Forging A Knife From 1/8" Round Rods!

this video is sponsored by nordvpn today we've got an interesting experiment with these two types of metal rods they're 1 8 inch in diameter these are w1 drill rod and these are mild steel the plan should i have one is to arrange these in alternating fashion in a canister and weld them together to make a knife and see what it do i got to do something to keep these straight so i'm going to mark the w1 high carbon steel drill rod with this black marker there's a couple of ways we could stack these on end the first is how they naturally want to align themselves fitting comfortably in the notches created by the two bars beneath them much the way people would form a human triangle or we can line them up directly over each other leaving diamond shaped gaps neatly between every group of four bars we'll fill that space with brightly etching steel powder later so for those keeping score that's three different colors essentially dark w1 drill rod gray mild steel and a brightly etching 4600k steel powder it's all going into the same canister the bars are not cooperating they don't fit precisely in this canister so i have to use some shims to tighten everything up so if we did everything correctly we should have these diamond shaped gaps perfect there they are but first let me tell you why i'm passionate about vpns and especially nordvpn who recently received pc magazine's editor's choice for vpns and now they've got a special promotion going listen i'm so concerned about this guys we live in this attention economy where everything about you is gathered stored sold and used to con you out of your time attention to money later on lord vpn helps stop this by firewalling your internet data with next generation encryption and hides your activity to isps hackers and governments nor does not track log store or collect what you do on the web and that is critical here's an added bonus lots of great internet content is only available in certain countries with nord you can log on to 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it's small but if it works we should still be able to squeeze a knife out of it before moving on to the main attraction using what we've learned here hmm well this pattern is a little bit distorted but that tends to be the nature of forging the metal near the outside generally displaces more than the metal near the middle plus this isn't perfectly square yet so things are a bit wonky for that reason too now here's what it looks from the side there's not a lot going on here clearly to get the most out of this we want to have the on end or cross-sectional area on the surface of the knife so i have to bring that to the outside somehow there are several ways to do that we've sort of talked about these in the past but let's sort of recap the fairy flip because it's one of the most common ways people might do that in the fairy flip the goal is to get the red area to the outside of the knife so you cut the billet at an angle at even intervals then pull them apart turn them on their sides and arrange them so the red portions are facing up then forge weld these in place into a flat bar my metal band saw it's sort of a hobby level enthusiast type band saw for multiple reasons it has trouble cutting thicker carbon steel pieces accurately which is why i've never really tried this before but the billet is small and we may be okay i'd like to keep the pieces in order so that the pattern doesn't change dramatically on the side by side tiles across the final billet at any rate so when we flip them and arc weld them together we'll clean it up and then forge weld it now if you're like me and you're not like me you're better than me you're smarter than me you're half machine a cyborg you're wondering how this will ever work first we're going to get the bill at red hot then add some flux put it back in the forage at forge welding temperatures and try to press it flat so wrap your metal brain around that [Music] okay okay so shockingly shockingly this has worked now it's time to see if we can forge a solid piece of 1084 steel to the edge here so we can actually make a knife of this thing now anyone who watches knows i've never been able to weld two thin pieces like this on top of each other not ever never see everyone else can do it but not old steve see for him this is something the fundamental laws of nature will not [Music] allow wow that is a really great pattern parts of it are out of focus while other looks in focus until you turn it but there's a crack that opened up on the quench right along that last forge weld no okay universe you got me again good one so for the main show let's try to think about other ways we can bring that interesting cross-sectional pattern to the outside of the blade doing a ladder is sort of a good way you cut down through the billet and the divots on the sides of those cuts become displayed along the top of the billet sort of like i'm drawing out here now the boring area in between the ladder divots will still be visible on the outside surface too so it's not ideal or one can try this accordion type pattern where you grind down deeper wedges across from each other leaving none of the original surface left i.e there's no green so the wedge area becomes the outside of the blade after the flattening the problem is i think you lose partial thickness of your cross-sectional area here because it's not all turned up you know okay let's make a slightly larger chunk of steel this time i'm going to incorporate a solid piece of one-quarter inch by one-quarter inch 1084 steel into the canister for our edge so no more dicey forge welding at the last minute which is where things blew up last time this is a great shot of that square 1084 steel piece that's going to be our cutting edge [Music] so when we etched it on end here you can see that our 1084 cutting surface is right where it should be we may have actually pulled this off we just have to keep it centered from here on out so it can form a straight and centered cutting edge for our knife and to help with that we're actually going to grind away some material on either side of it so that it can stay as wide as possible while we squish down the rest of the [Music] billet now it's time to grind in our first ladder pattern and smoosh it flat [Music] so everything is right where it should be so we're going to do a second ladder pattern a finer ladder pattern and we'll see what that looks like after we smoosh it flat oh man we narrowly avoided disaster so i didn't take into full account the fact that when we smash a ladder pattern flat it makes waves and all the steel underneath even our 1084 steel edge core it's not as pronounced as it would be because we did some grinding away of the sides in that area a bit before smooshing it but had we not done that our cutting edge would just be wandering all over the place and it really wouldn't be usable we wouldn't have a straight surface to make a knife edge with so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you've probably noticed there's an up sloping tip at the end of the knife and that's to account for our cutting edge having to get pushed far up enough at the tip without making it too narrow back to front by fully forging the tip to the shape so this up swoop will be ground away and our cutting edge will be right where it needs to be all right down to business we're going to grind our profile then set our shoulders with a carbide file on the 2x72 grinder they'll be touched up a tad with the file but it doesn't take much touching up if you use a fine belt on the grinder to to really get things smooth and flush our blade goes into a steel pouch for normalizing a 1550 degrees and then 1500 degrees each time for 10 minutes followed by cooling at room temperature the quench is going to be from 1490 degrees into a medium speed quench oil professional quench oil i have started to temper in stages these days so as not to over soften a blade the published add-on tempering is great i always start there but i take off about 25 to 50 degrees for the first cycle then i work my way up in temperature over the next few cycles to desired hardness and the tables are good but who's to say that my 1084 is the same as the person who put the table together or that they were quenched from the same temperature and start at the same hardness and all that it's my understanding that these things can slightly alter the tempering curve you know how to reach a certain hardness so at any rate i treat it like barbecue you start low go slow type thing i'm putting a thousand grit finish on it before etching i've worked up a wrought iron bolster and the handle is going to be stabilized maple burl [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Green Beetle

Views: 182,413

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Id: 4KtyhrP-oEw

Length: 17min 8sec (1028 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/KingManJug]

Thank you. This was great to watch!