How to make a knife - a bushcraft knife

what guys Jeremy here with simpler life and today I'm gonna show you how to make a knife this will be the knife we're gonna make did a quick little sketch and I've had a couple of quests on maybe doing a how-to video for building the knife and I might as well that's how I learned how to build knives is watching a lot of YouTube videos and it's a great way to kind of see how people do things there's a lot of different ways that you can build a knife and a lot of them kind of you adapt to what you have available whatever tools when I first started I was hand filing the bevels on my blades then I made a belt grinder and even if there's other tools that I wish I had right now that it don't and it would change my process a bit but I just figured I'd share step-by-step how I go about building my blades so we've got a fire going here I'm gonna get a little warmed up a bit and then we'll get right to work okay so first thing I do is cut out the knife from the piece of paper that we had drew it on and then I take that and transfer that just trace onto a piece of quarter-inch plywood cut out the plywood and basically this will be our rigid template that we're gonna make and this is how we'll mark our steel also the reason I kind of like doing this it gives a good feel in the hand you kind of get a sense of the size and the feel of the blade and the handle before you actually go committing to putting it on a piece of steel it feels good I think we're ready they're kind of like that and then we're actually just gonna shape this a little bit on the belt grinder just to smooth it out and get a finished product and that way when we transfer it to our source steel it'll be exactly how we want it to be profiling the handle make sure everything's good and then I'll take a scribe and simply scribe that onto the steel be careful at this part you want to get nice tight lines and then we take it outside went to the angle grinder and just start hacking at her this is a way that I cut open my blades just because I've got angle grinders I'd like to do as much as I can with angle grinders because those materials of grinding discs cutting discs are the most readily available I like to save my belts off my belt grinder and get most of profiling done with a grinder that I can and then we will come into the final profiling and shaping on the belt grinder ok so now we've got our blank profile and we can get ready to mark where the knife edge will come to and then a grind line so know how deep the grind for putting our edge on so to start this process I'll just use a black marker put a nice thick black line on there and I'll take a drill bit that is the same diameter as a material thickness that I'm working with and basically I've got a granite surface plate any hard flat surface would do and you just kind of rest the drill bit flat on the surface and scrape the tip of the bit along your knife edge and I've got I have a very difficult time getting exact center usually I end up with two small lines very very close together and I actually prefer that because when you're grinding your blade you don't want to bring it to a sharp point you'll want to leave a little material on there for heat treating and so basically there you see it we've got a very - very close lines together and that's ready to start grinding okay so now we're ready to put the bevel on our blade and for that I use a simple jig all this is a piece angle iron I'm gonna drilled and tapped the 3/8 hole and I just use a 3/8 bolt with a lock nut and what that basically does just adjust the tilt of your knife coming into your platinum here now I keep my table at 90 degrees so if I were to just have a regular piece of England it would obviously just grind it flat some people actually tilt their whole table but I prefer to leave my table flat that way when you're shaping the Knights and stuff you get 90 degree edges everywhere and then you can just do all your angles with your jig and it's a bit of just experimentation different knives like I don't want this one to be a very big grind this is gonna be like a bush crafting knife and so I'm probably gonna want my my grind to come about halfway up the blade and so I'll have to just kind of experiment with it a bit to see what angle or how deep I need to move my bolt in and out and to get that so we'll get grinding another thing I should say real quick you're gonna want to keep a bucket of water with you because you want to pull your blade quite often when you're grinding it and follow you for this simply lean it up against my jig and clamp the blade port Naveen wanna make sure you get your knife flat every time and make sure this clamps not gonna go anywhere and it's set up like this you should get fairly consistent results and we grind away it's a you know as you start going you'll kind of see how you're going in there with your your plunge lines and stuff like that it's this part is a part I found probably the most difficult to get to to get it right but basically it's just trial and error or one thing when you gonna get into making knives you're gonna wreck a lot of blades I've got a lot of sharp cutting tools that have very different blade grind lengths on either side of the blade and that's just kind of how it is there's not much you can do about it but as you keep going and keep working on it you eventually do get better the point where both sides are nice and even and you know your lines are straight but it's just one of these things that man when I first started I pretty much thought it was impossible to do but you kind of keep going at it and you figure it out and then the next step that I'll do is before I heat treat I actually like to get a nicer finish on the blade and remove the grind lines now I could go to a smaller a finer belt on my belt grinder but I find that often it'll start adding weird things that I don't like and so what I actually do is just hand polish these quick and I go to about 400 grit before heat treating and it just gives a nice finish on the blade it's a little jig I made probably deal video on some of the specific tools as well as I made this little sanding block and one thing when you're sand when you're when you're making knives you'll be shocked how much abrasive material you go through like I buy these sheets in like 50 packs cut them up to the size I need to use in the sander that I made and you know what you'll find it starting to get dull you'll actually save yourself a lot of time if you are regularly regularly changing out your sanding sheets so I kind of get all ready like this before heat-treat get a nice finish on it and also when you're sanding you want to be going opposite directions with each set each new sheet so you'll go up 45 degrees and then when you're sending on the next sheet you crosscut that 90 degrees to that and actually removes the most material and so now that we are we're happy with the finish of our blade I'm so going to polish it more after heat treat but the next thing I'll do is just put in the little should I forget what the technical term is for that little tiny thing that we're filing in right there but not overcast so it's just above the reco so I forget what they call that beam but anyways do the final shaping and profiling of a handle because once it's he's heat treated it's much more difficult to make any changes so that looks pretty good and then before we heat treat the last thing that we need to do is drill our holes in our handle for the scales the pins and also we're going to drill a bunch of holes in the center of the handle just to remove some weight from the knife okay so now we're gonna lay up the handle and where the pins are gonna go now for this step of the process I always just eyeball it maybe that's not the best way to do it but I it works for me and then we'll mark it with our Center punch and get ready to drill the holes now one thing when you're drilling or making knives handy to have a lot of different sizes of drill bits and not just your standard drill index I've got the letter set I've got a decimal set the the normal fractional set I've got a full metric set pretty much anything under half-inch I've got any size of drill but you could imagine the reason that I quite like that is because then you can use pretty much anything you want as a pin material and you're always gonna get a really nice tight fitting hole so I've got that all drilled out then we're gonna heat it up and this is a oh one tool steel and so it's quite forgiving metal it's quite easy to harden basically you can just get it to a nice cherry red and then quench it in oil and we're using canola oil here and I've worked a lot with old one in my mill right apprenticeship we had to make a lot of cutting tools for the metal lathe and we've done all out of Bowl one tool steel hand it's amazing how it's very versatile very useful steel to use so basically heated up and quench it like that and then cool it down really well and then we're gonna be ready to put it in the oven to temper it but before I temper it I will lay out the profile on my scale material so that I can cut those out and get those ready while the blade is tempering and tempering I do 350 degrees for 45 minutes and I do three cycles on each blade so here we'll just cut out the scale material this is 3/8 g10 one thing you'll notice when you're using a lot of these synthetic materials is that they are really hard on your cutting tools like on saw blades and stuff I'll probably go through like four saw blades cutting these scales out so it's kind of frustrating but whatever it is what it is and after we've tempered it we're going to put our statin finish on the blade pretty much get it near perfection where we want it to be at this point and I hand sanded I'll go to about you'll probably stay at about 400 still for this and basically want to get any mill scale or any heat scale that you've put on the blade and get it all cleaned up from all the previous processes you now that we've got the blade finish pretty much where we want it I'm just gonna wrap it up in some masking tape to protect it what we're gluing handle scales fitting scales fitting pins and stuff like that and those sounds damaging your blade while you're working on other parts of it so come over and we'll cut our pin material that we're gonna use and take all the burrs off make sure it's a nice tight fit and that it's slides slides into the holes and then drill out our scales now one thing you'll want to use is those pins as locators basically kind of drill your first hole put a pin in and then drill your second hole that ensures that your scales are all going to line up perfectly also those pins are left in the handle for the profiling you want to do a basic profile before you actually glue your blade to your your scales to your blade just some of these contours you're not able to get while the scales are in place on the knife so you get all the final shaping done for right up near the ricasso and get all that stuff set up and the way you want it before you go ahead and glue your scales on because like I said once once the scales are glued on you can't make any other changes to that part of the of the knife we'll go ahead and give it a sand just smooth it out remove any uh any crap that might be built up in there and then we'll clean it I wipe it all down with a really good solvent I think that's just a lot of lacquer thinner I'm using and I wipe all the parts and pieces all the pins everything and let that dry properly and then I'm using it this is a DEFCON 2 part epoxy it's a five minute epoxy I like this stuff it's really strong but you do need to work quickly with it so basically we're gonna scale on push the pins through and again with a nice tight fit you want to you need to pre fit everything before you put the glue on but I like my skills to be really tight and so sometimes we'll have to tap them in there with a hammer to get them to get them all lined up properly so I'll just finish putting the glue on and get all our pins in our lanyard hole and then after this we will be clamping it now one tip I'll talk about right now is when they climb I like to use a piece of wax paper just because it keeps your clamps from sticking with this this epoxy if you get your clamp stuck to the g10 scales and it's a you know you got the epoxy under there those things are tough to get off and it's just may as well use a piece of wax paper because then it doesn't they're not joined together so well bang the sucker and nice and tight getting lined up and put our lanyard pin in and then we will get ready to clamp it alright so the handle wrapped in wax paper and bring it over the bench vise I just want to say this the bench vise is probably the most valuable tool that you'll use in making knives and pretty much any shop activity for that matter if you don't have a decent bench vise I would consider that be one of the first tools you buy and one also with a swivel base that just allows you to move the knife in different different positions and stuff when you're sanding and doing different processes it's amazing how much I use that swivel feature on my vise so basically I'll put the bench vise in the center and the smaller clamps on the outside and let it dry and then now we're at the fun part the creative part I guess it's all creative really but profiling the handle is kind of fun because you just kind of let it happen you can do whatever you want it starts to take shape you keep feeling it in your hands something feels good something doesn't you can change it and you just kind of let your imagination run wild here one thing to watch out for is when you're grinding your pins down to length you don't overheat them because you can burn the epoxy and that looks bad on the finished product once you've got your shape done I'll finish it with hand hand sandpaper and get all smooth up and feeling nice and then after that's done I'll go ahead and just clean up the blade any areas that may have gotten scratched or nicked or something during the other processes and the final step here is just how you take it to a cotton buffing wheel you can do is polishing or a compound or not I didn't on this one and I'd like to keep one wheel without any compound impregnated in it because then I can use it to polish the g10 and the wood scales just to shine them up and smooth them up a little bit so that's pretty much it it's not a complicated process but you know you do it a few times and you'll actually start to get some nice results so I hope this helps if you have any questions at all please don't hesitate to ask I'll do my best to answer them I'll also do some other videos on some specific tools that I've made that have helped this process a lot better but there it is simple bushcraft knife with a coke bottle shaped handle and quite happy the way turned out the only thing that will get a sheath on it and sharpen it up so thanks for watching the video guys Cheers you

Channel: Simple Little Life

Views: 644,976

Keywords: custom knife, handmade knife, knife making, knifemaker, bushcraft, bushcrafting, bushcraft knife, prepper, preparedness, homestead, survival, hunting, hunting knife, DIY, simple little life, homestead knives, made in Canada, made in Alberta, how to make a knife

Id: TyS8kU81y4c

Length: 16min 7sec (967 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 12 2016