Forging a Scottish Knife From a Farrier's Rasp (Sgian Dubh)

hey guys fill bomb heart here so for today's video I'm making a scheme due out of a farriers rasp so basically a scheme do is a traditional knife for the Scottish Highlanders typically it's seen tucked in the hose or sack of their Highland garb so it was kind of derived from a last-ditch self-defense weapon but it's also just a good utility knife great for hunting food preparation anything like that it's really a neat knife and it's got a cool history behind it I'll kind of get into that at the end of the video for the closing discussion but this particular knife I forged out of the scrap steel from my kitchen machete video if you saw that one so with that rasp I cut it off about here last four or five inches and so that's what I use for making this knife so as I get into the forging of it I put some borax down on the teeth to kind of try to 4/12 those shot or at least prevent as much cold shutting as I could I don't know how well that worked but that's what that white powder is that you see me sprinkling on the rasp so without further ado gets Forge going I show you how I made this [Music] [Music] [Music] okay here's what the knife is looking like after I came out of annealing so got a lot of fire scale on there so the game plan for grinding is this is where the edge is gonna be so it'll be kind of a spear point type shape I guess it's a little more of a drop point so I'm gonna get going just grinding that out [Music] [Music] [Music] so I've kind of treated an edge bevel with the file but there's lots of deep gouges and lines so I'm going to use the the workshops are just sort of polish up the whole thing and what I'm really trying to do is just get out a the file marks or grinder marks before I put it back into the forge for the question [Music] [Applause] so a lot of these Scottish knives have got scalping or file work on the spine here it's going to give that a try I want to start with a small round file just to kind of get the indent in I'll give it a shot so I got some oak flooring here and since the two sides of it are flat fit together well for slab type handles so the little thick right now so I'm just going to split them down and see if I come into usable handle [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so the knife has been quenched and tempered did the triple tempered on it so now I'm going to let it soak in the vinegar here for a few hours if I can get some of that scale off [Music] okay so I went through all the different workshop belts in this thing this is good and sharp now I'll show you right quick here that makes me happy right here [Laughter] [Music] okay so I got the handle shaped up the way I wanted its sanded out to about 220 grit and so on the machine dues from what I've seen they've all got a pretty dark stain on the handle got some dark walnut Minwax stain and so I'm just going to put a bunch of coats on this one day at a time so this would be coat number one so I'll let the handle dry overnight and I'm going to get a second coat on there okay so I got the handle stained up now I'm going to cut down my brass pins and I'm just going to glue this whole thing together and it should be should be good to go okay so today I'm gonna be using the the jb weld clear weld epoxy so I'm hoping just to be able to squirt this down into the into the handle and this will work out nice and neat for me okay so here's the finished knife so again that was only two layers is that dark walnut and then I put put a little layer of linseed oil just just cuz I like the way that the oil finish looks so was the traditional skiing dudes I guess the handles were made out of bog wood oak which is oak wood that's been in a bog for about a thousand years and so it's just you know kind of absorbed all that dirt and minerals and the all day it's just embedded and ingrained in the wood and that's why they're pretty much black in color and that's kind of where the the name scheme do supposedly came from because scheme do and Gaelic just means a black knife so the hypothesis is that you know because they had the black handles that's they were called black knife there's also the theory floating around that they were used for kind of clandestine operations and midnight throat slitting and that kind of a thing so that's why it's kind of you know black in nature but I think that's just sort of some tall tales but sounds cool though doesn't it and the skein do which stuff didn't really appear much before the beginning of the 1800s so it's not that old of a knife is I had previously thought was the kind of classic skein dude that we that we think of was kind of the Thistle shape handle or the the stone setna in the the end of the pommel there that's kind of a invention of the Victorian area whether it was kind of a Celtic revival whether it was the kind of romantic notions of the Scottish Highlanders and stuff like that so there's a couple different theories as far as where this came from one of which is that it was kind of derived from the the armpit knife which I forget the the Gaelic name for that one but was kind of a hidden blade that was warm under the armpit or on the arm itself and this little book by James Forman called the Scottish Dirk he has a theory where the skin do may have come from hunting knives carried by Scottish gillies which is the game's keepers so after their Lord kill the deer that was on their work really began and they were the ones that would feel dressing in butcher and stuff like that so they would have a small knife like this for doing the the gutting and then a larger knife kind of like a Dirk in size that they would use for quartering the game up and butchering it I guess the the Scottish term for those hunting knives growl ik nice and unfortunately since they were kind of owned by the common man they were hard used and apparently none of them survived today and so a knife this size is what they would use for fuel dressing the deer and gutting it and skinning and all that and from my own deer processing I can tell you that this is going to be a cool knife to use for that sort of thing and I do plan using this as my deer hunting knife this year but real comfortable handle with those pieces of oak flooring I like a little bit of a swell that's there and then the handle is short but it's nice so that you can really easily switch grips with it from forward grip to reverse grip and then because of the curve there you can put your thumb on that if you wanted to use it for some sort of downward stabbing motion you know like a defensive knife which I mean any fixed blade is kind of a last-ditch defensive weapon if that's what it comes to by as utilitarian knife it's got a really good blade shape and I know that's gonna work well as a as a field dressing knife but here's the the sheath that I made for just a simple sheath a pouch style but only goes into about there so I can still get a pretty full grip on it when I when I draw it and then the the way that the belt loop is it rides very high on the on the belt so when actually when I sit down and all that the sheath isn't banging into stuff I'm not crunching down the chair and all that well this is just kind of my take on a skiing do kind of a modern reimagining of the of perhaps the original scheme do now if not the Victorian concept but kind of the utilitarian working man's knife but I'm some of the early skiing dues a lot of them had antler handles or this kind of simple design and actually this book the Scottish Dirk has a few good photos of skiing dues I'll probably roll in a few photos there to show you interesting resources for sure so I hope you guys enjoyed this video as always I appreciate the support if you want to get your own skein do you can check out my Etsy webstore black cart for job we plan it on bacon a few more of these if you're interested in buying one and then you can also follow black art forge on Facebook and Instagram if you want to keep up to date with what's new again thanks for watching and until next time be more Viking

Channel: Phil Baumhardt

Views: 9,201

Rating: 4.9156117 out of 5

Keywords: scottish dirk, sgian dubh, the scottish dirk by forman, Blackheart Forge, Phil Baumhardt, Highlanders, Lowlanders, Stewart, Campbell, black knife, blacksmithing, charcoal forge, low tech, DIY, backyard, bladesmithing, bench grinder, Ken Onion WorkSharp, knife making, knife made from a knife, using a file for knifemaking, hand forged, hammer, tongs, boot knife

Id: SAY8_fgRAfU

Length: 20min 46sec (1246 seconds)

Published: Sat May 26 2018