Forging A Knife From Guitar Strings!

hey last month I made a guitar pick from nickel wound guitar strings in 1095 powdered steel as a proof of concept and now I want to take it a little bit further and make some knives you only get three strings that are wound per set so it's gonna take a lot of sets now this is a canister Damascus project and these are the type of tubes I have on hand I'm sure we can make one of these work [Music] I'll be hammering a small amount to draw out the tip a little bit and forge to a small degree the bevels but most of the shaping of the knife is going to be done on the grinder so as not to upset the positioning of the 1095 core that is going to be our cutting edge it's really got to stay true and in the center bending and manipulating the billets causes the weak points around the nickel and the strings to sort of open up so there's some cracks that form on the surface here I'm gonna apply some flux to those and try to weld them back into shape by sort of smashing them flush it's not going to work but in the end we'll be able to take care of these with some careful grinding here's a better look at some of those cracks they don't go very deep but they are significant enough I'm gonna have to do something so I'll grind a false edge here that's no big deal except that I've only ground a couple of them so we'll just keep our fingers and toes crossed and push through this all right so after squaring the shoulders and doing some thermal cycling everything still looks pretty good it's straight so we're gonna move on to the quench notice that my grinding even rough grinding happens mostly after the quench and to 400 degree tempering cycles the nickel grinds very easily even after it's hardened there's less chance for warping the more shaping I do after hardening the knife so I think it's sort of a no-brainer here to take that approach awesome let's make another knife I want to make one with an even tighter string pattern so we're gonna put even more strings in this one I've got some titanium dioxide here liquid paper doesn't always work for me I've had some pretty variable success but I've gone straight to the source so to speak and I bought pure titanium dioxide we're gonna mix it up our own paste with it put it on the inside of the canister and see if that will work too reliably keep the contents of the canister from welding to the canister itself just in case it doesn't work since I've never done this before I did put steel foil stainless steel flow on three sides the canister so I guess we're really just checking one side there we'll see how it goes this canister is one square inch the last one was one and a quarter there's about twice as many strings per area here pretty psyched [Applause] this canister is one of the easiest ones that I've ever pulled apart so the steel foil worked as usual and maybe the titanium dioxide on one side worked as well I'll keep using it and keep you guys posted all right so where are we have we have a billet with 90 plus guitar strings in it right and there's no cutting surface the nickel from the guitar strings is just not gonna make a cutting surface at all it's not really hardened about so what I could do is Forge well the piece of 1095 on the top and then a thin piece on the bottom so this will be the spine this will be the edge and I'm doing that because this piece is gonna bard everything together right because if as you see cracks form when you bend this piece of guitar string billet and try to form it and shape it little cracks form along the edges and it has to do with the nickel and the guitar string and the canister Damascus process so if I borrowed a good piece of steel to both edges and I'm manipulating it in that plane it'll keep the cracks from far so this is the plan to for drill this all together let's see how it goes all right so that didn't work at all nothing stuck I think it's because you know I can't apply forces directly entirely with a hammer or even a press and exactly 90 degree plane right this it's gonna be off slightly this thing is gonna be tilted and so there ends up being a lateral vector portion to the force applied and I think if that shifts things apart as much as it pushes it together that's my theory that's why I think I have trouble for welding these thin pieces together that may not be the case if someone else knows a better reason just chime in so I still have good billet left so I'd like to do is just go to a canister where I know the welding environment is good and we'll just put half the bill here a piece of 1095 here the other half the billet here and as you can see there's extra space in the canister no worries I have a piece of 1095 that happens to fit perfectly I don't have to do any grinding and I'll put a piece of stainless steel foil here that should prevent any Forge welding from happening and so we'll have a separate piece of 295 from our good knife steel CMI steel construction here but the 1095 cutting Cort [Music] here I'm putting a downward slant on the handle portion I anticipate at this point that this is going to make a full take knife and I want sort of a downward sweeping handle so that's all I'm doing here okay so interestingly enough that didn't work at all what happened was we got a good weld here with the 1095 and a core in the guitar string bill and on both sides nice and my this stainless steel foil welded so I have an extra piece of thicker 1095 here and I could try to grind that away or cut that away but it's you know I'm gonna I'm gonna cut away too much of my guitar string billet if I do that I think the best thing to do is sort of grind things down a little bit you know and then draw out this billet cut it in half and then reweld it to itself with a 1095 in the middle I'll put a little extra piece of 295 here to make sure there's a good clean cutting edge and that's what we're gonna do if this doesn't work I'm out of options they won't there won't be any other options all right so I think that worked which means our billet is still sort of wonky right we have 1095 here 1095 there and then a cutting edge in the middle so as I grind through the plains there'll be guitar string 295 guitar string tonight if I were thrashing tonight my guitar string a little crazy but I think it'll still give us a good pattern [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: undefined

Views: 512,766

Rating: 4.7629814 out of 5

Keywords: forge, knife, bladesmith, canister damascus, fire, guitar strings, nickel wound, diy, knifesmith, knifemaking, air guitar, face melting

Id: aybCR0TD6uE

Length: 21min 11sec (1271 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 06 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/GermsInYourEyeballs]

I thought guitar strings were made of nickel?

[u/GuardedDig2]

I hate you mango