FREE Guard Tutorial: Hidden Tang Knife Build

hey guys welcome back to the shop if you have questions or trouble with fitting a bolster or guard to a hidden Tang knife this video is for you if you're like me you probably struggled with fitting a guard or bolster to a hidden Tang knife and are not entirely satisfied with the results you may have gotten at different points in time and want to do better at it so I'm going to walk you through how I do this now currently and yes it could change in the future as I continue to learn so fitting a guard or a bolster really starts very early on in the knife build because everything you're doing with the Tang here is going to affect how you fit that guard or bolster in the future we've got a couple several blades here that are hand sanded and finished on the bevels ready for an edge and there's nothing else we're going to do to the actual blade we actually just need to go ahead and fit the guard or bolster and then put a handle on this something you need to take into consideration before grinding away material or even forging a blade is the at least the general design features of of the knife these are working blades these are designed for use a general purpose belt knife and as such the ricasso is approximately the same width as the blade I don't have a nice I don't have a a large drop down to the edge like a lot of these buoys that you see these days there's nothing wrong with that but this is a more practical and actually usable blade design for a variety of different things and so hence the design what I'm going to do here and there's different ways of doing this but I'm going to align the guard or the bolster with the plunge line and again that's something that uh really does play into this as well separate subject but having your plunge lines even and the same on each side is going to be important to an overall good finished product and it's going to play into how you fit the guard now in some cases you might be able to work off of everything simply being 90° to the spine but if you've got a swoop to the spine or any kind of ergonomical curves to it that might be a little bit difficult to do you're kind of working out of a non-definite point at that at that stage if that makes sense and so that is a little bit the case here because I've got a little bit of a upturn to the blade so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to Simply move back about 38 of an inch here whatever this thickness of this particular piece of Steel is line it up with the uh plunge line and give myself a reference mark back on the ricasso I could go back further on the ricasso here about a/ inch and create the shoulders at that point giving myself more of a ricasso talking about ricasso as a whole subject by itself uh the utility or lack of utility of a ricasso is a subject of debate and it really just depends on the personal preference of the bladesmith or the user even more importantly personally I tend to prefer a minimal to no rasso on a using blade for various reasons one of those being that having a larger raso a a lengthy ricasso pulls the usable Edge further away from the hand of the user which actually creates an adverse leverage against the user and that doesn't really help anything when you're trying to cut through a piece of of material of any kind that that's Works in opposition to you so in this this case I'm going to opt for that shorter ricasso length and it's still going to leave some ricasso there and that forg finish it's going to look pretty nice like that I think so this uh tool right here is invaluable it's a file guide with carbide inserts there's any number of different uh makers of these tools you could even make it yourself I would recommend getting one with carbide inserts they are more expensive but they are better for what they're used for that carbide is not going to get worn Away by a file or even as you'll see a grinding belt on on your grinder and this is going to be very important in the next stage here so with the with the carbide inserts facing the Tang I'm going to move it up to that shorter ricasso indexing there and and tighten the screws down if I wanted to make this more of a 90° to this blade I need would need to grind my plunge LS appropriately at the beginning which as you can see they are not and so that's not a design feature of this particular blade and so like I said before the prep that you do prior to actually starting the fitting of a guard or bolster is just as important and you have kind of need to have a plan for how you're going to go forward with that we can go to the Belt grinder now and I'll show you the next step all right before we get into it let me show you the setup I have here on the Belt grinders for doing this job and I'm doing multiple blades here obviously so having redundant equipment is super helpful first belt grinder here we've got the flat platin of course with the glass backer on there and an 80 grit ceramic belt and that's a like a I think it's a y weight which is real heavy heavier than an X even I believe over here on the second belt grinder same platin setup with the with the glass this one's a little bit chipped right there so this Edge is better than that edge but anyway we've got a 220 grit aluminum oxide belt it's a uh J Flex A J weight so it's pretty soft and flexible and it's been used a little bit that doesn't matter it's got enough abrasive on it to do what we need to do here so these are the two grinder setups that we're going to be using and we'll start on this one is [Music] okay pull off the uh personal air purifying respirator hood here for a second so I can show you and make sure that it's clear what we've done up to this point so so far I've only roughed in the shoulders with the ad grip belt stay it away from the carbide inserts a little bit it doesn't really grind it the carbide but I just want to prolong the life of that of that carbide as long as possible for this tool and it's important to pay attention to the size of the shoulders you want them to be equal except in a case where you might not but I don't know what that would would be exactly in this case obviously we're going for pretty much equal shoulders and I'm just eyeballing that but you I want it to be really close next we have gone and thinned down the actual thickness of the Tang from the shoulders and so we have very faint but still present shoulders at the thickness of the Tang as well as the width which is very obvious there this is going to Aid in the fit up of the Guard you'll notice here that I was holding on to the end of the tang and we haven't ground completely through here that's because on the final fit up of this blade Tang is going to come to about here I mean that's almost the full length of the grip and it's going to be at least 3/4 of the length of the handle so I don't need this little bit right here but it is Handy to hold on to while you're grinding it I can just cut or just grind that off and then just make sure that there's a nice nice taper all the way down it doesn't have to be exaggerated but it does need to be thinner here than it is here or you will obviously run into problems when fitting the guard so let's go to the next grinder and finish out the process that we [Music] [Applause] started [Music] [Music] okay right off the grinder here blew off the uh dust with the compressor show you what we have going on so you can see that I got my shoulders uh the equal they're not quite equal uh this one's a little bit smaller so you know pay attention to that but you can see what we have here get something of a pointer right here that's not much of a pointer hold on so we've got a nice radius right in here and that radius follows around so that you have a radius at this corner as well so hopefully you can see that in the camera this is radiused here and then it follows all the way around to here and we've got a little bit of a radius there so all the way around we don't have any sharp 90° uh Corners especially here and here the shoulders are flush with the carbide inserts here and I don't know if you can see that on that plane in the camera there hopefully but there is maybe just a tiny bit right here but they are almost completely flush I might need to take that one down now no I think it's right there with the uh with the carbide inserts and so they're on the same plane and they are flat and clean very close and we've got a taper to the Tang here up until this point we're going to address that once we remove the file guide and I think we can do that now I might run this back can just make sure cuz I can see just the slightest Edge in the light here not an edge per se but a maybe like a couple thousand or just a thousand right there so I'll be right back all right let's take off the file guide and see what we have here all right looking pretty good got a little bit of a shoulder there just ever so slightly everything is crisp all right let's finish addressing this okay so our Tang is fully prepped to begin actually fitting the guard that's all we've done so far is prep the tang and trust me when I say it is just as important as anything you're going to do with the actual guard material from here on out so we still got a nice length to the Tang like I said it's almost the full length of the grip which is more than acceptable for a knife of this size in design the thickness of material that we have at the Tang is more than adequate and I want to address something right now you might be wondering or asking why am I not using a file on this file guide to do this work and fit you know prep this Tang for fitting the guard a couple reasons first of all this blade is fully hardened and tempered so fully heat treated throughout the full length of the tank different people heat treat their blades differently some will do just an edge quench or an edge heat treatment and leave the rest of it soft and thereby facilitating to some extent the ability to use a file on this kind of work that would still be difficult with this particular steel being 50 to 100 because even at a cooling and still air it's going to have enough resistance to the file because of the carbide content in the steel in the partic stage even to make that rather difficult and a pain in the neck so that's the first thing secondly why don't I heat treat my blades in that manner and make the tang and the spine softer well there's two different or a couple different ways you could do that you could just quench the uh the edge and leave the rest of it in a partic state or you could quench the entire thing like I've done here and then come back and soften the tang and the spine I don't do either of those because in this state this Tang is more than tough enough to handle what this knife is for and the blade of this would probably break before the Tang did and if that happened then this knife is been severely abused and misused so that's really not a concern of mine when I heat treat my blades I'm going for a very tough combination of toughness and Edge retention so get a nice fine grain for the toughness which is important not just for the overall strength of the blade or the knife but the actual strength at the edge because one of the ways that a blade dos is through microchipping which means the edge is not tough that is a completely different subject hold on don't let me get started on Metallurgy and heat treatment the point I'm trying to make here is that this steel is too hard to use a file on this and even even if we heat treated it so that the Tang was softer than the edge or even the blade it would still be Troublesome with this particular steel my goal here as a professional bladesmith meaning I pay the bills doing this is to make a high quality high functioning heirloom quality knife in a reasonable amount of time so that I can actually pay my bills there's nothing wrong with taking months to complete a knife if if you're doing it as a hobby and your livelihood doesn't depend on it or perhaps you're creating a high level of artwork that you have built a market to U sell that to but that's not what I'm doing here I'm making heirloom quality working blades that are high functioning and I need need to be able to do that in a somewhat reasonable amount of time in order to do what I'm doing and provide for my family so all those reasons put together is why I've done everything like this to this point I guess the easiest way to sum this all up is to say that my methods that I have developed here or adopted I'm sure I'm not the first one to do it this way are to achieve a high level of fit and finish on a very practical basis so let's continue the bolster or guard material that I'm going to be using on these knives is just a nice old good old traditional brass a word about that not all brass is created equal this is 360 brass stock from J Supply knifemaking.com they're not a sponsor but I've been purchasing from them for years and it's a good place to get a lot of stuff including this you can go on to Amazon and find some cheaper brass stock from various places and I will say it's not all created equal this particular brass is meable and workable I've had other brass that is brittle and even despite a softening process in which you heat it up to a red hot and quench it in water quite the opposite of Steel it still did not soften so I don't really don't know what kind of alloy they are putting in that and what is up with that but this stuff is good and that's what we're going to be using today not getting too fussy at this point I just need enough material to give myself leeway on either side of the width of my ricasso and if you are going to do a finger guard you're going to need some extra so I'm just going to eyeball it and give myself about half an inch extra material aside from the leeway on the width of my ricasso and just cut it off I've deburred this heavily on each end on the grinder so that it will lay flat and you don't catch your finger on any of the burs that can be a little uncomfortable this is 1 in wide by 3/16 inch thick first thing I'm going to do not that hold on a second is get my blade here and again I'm just going to eyeball where I want it to go so leaving more material down that way for a little bit of a finger guard nothing too exaggerated in this particular case here and a little bit of leeway up here I'm going to Mark the widest point of my Tang okay just some uh some little marks right there next thing I'm going to do is take my calipers yes I know you're not supposed to use them as a scribe but be honest we all do get a cheap pair this is kind of my uh beater pair of calipers and I'm going to scratch a Center Line in between those two little marks that I just made I don't want to go beyond those because then I'm going to have to sand those scratches out and why do any more sanding than you have to so we're just going to stay between the two marks uh yeah not like that that's what you don't do right there okay so hopefully you can see that right there maybe get it in the light here see if I can uh get the camera to show that to you here we got a couple of there we go couple little marks right here and then a Mark here and a Mark here and this is approximately where the slot for the Tang is going to go all right next you need to be aware of the thickness of the thickest part of the Tang where this guard is actually going to fit up to and and what do we have here we've got about 178,000 and it should be the same on each side but if it's not it's really not the end of the world 175 174 so we're off about 4,000 soft now I could go back and correct that that's something honestly if I was really worried about that I would need to check before I took the file guide off but I'm not super worried about that some guys are going to be but really that's not going to affect the finished product at all that means I can use a 530 seconds drill bit to rough drill the slot here because the 53 seconds is what 156,000 somewhere in that neighborhood and so that gives us I don't know almost 20,000 a leeway okay unless you're super confident with where that drill bit is going to go when you put this up on the drill press or even hand drill it I would recommend doing some Center punches to really guide that drill bit now again keeping in mind the width of my drill bit I want to stay away from the finished width of the slot so I've got three three spots punched in here that's not going to take out all of all the all of the material but it's going to be enough to start with here this is actually a homemade scribe so it's great for fine work but I think I'm going to reenter punch these with an actual center punch so of course they all should be in a nice line lined up with each other they're pretty close there so let's go to the drill press okay over at the drill press you want to make sure that the table on your drill press is flat true to the spindle or the drill and the drill so that the holes you're drilling are you know at right angles with the piece of material you know having them a little bit off is not going to be the end of the world but again it's better to do everything as close to perfect or correct as possible as you go and there's less of a mistake or less of a buildup of issues to correctly and on so typically what I do is I just put it flat on the table and hold it with a pair of channel locks which you know works fine I remember that actually have a drill press device and so I use some extra pieces of stock for some parallels to make sure that this is sitting in in theice level and we can go ahead and drill I guess those will just stay in there maybe drill the uh drill the [Music] holes not too bad so at this stage we are still a good 16th or more of an inch away from our final dimensions on each end and you can go straight to a chainsaw file like an E8 in chainsaw file and start hogging this material out I use a rotary tool with a carbide Burr for expediency so I don't have to sit there and do as much filing so let's do that next [Music] [Music] all right quick and to the point we've hogged out that material and so the slot is formed and now it needs to be fitted you got to be careful with those carbide burs on that rotary tool they can walk off on you and dig in and create a divot that is going to be difficult to work with so just a word of caution in that respect so you can see how far the Tang will actually fit into there at this point not very far which is good because we want to be able to carefully remove more material so that it fits nice and snug up to about within 3/16 of an inch of the shoulders but the very next thing that I do at this point is I will index and Mark the guard so that I can index it again into the same location or same orientation each time this is going to be the front I always mark it on the front as if you're holding the knife left top left corner of the Guard or bolster that's going to be ground away since this is going to be rounded off of course that tells me where it's supposed to go and how this blade is supposed to fit in there each and every time so I don't accidentally swap it around and start working on it that way and then realize I did it the wrong direction and have it not fit now again because I've taken Material off in the wrong spot definitely don't want that even if I'm not taking the bolster in and out of the Vise this indexing Mark tells me which way this blade is supposed to fit in the bolster when I'm checking it during filing my favorite hand tool for fitting guards lately has been nothing more than an 8 in Nicholson chainsaw file you can also get yourself like a 530 seconds but I'm going to show you how I use this almost completely by itself to shape and fit the slot for this guard so we've got some high spots in between the holes that we drilled here and typically you'd come in with a flat file and file those flat but I'm just going to use the chainsaw file and run it lengthwise here and hit those high spots and give myself a nice flat surface here I'm not saying this is the best way to do it or the only way to do it by any stretch I'm just saying that this is something I've been doing lately that's working pretty good and accomplishing what I need accomplished here and and it's kind of Handy to be able to do it with one tool try to get you in here from my vantage point so you can see right in there it's looking pretty flat and we're just kind of running diagonally there and knocking off those high spots so we'll pull this out real quick and uh have a look at the slot so making some progress there and you notice we're a little further up on the Tang now so I can start looking at the bolster in relation to the tang and see where the high spots are and address those specifically and I can do that without even taking it out of the vice but it's kind of hard to show it on camera hopefully you were able to see that there's some high spots there and whoops my fouls backwards I'm going to go ahead and knock those go down and I can get a little more precise and address one little spot here as you can see right there so pretty uh pretty clean flat sides already we're removing material slowly little by little and uh sneak in that bolster a Little Closer to the shoulders so we're going to look at the uh the right angles here and you don't want it cockey off to one side or the other and the way you file that slot is going to influence that so that's something else to pay attention to As you move up the Tang okay so I've removed a little more material and you can see that we've moved up the Tang a little more and now we're starting to run into the ends of our slot where the slot is still narrower than the Tang hopefully that's in Focus so I need to come right down here and give myself a little more of a corner on this slot and again using my 8 in chainsaw file so even though I have the corners rounded on my Tang it's really more of a rectangle than it is an oval but the radiuses are pretty similar to the size of this chainsaw file so I'm literally going to come in there and address that corner and kind of file laterally both directions to knock that out a little bit you see me moving side to side on the slot there addressing those Corners let's see where we're at all right so we've got a a profile that looks like it's going to fit a little better once we get a little closer up there still need to take a little bit more down here on the bottom and on the overall width okay I'm about 7/16 away from my shoulders here and if you look here we're pretty close but I did go a little bit over right here I've got a little more room here than I should so I might normally file up and get things a a little bit closer but I'm going going to leave it there for right now because when we tap this down it's going to stretch things out a little bit and hopefully take care of that little bit extra room we have but before we do that I'm going to go ahead and address the finish on the front of our guard okay next stage here I've got the blade wiped down with WD40 so that the fingerprints do not create nasty marks on the blade and then wrapped up with some duct tape to protect the finish that we worked so oh so hard on earlier and we're ready to start fitting this guard in the final steps I've got a piece of hardened and tempered steel here just a scrap piece of Blade steel with a sanded finish on one side that slides up to there and it will fit the full length of the Tang and then I can use it as a strike plate to tap the guard down on there with my ghetto pipe driver here and not Mar up the back of the Guard so much Andor bend it since it is malleable and last but not least my trusty oh where did it go piece of leather no I got to find that that I simply use to clamp the blade in the Vie okay we've got our setup put together here this shouldn't take a lot of force to fit down onto the shoulders because we've got it close and this is a malleable material obviously depending on what you use that's going to vary a little bit but in any case you do want to have this nice and tight in the Vise so that there's not movement of the blade if if at all possible you don't want to force it as long as it's moving that's good okay there it sits this is where you're going to want to start slowing down I'm going to pull it out of the Vise here to show you what we have going on and we're real close but you can see where we're going to start especially right here at the bottom it's already happened we're going to start hitting up against the very radius of the shoulder right there hopefully you can see that that's going to be kind of a case by casee basis but we do need to pull this off now and address that so you can see where we're starting to get a little bit of a wrinkle there actually at both ends that's showing us where we need to start taking a little bit out there now we haven't even touched it down on the shoulders yet but things are coming along nicely we just need to do a little bit of relief there okay so we've got that addressed this should be the final final deal here right hopefully trying to put even pressure all the way around as we uh work our way down we going to need a little more a little more relief but we're coming along nicely pretty nicely still got a little Gap right here at each shoulder so we need to keep going down a little bit more so we're going to see what we need to take out to facilitate that here couple things to watch out for on the front front finished surface here had a few little wrinkles along the uh edge here so I just addressed that on the Sandpaper and smooth that out just pushing a little bit more material than you want to on the uh final fit up there and that's kind of what causes that I think and then likewise on the back here if you're actually hanging up or hdden on the back side of the of the uh brass here that had that kind of mushroomed up on me a little bit there and so I addressed that on some 80 grit sandpaper and relieve that just a little bit got to pay attention to that and we are very very close I need to tap it down a little bit more so at this point this being a malleable material we can actually make an impression of the shoulders in our brass at each side you can see here that we're about there we've got a little bit more to do on the bottom shoulder here okay and last but not least you want to be paying attention to the angles here making sure that this is at right angles to your ricasso as you're sending that home in the final stages here and I'm just using this uh scribing tool this block here to kind of show well this tape's in the way but um we're we're pretty good here we've got some nice right angles and that's what you want and again this is uh something you can tweak as needed a little bit uh back and forth to get that fit to where it's Square final touchup on the sandpaper on the granite block to get rid of the littlest bit of wrinkly look here along that line and you can see we've got a really nice fit up here um almost completely imperceptible line there maybe just a tiny bit on this side and uh overall pretty good all right guys that about wraps it up but I have two more bonus tips for you the first one being you'll notice that we haven't done any shaping to the guard as of yet the reason for that is because you want to be able to shape the shape of your guard to where it actually sits from the rasso because that's what it's going to be indexed off of and you can do that with some different templates I'll show you that real quick and I'll show you a little tip to help with any little goof UPS you might have maybe you over filed a little bit had a little more room in this than you needed and you need to close that Gap up for a nice tight fit like we have here this is a guard template for a larger knife but you can see how you use it you index it right at the ricasso on each corner and then Trace around it this is going to give you equal quadrants all the way around indexed off of the actual knife where it should be now obviously this particular this particular uh pattern or template is for a double guard and so I'm just using this for demonstration purposes two different templates would be necessary to actually use on this one since the bottom half of the Guard the bottom end of the Guard is longer than the top this is one way to get a very precise and clean guard shape based off of the actual knife that it's on all right final tip before we wrap this up let's say that you've got some gaps showing on one or both sides of your slot cuz you over filed or something along those lines take that guard off of there and this is more specifically with malleable material which is one reason why using brass like this is nice come over to your Anvil hold it edgewise and just tap down squish that slot together a little bit and then go right back to fitting it with a little bit of tapping pressure like we did at the end there remember if there is anything any leeway going to happen it's underneath where these shoulders are where you're not going to see it and it's not going to affect anything anyway so that's one way that you can address tiny gaps on either side of the slot and you will probably have to readdress the finish on the flat surface with your sandpaper but that can be pretty pretty helpful in fixing some minor issues in that regard all right guys I hope you enjoyed this video and hopefully learned something from it or benefited from it in some way in your shop you now have everything that I have and know and have tried and tested in my shop when it comes to getting a high level of fit and finish in a practical manner on fitting a guard or bolster like the one we did today there's going to be some different nuances with different projects but you've got the gist of it and the base of knowledge so I don't ask this on every video but if you want to support the channel you can do so for free simply by liking subscribing hitting that notifications Bell leave a comment and even share this video to some of your knif maker blad smithing friends as always appreciate you guys watching and we will see you on the next video

Channel: Fire Creek Forge

Views: 21,137

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Id: 92BiXnHjdeQ

Length: 42min 53sec (2573 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 06 2023