Forging a Bowie knife from beginning to end.

[Music] hello everyone and welcome back to the forge now today we're going to be taking this big old chunky piece of leaf spring you see laying here on this anvil it's a nice thick piece and we're going to be turning it into we forged out a big ol booty chopper so let's go ahead get the form it up get that piece of leaf spring straightened out and get to work all right we had kind of a gnarly spot right here on the end of this where when we was unwinding that cool on the end that it got kind of a cold shut so I use the hot cut Hardy and cut this piece off but we've got some spots here if we don't address that are gonna give us some problems I'm gonna take this over to the grinder grind this off good and clean you can also use a rasp or a file to do this wit but it takes a lot longer I'm gonna take it over 36 grit belt knock it off get it good and cleaned up and then we'll move on to forge this blade out let's get to work all right got that bad boy all cleaned up no more cold shuts let's get it tossed back in the Forge you get to making this Billy knife [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Oh Oh [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right this is where we currently are with the steel cool down enough I can lay it here on our paper and just give it a quick look we are short in some areas and laying to home and the others just fine this is a rough forging so I'm going to put this back in the Forge we're going to forge it up more of this what our harpoon point will be right here and we're gonna bring this belly down a little bit more as well as work this area down here just to make sure we fall into the area so when we grind it we could get the shape that we want so let's get a toss back in there and get it finished up almost there and there's the rough forging of our bowie knife we got more than enough material to work with to get our final profile that we're wanting I'm gonna go ahead and let this cool down and then we will get our our profile drawn out on the blade and grind it to shape and move on the next step and getting it ready for heat treat all right there is our template laid out on our blade like I said we had a little too much material here in the front but having too much material is never a bad thing it's when you don't have enough that the problems begin to start up then shorter than Ives happened and smaller and I was happened I just want to make certain that we had enough to get the blade profile I was aiming for and we did so let's go over here I'm gonna take the bandsaw first cut off a lot of this excess here to say that say well my grinding belts and then we'll go in there to the grinder and get to cleaning this up and get it ready to start grinding all this scale off and start seeing what we've got under Nathan [Music] so we got the profile ground into our booty knife here and as you can tell we have some areas like the tang here and like this tip up here that's way too thick the Tang I'm not too worried about right now because we have to grind in the shoulders and everything here anyway down the road the tip though I need to address before I start putting in the bevels as you can see it starts out stays pretty consistent through this point and then we used to flare out all of the flare out is actually on one side we got one side that's getting straight one side that's that's proud of the other so I'm going to use the my layout fluid and go around the sides here and take my and take my caliper and follow the straightest edge that I've got to determine where I need to remove the tip and remove the material on this tip out so we have a good straight surface to work with so after that it'll just be cleaning it up and grinding in the bevels finding out the tang getting the shoulders established here and then we'll move on to thermal cycling and heat treat but so far so good I like the profile it's got I think it'll be nice it already feels pretty good in the hand so let's get this marked out and get on to the next step not that right there that bottom silver line is how much me to take off to make this blade ground straight so let's head back to the grinder knock that off the tee [Music] all right that's a good stopping point for this video I'll take some time in between part 1 and part 2 and clean this up some more and get our bevels roughed in a little and so we can start part two of this video with the heat treat and moving on to addressing our shoulders here and getting the final bevels grabbed in our clip point up there or our harpoon point up there and get to work on our hardware or our handguard and look at our handle material which I think I'm going to use bog oak for and move on from there so far so good is that really like the profile of this this style knife that being said I appreciate you for joining us today if you would hit that subscribe button remember to ring the bell for notifications so you can be notified of our newest content as it comes out as well as part two of this I appreciate you very much have a good one we'll catch you in the next one hello everyone and welcome back to the forge now our last video on this buoy project we got the blade forged we've got the profile ground in got it all cleaned up so let's go ahead and get the grinder fired up get these bevels roughed in so we can get this sucker heat-treated [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] all right we've got our bevels Ruffy and nicely on each side put some layout fluid here on the little B the harpoon point of the knife use my stone here and my hot gage to scribe a line so I can grind it in I don't want this to be a zeroed edge up here just enough but it looks real nice and everything so now we're going to head back to the grinder I'm going to go ahead and grind this in then we should be ready for heat treat already let's get after [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] all right we've got all of our bevels ground in here roughed in for heat-treat that are our poon point there roughed in so we're ready to start thermal cycling this bad boy and get heat treated so let's get the force lit up and get on it all right and I'm forging in the temperature we're going to go ahead and thermal cycle this three times before the Queen [Music] [Applause] [Music] alright our booty knife has finished tempering so now it's time to jump back on the grinders get our bevels finished get it all ready to turn our attention to the guard into the handle so let's get after it [Music] all right now we're finished grounding our Bibles in we're going to go ahead and get this sucker hand sanded up and then move our attention onto the guard and the handle so let's go ahead and get it to the house and get work [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right this is where we are currently I've got the tank all cleaned up shoulders cleaned up everything ready to go in this part I have picked out the guard interior which would just be this piece of mild steel here our next step is to scribe the lines on to it and get the slot milled out so let's go ahead and get to work on that [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] all right what I want to do now is I'm gonna pick out a bit that's just a just shy of the thickness of our blade here of our ricasso area looks like it's going to be about a 3/16 so that looks like it'll work out real well punch a starting point get the hole drilled and then get over the milling machine use our bit here just to get a [Applause] [Music] [Applause] starting point there forbid [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] all right as we currently sit right now the guards fitting up really nicely I mean there's hardly any gapping a couple of strokes with the file it would be a perfect fit up but I'm trying to challenge myself more lately and trying to do any things and so I'm thinking I'm going to go ahead and reapply my layout fluid to this and I'm going to use my rotary carver and try to inset that recall this down into the guard I never have done that before I know a lot of master Smith's and more experienced blade Smith's do it for a nicer cleaner fit up so I'm gonna give it a try and see how it works out worst case scenario it doesn't work out at all I gotta make a new guard but oh well we'll see what happens all right so I'm gonna scrub it out and we're going to see how this goes [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] here's what we worked on yesterday we got this guard slotted out here and then we got it recessed in here for the Ricoh so area of the boot knife to set into and here's how here's what we ended up with it sits in there pretty well it's not a hundred percent perfect but I didn't think it would be this is the first time I've tried this technique fairly happy with it though overall so I'm gonna go ahead and take this card over to the grinder and get it cleaned up and you let's document get the edges cleaned up so we can lay out the design of our guard and then move on to our handle so I catch you in just a minute when all that's done all right in my original design of this I was thinking of going with like this mini s guard design but I think I want to go with a smaller straight guard I just think that style would lend itself really well with this design and help it have a really good flow so the next step here we've got our guard all cleaned up we're ready to lay out our lines but I want to go ahead and move to the handle and start getting that get that figured out go ahead and get the tang inset so we can we can lay out the lines for our handle and make sure all the lines of this knife flows together really well so that's where we're going to turn our attention to next is the handle material all right now I've got my templates made up for my handle here and we're gonna be using that on the piece of bog oak and I also got my template made up for the guard here so I need to go ahead and scribe the line because we're gonna have to cut this to length it's a little bit too long and so I'm gonna go ahead and mark it up with the layout fluid use my scribing pen to go ahead and get that marked and get it cut off so we can move on to getting this handle rough cut [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] enjoy the black [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] the Sun dies [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so that's a good stopping point for today's video we got our our blade heat treated we got it ground too close to our finish I got to go back and sand it again we got our guard picks it up and and ready to fit up on the blade we got that recess in there so it can fit getting snug good and secure and we got our handle material figured out and cut out and everything and I think once it's all assembled I think it'll look really nice so let's see I think it'll look really nice let's take a look at all right so far so good I'll try to do a nice sculpted handle on this haven't they done any real sculpted handles before so this ought to be a fun little challenge here but so far so good I appreciate you for joining us today if you would hit that subscribe button remember to ring the notification Bell is what I'll hit the tab if you notified over new this content when it comes out I appreciate you very much and we'll catch you on the next one bye bye hello everyone welcome back to the forge now today we're going to jump back into our buoy projects we're going to get this sucker wrapped up the first thing we're going to start focusing on is this guard right here we need to get some reference lines scribed on this guard so we know how family want to grind it so we know where we want it to meet up with our handle here so let's go ahead and start laying them out and then we'll get over the grinder and start shaping it alright during this part of the process everything is going to be scribed a little thick I'll eventually clean it up and grind it down thinner but I would rather have too much material than not enough as I work on this so I'm going to to scribe in the reference lines for the thickness of the lugs as well as scribe being the reference lines to where our Tang hole is so I can keep track of that and we get ready to start rounding our handle down here a little bit so I'm gonna go ahead and jump on that [Music] Oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right now what I've done is I've used my height gage to scribe a line all the way around the handle here and that will be the the finished thickness of the handle of course we'll sculpt it from there but this will give us some lines we go to the grinder and grind off all this excess wood here that we can follow to keep everything uniform [Music] Oh [Music] Oh our handle is to a much much better place now it's the proper width I leave it a little bit big it's still a little bit oversized but that's mainly just for final fit up purposes now we're going to move back to our guard here I've got some lines scrubbed here on the front that's the overall thickness of regard or width of our guard so we're going to take it in here to the bandsaw and we're gonna go ahead and cut it and then we'll get the layout on it properly [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] all right we got our guard cut and cleaned up on the grinder mates up with the handle a little bit better the handle I left the handle a little bit thick and so it's not perfectly flush cuz I'm not ready for that yet but now we're going to come along here and we're going to mark where the ricasso meets up with our guard and scribe it on the outsides so we can then begin the process of forming the lugs for our bowie knife here because we want everything to flow we want all these lines to line up all the way to the end of the handle so I'm going to go ahead and get the sharpie I'm going to mark it then we're going to use our hot gage here describe us a good line there and then we'll begin the process of grinding that shape [Music] [Music] there's our marks right there we will come in here and we will draw the curve from here up to here to form the lugs for this and with these marks here we'll know that everything flows together everything should be straight and in line all right there's the thickness of our lugs to start out I will thin that down quite a bit let me do the final forming of them so now it's going to come in here and draw the the curves I want and we'll be set and ready to go to the grinder [Music] all right we've got our guard shape for the most part you can see kind of the design I'm going for here it is not perfect yet it's still pretty rough it'll be refined in the handle shaping process and everything else I'm gonna go ahead and jump on the grinder again and clean up these sides you get some of these deeper scratches out so they'll be easier to work out later on and then we're going to move on to bedding the handle I want this to be a nice clean fit of it you see it's kind of loose right now I want a good clean fit up every time so when we go in to drill the handle pin and everything else will be nice and straight with no concerns no problems so let's head back over to the grinder and get this guard cleaned up and we'll move on to the next step [Music] all right for the most part I got the really deep scratches out which is what I was aiming for I'm not too worried at this point about getting them all out because I'm gonna have to come back in when I shape the handle and thin these lugs down even more for the look that I'm going for so so far so good cleaned up fairly reasonable so now we're going to move on to bedding the tang and head off for the next step [Music] no way to throw [Music] Oh all right now you saw it when I bedded the Tang on this bowie knife here that I wrapped the Tang with plastic wrap first and the reason I did that is because even though we're using petroleum jelly or is something else to keep the to keep the the steel from contacting and sticking to the epoxy sometimes it still does and so I actually had that happen on the railroad spike katana build here video or so ago the epoxy got stuck when I was when I was betting the handle for it it was a nightmare to get loose so I wrapped it with saran wrap I watched Liam Hoffman do that on some of his chef's knives and if you do it right wrap it tight you don't have to wrap it a whole bunch of layers you know a couple or so and then cover that with Vaseline whenever you feel your Tang with epoxy and stick it in there it's pretty much guaranteed that it's going to come out with no problem and then you just bring it out you just unwrap it and your Tang is good and clean your your handle is bedded and you're all set so that's a nice little tip to keep in mind both of you me a lot of you may already know how to do that a lot of you may not but it works really well in a lot of different projects so now at this point we've got everything ready to drill the handle pin now I'm going to go ahead and drill this right now you know the handles not shape because that will allow us to hold this handle in place and do some of the contouring of the handle here get it kind of down to its final dimensions before we actually do the the final finish and glue up of this bowie knife so let's go ahead and get our pin location marked out get it drilled and move on to the next step [Music] alright now as it drilled this handle pain location I'm not going to drill all the way through I'm going to drill down until this bit touches the steel and marks the steel because the moment it hits that steel if I start trying to drill through this bits going to develop a little bit of wobble and it's gonna wallow out the hole here on the top so I'm going to drill through hit the steel get the bit to bite into it take this handle off finish drilling through the tang and then put it back together and go ahead and drill out the other side that should help us keep a pretty straight hole [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] all right now that we know our pin fits all the way through everything's good to go we can come in here and get our template that was going to use for our handle I'll draw outline it and now we can start shaping the handle okay so far so good let's get the template laid out on here to get it traced out and move on to getting this handle shape [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] don't come round and waste my time a generation of my time [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] alright we've got everything ready here I've got my guard ruff shaped and ready to glue up our handles been a rough formed it's ready so now we just got to put some epoxy in this handle get everything together let it glue up and then we'll be ready to finish the shaping process on the grinder [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right this is where we currently are right now I've got a little hand setting to do on the handle to get all the scratch marks out and then I'll catch you at the end when we show the finished product [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] that wraps up my booty knife I appreciate you all for joining us on this three-part series if you would hit that subscribe button remember to bring the notifications bill to be in point of our newest content as it boasts I appreciate you very much for watching you have a good one we'll catch you on the next one Bubba

Channel: Mystic Mountain Forge

Views: 4,095

Keywords: How to forge a knife, forging techniques, blacksmithing, knife making, forging a bowie knife, bowie knife, rasp knife, damascus, leaf spring knife, making a spring steel knife, making a knife from an old file, forging for beginners, shop set up, diy belt grinder, knife making 101, DIY, cool blacksmithing projects, easy knife making, forge welding, forge set up, refractory, gas forge, coal forging, restoration, making a knife guard, drawing a template, forged in fire, coal, grind

Id: Xw0UKqemvzk

Length: 42min 46sec (2566 seconds)

Published: Sun May 17 2020