I'm gonna have to drill two holes two or three holes this direction to get the width of the Tang that I need we'll put this long drill in here first and another reason to have this Tang traced out on there is so you can get the angle of your drill bit right so set the drill bit down bring the block up to it and now you can move this block however it needs to be for the angle of that drill so I'm going to line that line up with my drill bit and then clamp it now I can take this drill bit back out put my Center drill in raise this table a bit I'm gonna drill my first hole center of the block of wood with my drill bit coming in line with the width line that I drew there roughly I mean this doesn't have to be precise [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] now that we have the two outer holes established and they're both going at the right angle that's like the foundation of this whole Tang slot now I'm just gonna take a another drill pass and go directly between the two holes this is really not crucial the goal of this is just to remove as much material as you can without the drill bit wandering because out after a certain point it's just gonna wander into one of the other holes so just try to remove as much material in between there with the drill as you can so that is good on the drill press looks pretty ugly right now but you know what they say it looks really ugly until it doesn't it's not an actual saying oh did I invent it yeah oh yeah we're back at the wood shop now after doing some drilling into the wood block and it's time to brooch out the Tang slot in the wood we are going to make this oversized from this Tang our goal is to have this thing fit in there and this flat shoulder to sit up flat against this block pretty effortlessly we don't want any resistance that's going to cause a weird angle so I'm going to broach this out oversized and I'm going to be doing that with this sharp dangerous looking little brooch that was made by another knife maker named Niels Vandenberg in South Africa it's deadly what we got away as you go [Applause] flashlight and it is pretty it's a pretty dang nice slot but there's some fuzzies in there now what I like to do after I've done broaching is file a chamfer around the perimeter my Tang slot this is going to help account for any burrs that might sit at the underside of the bolster or the tang comes out looking pretty good I think it's time to move on to the next step next step is to further flatten the top of this wood block now I flattened it pretty well on a disc grinder just for the drilling of the Tang slot but it's time to flatten it a little bit more so I take a scrap piece of under-20 sandpaper a piece of granite and some spray adhesive this is the stuff that CRC sent me a few weeks ago I have had a chance to use it yet so let's see how it works I've been really impressed with the other products I've used for them so no doubt that this will be just the same what don't use a ton of glue because you don't want the glue to actually interfere with your flatness I cut I took part of the sandpaper off because there was a wrinkle in it and that was kind of stopping it from being flat but now this piece is flat so put it on here try to take nice even poles across the sandpaper what is this why'd you put that there are you saying I need to use some hand cream you put it there it's hand cream why didn't you put it there what onto our next step now which is called betting the handle betting the handle is the most wonderful thing ever in making a hidden Tang knife because it makes your life so much easier and it makes such a nicer fit so we've got our hole it's oversized the knife Wiggles around what we're going to do to fix that is bed the handle with five minute epoxy this basically means that we're casting the void around the tang with five minute epoxy that way we can take the knife Tang back out and have a perfect casted casting of the Tang so it would be a perfect fit every single time no five minute epoxy is absolute garbage if you are doing an actual glue up on a knife handle but for something like this it's perfect so that's what we use it for whereas it clogged up oh I didn't take I took the kid did you put the cap back on I must have never taken it off but I thought I did going crazy or maybe I did it in another life this place I'm just gonna use all that okay now what we're gonna do is a very important step and that is protecting the tank from the glue so we take teflon tape it's a very thin plumbing tape and we wrap that around the tank and we want to do a very thin layer so we keep a pretty accurate tank thickness in the casting so wrap this around very thin layer all right now the last step of insurance that we take is to cover that tank and the underside of the bolster with some sort of grease or wax or oil I usually use Vaseline but I can't find my Vaseline so I'm gonna use just some like Johnson's paste wax that should stop the glue from sticking pretty dang well so just cover cover that puppy anything that you don't want to stick to the glue he needs to have wax or oil on it so all the underside of here very important there's no glue sticking to it okay got that taken care of now let's fill up this wood block with the epoxy here comes the air bubble we go it's pretty good so I can now add where I want my pin to go gonna be about right there in the middle of that tank [Music] wants to now we are ready for the moment of truth taking the handle off the knife this should come off with maybe a few taps they'll pull in their caps yes beautiful that looks like used toilet paper though that's disgusting you can see that as a perfect perfectly cast slot of the tank I'm really quickly cleaning up this block by sanding that little bit of glue that was on the surface off that's done we're ready to test to see if that bedding actually worked and if the pin fits it's a nice press fit there it spin oh yeah that that's locked in it's rock solid I mean there's a little bit of movement but that is pretty good that's what we're after now later stages I'll shape the hand I'll do all that stuff and then put some high-quality 72-hour epoxy in there and okay I can create some Barb's in the tank to create a mechanical lock in there and to permanently seat that in there but five minute epoxy works great for bedding and things like that so maybe you'll see this in a later video if you learn anything from this video if you like this video let me know in the comments below and if you aren't subscribed already you make sitter subscribing to more videos in the future thanks see ya thanks

Channel: Hoffman Blacksmithing

Views: 46,984

Rating: 4.9032259 out of 5

Keywords: hidden tang, hidden tang knife, knife handle, knife making, custom knives, handmade knife, how to make a knife, knifemaking tips, knife guard, hidden tang knife handle, hidden tang handle making, hidden tang chef knife, hidden tang knife handle construction, hidden tang knife handle designs, hidden tang handle, how to make a hidden tang knife, knifemaking tutorial, fitting a hidden tang knife, how to fit a hidden tang knife, wooden hidden tang knife, liam hoffman knife

Id: pM3g6n0kcYU

Length: 20min 38sec (1238 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 11 2019