How To: Make A Belt Knife (For DIRESTA)

hey I'm Chris for make everything and today we're making a belt knife for none other than Jimmy deressa most of you that are subscribed to my channel are here because Jimmy sent you so I figured why not I'll make him something to say thanks so the belt knife is something that I've designed and made a bunch of over the last few years my latest idea was to model it on the computer and print it out so I'd have a reusable template so I could make them more often using the template that I made in Google Sketchup I can just punch these holes with a center punch and then drill them out with an annular cutter this is a 7/8 Jancy slugger with carbide teeth it's the best hole saw option for metal that I've found this feel that I'm using is CPM 154 which is a american-made stainless steel it's a little harder to eat treat than your typical small knife chops feels you have to use a programmable oven and complete foil and so this is actually the first belt knife that I've made out of CPM 154 you can see that my paper template didn't really do so well with the oil from doing the hole but as long as I get the alignment of these the favorite template is not super critical I'll cut along the line here and put the paper template back on the steel so that I can get the profile and just trace it out with a sharpie when I cut the profile I just use my little quarter band bandsaw the blades are super cheap so it's not a big deal when I blow on a part the CPM 154 is a little tough on bandsaw blades I do have a full size metal cutting bandsaw but I'd rather not dull out the blades when I'm using a harder material like 154 or from using titanium I get my cut pretty close to the line and then I refine it with the felt again this is a lb 1000 it's a 2 by 72 Bell grinder and underneath the platen I have a bucket full of water to catch the sparks on any of the debris now that I've got the outside profile ground I'll just take some of the burrs off the holes that I drilled with a dremel the little brass templates that I had there was for the bottle opener notch that I'll put in the top of the night I'll use a 3/16 drill bit to drill a hole and then I'll put a little bit of layout fluid on the knife and then use that brass template to trace out the shape that I know will work as a bottle opener take it back over to the band saw and just cut those two lines I have to do a little file work here to refine the shape of the bottle opener knotch it's a little tough to get it right every time the same so what I wound up doing is I cut it generally to the right shape and then I just try it out on a couple of different bottles until I get something that I know is going to work every time so a little bit of hand fall work here goes a long way and then I'll take a dremel and just sort of grind it out a little bit more to smooth out some of the file marks now that I've got the shape pretty much finished I'm going to lay out my bevels so I will use this layout fluid to describe out my bevels where I want them and the first thing I have to do those scribe out the center of the blade so that I know that my bevels wind up in the same spot there's a lot of great information on YouTube about grinding knife bevels and if it's something that you're interested in I would suggest you look a little bit further into it I'll put some links in the description to useful videos the blocks that I just clamped onto the blade are to get my ricasso in the same spot the ricasso is where the plunge line of the bevel will stop and I want it to be equal on both sides so since this is such a small blade it's actually kind of tough to grind normally I would put my thumb on the opposite side of the bevel but since the blades getting so hot I keep having to take my hand off of it luckily since its small the grinding process is pretty short grinding knife bevels takes a lot of practice it's something that I still sort of struggle with but the more I do it the better I get the easier it is to get the bevels to look equal I like to do my rough double grinding with a 120 grit ceramic belt and then this is a 220 grit silicon carbide belt I feel that these give me a pretty nice finish pretty quickly and the main goal is to remove the scratches from the coarser belt when you switch grits now that I have the bevels ground I'll just clean up the flats with this 220 grit belt before I heat treated I decided I wanted to add what's called a sharpening toil which is a little spot where the blade and the edge dips away so that when you sharpen you don't hit the back end of the ricasso where the bevels are so since this knife is for Jimmy deressa I decided I would go with the Jimmy direst of style stamp in the blade to customize it for him normally I cold stamp in a letter Z as my sort of maker's mark but I figured on this one I might as well put his name in there we're just cleaning up one little burr and now it's time to eat treat so this is a stainless steel heat treating foil it's specifically designed for this application and the goal here is to make an airtight packet so that the blade has somewhere to sit in when you're he treating it there's a lot of information about heat treating CPM 154 online I'm not an expert but this is how I've done it in the past and it's worked out pretty well for me I seal up the package using an arbor press and my ovens already programmed ready to go and I give it a start now that process is going to take a little while so while that's going I already have a template made for what the sheath is going to look like and I start to do the leather work I trace out my template and I'll cut it out with sharp knife a trick I learned a while ago is where you have two intersecting corners and you have an inside 90 I just put a little punch there and it gives a nice soft edge you don't want to put the knife running over itself I lay out the center of the sheath and I use this little gal geing tool to just make the fold a little more even checking and making sure everything's pitch is important with leather and the next step is going to be to make the brass clip since I'm modeling this off a knife that I've made in the past I typically have a template for this but at the time I couldn't find it so I just figured it out based on what I knew would work that's sixteenth inch thick grass and I'll cut it out and refine the edges on the sander to bend the clip I have this little piece of flat steel that's ground to a rounded bottom and I'll put it in the arbor press and just sort of force it over on itself give us a pretty even Bend and then I take it over to the anvil and Hammer it back down to make it as tight as I want using the edge of the anvil on this little body hammer I just round over the corner the purpose of this belt clip is so that it sort of locks on top of your belt so the knife doesn't fall off now I'll drill the two holes that will accept the rivets that'll keep it on to the leather sheath once these holes are drilled I'll take it over to another drill press I have set up just for countersinking and I'll just countersink those two holes so they get a nice flat even soft surface for your hands to run over and again I'll just refine a little bit more the corners on the sander right here I'm actually beveling the inside edge of the clip so that it easily slides over your belt I got these little velcro sanding discs for a dremel on Amazon and they're great for cleaning up stuff like this a lot of easy control and since the Dremel variable speed I feel like I really can control how much material I remove and sort of brighten things up with it one more little level of customization on this knife I decided to just stamp in a director logo on the clip as well now adding the clip to the leather sheath in hindsight I should have added the clip first it's been a little while since I made one of these so I sort of mess my process up but at the end everything worked out fine I glued up the sheath planted till it dried and then I pronged in the stitching for the leather this little multi angle vise is super helpful it's great to move around and it works great for doing leather work has little rubber piles on it so it goes and Mark anything up I'll stitch this up this is waxed thread there's a larger hole at the end of the sheet that'll accept the rivet which will just sort of terminate the threading now I'll just add two rivets that will keep the belt clip on like I said I really should have put the belt clip on before I stitch the sheath together because it's a little difficult to get the rivets in there I have to use this little sort of surgery looking tool but it worked out I use a scotch brite wheel on my buffer to finish the edges of my leather comes out pretty nice only problem is it totally stinks up the shop and now the knife is ready to come out of the oven and be plate quenched so these are 3/4 inch thick aluminum plates on the ground and basically you pull the knife out put it in between the plates and apply pressure to it while spraying it with compressed air and that cools the knife extremely quickly and the plates keep it from warping the stainless steel package sucked in around the knife which is a good indication of a nice airtight seal and I'll cut it out of its packet and there it is so now the knife is hardened but it has to be tempered since I want to finish the sheath I'm actually just going to use it for sizing and finish the last snap portion of the sheath I like to wait till the knife is finished to add the snap so that it can make sure that the sheath is going to be nice and tight and the Knights not going to fall out so I just add a male and female snap end on the sheath cut the end of the other snap tab short so that it matches with that and it's done so now I'm putting the knife back in the oven to temper it'll temper for four hours at 415 degrees to two-hour cycles and now the blade is ready to go it's probably about sixty Rockwell and I'll just refine the grinds and the flats I'm using a scotch-brite surface conditioning belt here which I feel gives a really nice even sort of brushed finish this knife is going to get stone washed so the whole thing is going in an acid bath in just a minute so this is PCB etching solution which you can get at like an electronics store and I will clean the knife and degrease it really well and then leave it in the acid for about a half an hour while that's going I take some neat's-foot oil and I just apply it to the leather sheath to protect it seal up the leather darkens the leather but it gives it a really nice look and protects it back over to the acid bath the knife's done it gives it a pretty dark look right out of the acid and from this point it'll go inside a rock tumbler to get the stone washed look that I'm going for even though the I've stainless the acid still edges the surface and then what happens in the rock tumbler is it removes some of that darkened finish and it gives it this nice bright high spots this is a new rock tumbler to me I still haven't really gotten the hang of using it with or without the lid I noticed that the media vibrates a lot more aggressively without the lid on it and that's sort of what I'm going for so I just decided to leave the lid off and let a few pieces fly around the shop didn't bother me it achieved the stonewashed look that I was going for it came out really nice now that that's done I'm going to put the final edge on this knife and she's pretty much finished I start with 600 grit sanding belt on a 1 by 30 grinder and now this is a micron belt I want to say it's 15 micron it's pretty fine basically seems like it has no grit but it's definitely refined the edge I go to a leather strop with black compound and then I move to a green strop by the time I'm done this edge is a mirror polish and it is razor sharp it'll shave hair it's sharp enough for me and that's it this knife is finished so I hope you enjoyed this video again i'm chris from make everything if you're into this kind of stuff please like and subscribe to my youtube channel and if you're interested in getting a behind-the-scenes look at what i do over at the shop follow me on instagram at make everything shop and since you're following me and i made this night for jimmy dore esta go follow him too he makes great stuff and he's a great guy thanks for watching see on the next one

Channel: Make Everything

Views: 287,480

Rating: 4.8919106 out of 5

Keywords: Diresta, knife, handmade, new york, leather, steel, heat treat, knifemaking, knifemaker, DIY, maker, makerspace, make, made, brass, metal, rivets, grinder, 2x72, knife grinder, heat treat oven, american made, belt knife

Id: v7eiRO5Hbkk

Length: 16min 25sec (985 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 29 2017