Forging A Knife From 1,000 Ball Bearings! | Canister Damascus, Pattern Welded Knifemaking Part 1

hey guys welcome back to the shop today we're gonna make a knife out of 1000 of these ball bearings all right this is the can we're going to be using it's one inch square tubing mild steel of course eighth inch thick which means the inside diameter or width is three quarters so not super big now i want it a certain length and that length is as long as i can make it but still have a forged welding heat over the length of it in this forge the biggest forge that i have the reason for that is i don't want to forge this in length any more than i have to because i don't want to stretch those ball bearings out and lose the roundness or something close to roundness so we're also going to have to forge this width wise and i'm hoping that combining those two foraging directions we're not going to end up with really really elongated shapes but something that's a little more oval or even kind of roundish now one of the inherent difficulties with cans is how to keep the can from welding to the contents unless of course you just want to grind it off which i don't really want to do so i don't think i'm going to be able to put a stainless steel foil in there which i've been doing on larger cans or larger with cans painting probably isn't going to be that great of an idea because i don't think i get all the way down in there there's another idea that somebody has mentioned a couple of times a couple different people and that is you heat the can up in the forge and create a layer of scale on the steel and that should disallow the contents from welding to the inside so we're going to try that this is right at ten thousand three sixteenths inch 52 100 steel ball bearings and it's right right under 10 pounds so with this smaller diameter and the powdered seal we're going to incorporate i'm really excited about the kind of pattern we can get out of this [Music] now some ball bearings that i've purchased and used were clean and dry and in this case these ball bearings do have a oil or something on those we're going to go ahead and clean them off first so [Applause] all right there it is a long skinny can if i ever seen one well we'll see if this works let's throw it in the forge and heat this thing up okay so here's the math on how many bearings we have in that can so before we started this bag weighed 9 pounds 7.8 ounces and based on the weight and the number of bearings in there that means there's somewhere around 1024 mess that up bearings per pound so with the weight that it now sits at which is eight pounds 5.67 ounces something like that we have easily over a thousand bearings in that can all right what you guys just saw there it startled me i turned the camera the record button off really fast my can actually blew up the the gases that were in there as minimal as it is because we packed it full of stuff expanded and blew that can open it fortunately was not very severe it was just more of a hiss and a puff but that is why you make sure that the can is vented somehow now typically a lot of times that i've done cans i have done a lot of cans but uh you know your weld on the end isn't necessarily going to be air tight and that's fine but in this case it was and i didn't put a little pinhole you know 16th inch hole or whatever and somewhere in the can at the end or whatever to vent those gases out and it expanded and it blew up so fortunately in this case it was not severe and that's great but that's a lesson learned there so uh don't make that mistake make sure your can is vented and i took it out real quick and just pressed it on the forge or the forging press a little bit because that after the can was compromised i didn't want to start you know having our uh variants and steel in there be affected by the atmosphere so i'm gonna hit it back up and we'll do some more uh welding passes on it here so obviously not is it only dangerous to have a can that might explode however minimal that could be the other issue here is that the can was stretched out because of the expanding gases and so it wasn't really holding our contents in nice and tight like it like they were when we packed them in there so i'm really hoping that this is not an expensive lesson here and we don't have to redo this whole thing over again but we'll get it forged out here and see what it looks like and hopefully we uh dodged the bullet on this one [Music] all right well there it is hopefully hopefully that was my success weld and everything like that um yeah that can popping like that was uh that was a good little lesson so right here is where it [Music] right in there is where it split open you can't really see it now but the can doesn't act like it's welded to the contents so i'm really hoping that our our scale method worked and let this cool down we'll try to peel that can off okay well it does not appear that our scale method worked to keep the can from welding to the contents so it looks like i'm going to be grinding all this off which is not what i wanted to do but um oh well we'll uh use a different method next time [Music] [Music] okay well it could be worse but it could be better too so i think my oversight on venting the can may have caused us some problems that we didn't need to put up with in that we've got porosity and some gaps particularly along the edge here this also could be due to the fact that i wasn't using squaring dies i don't have any squaring dies small enough to use on one inch bar and i didn't make any what i'm going to do now is i'm going to douse it down with some w40 put it back in the forge and we'll press it out at a nice hot temperature and try to get whatever inclusions that are out and then i may cut it up and restack and re-weld it just to kind of work the steel a little more and and work out whatever might be on the edges i don't know we'll see what happens [Laughter] so [Music] all right guys well i have this forged out to about 3 16 inch thick and yeah it's uh it's looking a little rough i don't think i want to make a knife out of this at least not by itself but all is not lost because we can do a laminate blade so that's what we're going to do [Applause] [Music] all right well you can kind of see where it starts to become a solid piece of steel a little ways in from the edge here on these pieces so definitely redeemable and i would be comfortable making a blade with this steel you know grinding off the outside here now that i'm you know clean that up and i can see what's going on but i want to make a bigger blade so we're going to continue on with our sand my or laminate construction [Music] so so all right so we have this cleaned up down to a nice solid piece of steel so you can see these edges are not straight and the reason is because i had to chase a few little lines just where you know our arc weld was was holding things in place and it didn't forge weld but this is a solid piece of steel now and i'll just go ahead and forge this out straight and that will distort the pattern a little bit but because of the type of pattern i'm not worried about that anyway so let's get this straightened out and we're getting close to being able to make into a blade [Music] [Music] [Music] so all right guys we have our blade blanked out so to speak on these uh laminate or sand my type builds i don't forge the bevels you just have a flat bar of steel so that when you grind in your bevels you're going to reveal the contents of that steel and of course your blade steel is going to show around the edge of the knife so what we're going to build with this is a dagger and this project has had a few ups and downs but we're rolling with it and we're going to make a cool blade still hopefully i think we will so the next thing i need to do is normalize this and true it up and then we can actually profile out the blade and then heat treat it and go from there before we do that i'm going to go ahead and clean off one side here and we'll get a sneak peek of what the pattern looks like and see how our ball bearings are doing all right there it is so yeah i'm pretty happy with how that's looking like i said earlier i don't want a super stretched out pattern here so these are looking pretty good some of them are fairly round and there's some more elongated ones so pretty neat you can still see some spots here where we don't have a good weld around some of those bearings not a problem that's going to come out because of our bevel and of course we have a solid piece of steel for our edge you can kind of see that right here in this section that's our 52-100 right there so this is going to work out pretty good i think and we're going to get a neat blade out of this anyway guys i appreciate you watching stay tuned for part two a lot more cool things to do with this project and i will see you on the next video

Channel: Fire Creek Forge

Views: 471,024

Rating: 4.2973094 out of 5

Keywords: ball bearing damscus, canister damascus, forging a blade, fire creek forge, Elijah Williams knives, knifemaking, blade smithing, blacksmithing

Id: u-En3UMoiGI

Length: 15min 35sec (935 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 23 2021