How To Make A Knife - Boat Knife Build - 4K

alright guys today I'm gonna be starting on this little knife here which I think would be called a boat knife maybe if you know what a boat knife is please let me know in the comments because I don't I'm thinking maybe it's used for sailors like sail boats people who need to cut rope exclusively or something like that but please let me know but I'm gonna be making one of these today so follow along also please let me know how you like the quality of this video look at the little gear in the bottom right hand side of your youtube screen and you should be able to see what resolution you want to watch this video in if you have a 4k monitor this video is going to be in 4k and it's the first time I've done a 4k video so I just wanted to know if you liked it or not so with all that being said let's get into the bill alrighty so we're gonna be building this knife with some 1084 from alpha knife supply I've heard some really good things about their steel on the forum so I want to give it a shot this is an inch and a half wide by 1/8 of an inch thick so I'm gonna be giving this steel a shot and see how it goes slight spoiler alert it worked great so the first step here is to cut it out on the bandsaw on the Bauer port a ban here after we get it nice and cut out I'll go ahead and start profiling on the belt sander so like I said in the beginning I have no idea to history behind boat knives I looked it up online or at least I tried to and I wasn't able to really find much about the term or this design at least the term boat knife or this design so if you know anything about boat knives and where they came from and what they're for or what they're explicitly designed for go ahead and put that in the comment section below and teach me something there please so we are profiling this knife out on an old 60 grit belt I like to not only get it profiled on the table there but also to finish profiling along the spine looking down the spine so that I have all my scratches going in the same direction and I have that spine perpendicular to the flats of the blade next got this thing sprayed with some layout fluid and then we start laying out our holes for drilling we're gonna be drilling to 13 number 13 holes therefore our core be fasteners and then also a center hole for an eighth of an inch decorative pin after we have the Center punched we'll head on over to the mini mill to start drilling these holes I'll also be drilling some weight-reduction holes in this Tang not only to reduce the weight but also to allow a pathway for the epoxy to move around in there during the glue up and fill up all the void spaces in the center of this handle so those holes I'm drilling with a number 12 bit have maybe 15 of these bits and I don't use a number 12 bit for anything so I'm using those as kind of my trash bits there next we'll lay out our center line here this is going to be what we grind to for our edge these two lines are about 20 thousands apart after I have the two Center lines I'll go ahead and use a square to mark off where I want my plunge lines that come to so I mentioned in my last video that I'm doing more freehand grinding really I'm really enjoying it actually I'm getting I'm getting better as I go I'll be using a 60 grit ceramic belt here what you saw me do before was just knock down that corner with an older ceramic belt I don't want to destroyed the media on this brand new belt by just knocking down the corners so this 60 grit VSM belt really really hugs away some material here it doesn't take me long at all to get the majority of my bevel work back towards the spine I got this belt from pops knife supply along with one of my orders and I'll definitely be ordering some more of these so you see me I'm working this one side here I'm slowly putting pressure towards the spine of the knife to work that bevel all the way back I'm about to show you a different angle where I will be switching to the other side to get that bevel work back as well notice that I'm using my thumb to apply to pressure there with my right hand and I'm slightly pulling my left hand back as I get closer towards the tip I've seen a lot of different methods online and I think I'm gonna try a push stick method soon and see how that works out for me but so far so good with this method I'm getting pretty darn close on my bevels here my plunge lines when I'm working with the ceramic belt I'm trying not to make them you know dead nutso on each other I just want to kind of close so that I can clean that up with the 120 so you can kind of see them there they're not they're not perfect I then move on to a 120 grit j-flex belt and I'll be using this belt to work my bevels back towards the spine a little closer and then also I overhang that belt on the side of my platen so that I can get a radiused plunge line so this is a step where I try to get my plunge lines pretty darn close to each other so that I don't have as much to do post heat reading it's worth mentioning that I get this blade around 90% done pre heat treat so I have about a 20 20 thousands of an inch behind the edge there finished edge and then I also work back to just about the spine on my full flat grind there before heat treating I'll also hollow out the Tang to take a little bit more weight off I'll be using some g10 handles here and they're pretty heavy I'll also file in my Spanish notch or our sharpening notch whenever you like to call it you can't do this post heat treat because the plates so hard so I'll get my files out and I'll put this Spanish notch in there I'm using a 5/32 of an inch chain saw file to do this operation so now our blade is - it's finished preheat treat condition will move on to drilling some holes in our handle material I'll tell you why we do this in a second but we're going to be using some about a quarter inch a little bit more than a quarter of an inch thick g10 here from alpha knife supply again and this stuff's great it sits very flat coming from alpha and it works it works really good - I mean I've used g10 before but I really like this stuff don't breathe it though make sure to wear a respirator whenever you're dealing with this stuff so we get it cut out here the next step is I'd get them clamped together with a can't twist clamp and then we pass through those those holes and our tang the tang is now acting as a drill guide and we drill out our 13 number 13 holes there for our two core P fasteners and then our eighth of an inch hole in the center so this mini mill I use it for some milling operations but it's really turned into a nice precise drill press for me I probably 80% of time I use it for drilling and I do some flattening on scales and stuff so what you see me doing here is trying to get an idea of the curvature of the front of my scales I'll go ahead and draw this out by hand here and then that's pretty much it for our handle scales we'll come back to those later so I'm getting out some parks 50 here I've switched to exclusively to parks 50 from my quenching I am in an 81 millimeter ammo can there that's five gallons of parks 50 and then we're gonna get the forge cranked up here so one of the benefits of the parks 50 is that it allows me to have repeatable quenches the oil doesn't degrade severely over time it's a a canola oil will the first blade you quench on canola oil is going to have different properties than the fiftieth blade you quench whereas in parks 50 that's just not the case so I'll put some cards in the description above on how to heat treat 1084 but the first thing I'm going to do here is I'm going to normalize display twice after I normalize the blade I will bring it up to quenching temperature on the 3rd run and quench it into that park's 50 so you can see me there checking it with a magnet to make them sure it's non-magnetic then we'll go a little higher and quench into the parks 50 it's a combination of using that magnet and having an eye what you didn't see as I was actually testing it before then it's become a habit just to keep testing it with the magnet so now we have a super hard blade it file tested easily we're gonna move on to our first tempering cycle at 213 degrees Celsius I did pick up a small warp during the quench and we're gonna mess with that in our second tempering cycle so as we don't risk snapping this blade alright so we have the blade in the tempering oven along with two other blades that I'm working on the tempering oven is ramping back up because it lost some temperature when I open it so we're about five hours out before the he tree is completely done with the tempering being completed so while we are tempering we're going to be working on the handle scale so this is kind of a pro tip I guess some would say the handle scales can be worked on while you're tempering if you go ahead and drill your holes before you heat treat so not everyone does that I think it's a time saver if you have spare time the day while your tempering to keep working on your knife so we're going to be able to profile out the handles we're going to be able to angle the front of the handle scales countersink the holes for the Corby fasteners and then bring up the Corby fasteners shorten those to the appropriate length for these handle scales in this stock so we'll be able to do all that while we're tempering it so that's what we're going to do now alright so we're gonna start off by profiling rough profiling these handle scales in the bandsaw here and then we're gonna move over to the belt sander to get them profiled out where you really want to focus here is gonna be on the front of the scales we're not gonna be able to come back and mess with the front of the scales after we glue the handles onto the knife so I get everything pretty close here leaving a little extra I still have a little overhang after to glue up I want to make sure to give myself a little room and then we'll chamfer the front of the handle scales with a 45 degree would block there after we get these rough chamfered I'll head on over to the hand sanding get it clamped up and hand sand the front of these scales to around a thousand grit starting with a 320 grit paper moving to a 600 and then finally to a thousand grit so this g10 polishes up really nice with a thousand grit I was pretty pretty pleased with the way it turned out I love I love all those contrasting lines there okay so we're going to do a brief lesson on Corby fasteners and how to measure and adjust their length to fit your project so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to find the total width of your entire knife handle assembly so step one is to find the width of your handle scales which in our case is 0.5 4 and our blade is eighth of an inch so our total width is zero point six six five inches next we're going to be drilling a 3/16 of an inch hole in both sides of the scale so if this is one scale this is the other scale and this is your eighth inch knife we're going to be coming in 3/16 of an inch on both sides of your knife so we'll take the total width - 3/16 times 2 and that is going to equal the inside-to-inside distance here which is the head-to-head distance of your Corby so let's do that so the total width is zero point six six five inches minus three sixteenths times two okay so that is equal to zero point two nine inches which is what we want from the inside to inside of the head here so this is a stock Corby fastener from pops knife supply and it is point three five and then this is a stock Corby fastener from True Grit and it is 0.37 so you can see both of them are too big for our application so we will have to take them down to point two nine I also want to note that you want to be smaller smaller than this number otherwise you won't be able to tighten the mini so with a point two nine I may go to a quarter of an inch already so here you see me putting those Corby fasteners in a drill and taking down their length I normally start off with the female Corby's and then I'll move on to the male Corby's to take them down and then I'll start testing them like you see here in the drill so that we can get close to our final dimension I got both of these down to around point two seven this is a counter bore from pops knife supply these things are the bomb if you don't have one you should probably buy one because it makes your life extremely easy when using Corby fasteners so you can see I'm using the depth gauge in my mini mill and we're going down about 3/16 of an inch into this quarter inch scale and then this is what they look like after you get it drilled I have a little bit of fuzz in there and then I get out with a q-tip but that's it so the blade is still in a tempering oven but I have an old blank here that we can use as a demonstration to see how our Corby math worked out the last thing I did was countersink these holes in the handle scales 3/16 of an inch deep and then these Corby fasteners have been shortened to around 0.262 point to 7 inches from inside the inside head so before I glue up all the time every time before I glue up I'll test fit these Corby's so that you're not in the middle of a glue up panicking because your core views are either too long or too short if they're too long you won't be able to tighten down the scales and that's kind of the whole point of why you're using Corby's anyway because you want to be able to have a mechanic mechanically squeezed handle scale so anyway let's do a dry fit here I'll put one Corby on one side I'll put the other male or B on the other side go ahead and lay the knife in and then take a screwdriver and start tightening here all right so it looks like it's tightened down just fine I'll go ahead and make sure they tighten and don't you spin yep all right so this is the Corby is the appropriate length I'll also test the other Corby but that's what I normally do before I glue up and that is how you install and do the math on Corby fasteners okie dokie so tempering cycle number one has been completed we bring it down to room temperature in my nasty slop bucket here then we're gonna address the warp so we have a warp in this blade to address this warmth we are going to counter bend it against the warp during the second tempering cycle I've seen this work a couple times it definitely helps you know every time so make sure you're doing this in the second tempering cycle though because the last thing you want to do is try clamping up your blade and breaking it before your first tempering cycle the blade is really hard after the quench but anyway we take some C clamps here and we get it clamped up bending in the opposite direction of the warp I may have it with a total deflection from the centerline of about an eighth of an inch counter bend and that seemed to work very well another slight spoiler alert here this thing came out great so anyway I get it clamped up and then we move on to the second tempering cycle at 213 degrees Celsius to make sure we get this blade in a tough usable condition as a side note I'll put some cards above if you want to build a PID controller for your tempering oven this thing is extremely handy it's really nice to know I'm getting precise tempering temperatures that's a miracle all right so this is day two the blade is surprisingly straight after that tempering operation the goal today is to get this blade ground up to its final grit which is gonna be around 400 grit on the belt then stone wash it fetch it well [ __ ] then stone wash it and then put the handles on and get it glued up so that's the goal for today or starting a little late so we'll see if we can get it all done and let's get going all right like I said this is day two here out of the tempering oven I take it to a semi worn 120 grit belt just to get some of the crud off of this knife anything that's left behind from the heating process so I'll take down the flats and the spine and I'll hit the bevels a little bit with it but I'm gonna be moving on to a Hermes 120 grit j-flex belt I got this also from pops I like buying a new belt or two every time I make an order just to try something new and this is my new belt so it worked pretty darn good I'm normally used the green made in Germany belts from True Grit the J flex belts and those are great but I really like this one too I think I got about three maybe four blades out of this belt before I felt like I started losing performance so that's the finish it leaves you can see I got it really close to the spine there I left just a little bit of meat there to get with my 200 grit belt here so I moved on to that true grit made in Germany cheap j-flex belt to get me up to a 220 grit finish after that I move on to a 400 grit belt of the same manufacturer and get up to a 400 grit finish you can see it's nice and fine there and then I moved to the scotch-brite belt after this one to kind of make that finish nice and milky I'm using a medium blue scotch-brite belt I really like to finish this thing leaves especially if you're gonna be stone washing it's a good priest stonewash finish you know I know there's a way to clean these belts if any of you guys know how to do that please leave comment in the comments section I would really much I'd really like to clean this but I know they're pretty expensive and I want to get the maximum use out of this belt but it has it has a lot of models on it so that's the finish I achieved we're next gonna stencil on my maker's mark I'm using a DIY DIY atching machine there that I built this thing works great I'm gonna be doing a DC etch since I'll be stone washing this blade and there's no need for the AC edge to AC kind of gives you darkness and the DC gives you def so we're gonna go ahead and switch this etching machine that DC and we're gonna put a nice deep edge into this blade to do that I normally hit it for about 12 times with one second holds and that gives me a nice deep edge it will catch your fingernail it's almost like somebody stamped your blade which is which is what I'm going for if I was gonna be doing a hand st. and finish on this one I would also hit it with a see after the DC etch to make it nice and dark in the valley there so after we get this thing HDC we'll take off the stencil spray it all down with a little bit of Windex and then hit it on the scotch brite belt again to go ahead and clean up that edge now that the etch is cleaned up we'll throw it in to the acid here for about ten minutes go ahead and get it nice and edged then we'll clean it up with some steel wool and then I will normally put some baking soda on the blade to make sure that that acid is neutralized well then put it into my homemade tumbler here it flexes the belt sander I also have a video on this if you're interested but it's this is a kind of a nice little time saver here I run this guy for about 12 minutes and it allows me to get around the shop and start cleaning up the the previous things that I did and set up some stations for the next operations so it's a nice little little time saver there it's not a lot of time but it definitely adds up especially if you're doing a batch of knives so the protectin blade during the glue up go ahead and wrap it up with some paper towels and some tape here last thing I want to do is get glue all over my blade and have to clean it off it just makes it easy just to pull that little sheath off of the blade once you're done with the glue up then take some prep prep all I think is the name of this stuff it's basically kind of like an acetone and I make sure that the Tang is nice and clean all the other components I generally make sure they're clean with a little bit of rubbing alcohol you want to get all the oils off of your components so that the glue sticks fish efficiently so I'm mixing up some G flex epoxy from West systems this stuff is excellent I did a head-to-head comparison between this and BSI and I think this stuff definitely performed a little better don't get me wrong that the BSI epoxy is uh perfectly perfectly adequate for making knives but I really like this Chi flex epoxy it's super tough so we go ahead and we put some G flex on the first scale both in the counter sunk holes and also on the flats pushing our two female core B fasteners and then we put some glue on the tang itself and then we repeat the operation on the first scale on the second scale with the male core P fasteners get everything lined up get the core B started and then hammer in that center pin I like hammering in that center pin before tightening the core piece just so that as the glue compresses it squeezes into all the crevices on the inside there after we get the core B fasteners snugged up not too tight just snug we go ahead and clamp the blade in the upright position so that I can clean off the squeeze out on the blade itself I don't want to leave any of this glue on the front of the handle scales or on the knife in that ricasso area because that's gonna be hard to clean up later and then take the glue the remaining glue and keep it somewhere so that tomorrow when I can start working this blade I can verify that that glue has had time the hole but 24 hours later we take this wax paper off and we get to shaping the handle my first step is to cut off the heads of the core P fasteners the bulk of the material there these are brass so pretty easy to do on this bandsaw and then we're going to go ahead and start hitting it with the belt sander so step one of the handles is I like to get the flats flat with the with the pins and the core P fasteners after I get the flats flat we'll move on to the spine of the knife and bring down the handle material to the spine I'm sorry to the yeah - just fine on the tang I guess on the tang of the knife you know this can take a little bit of time here that g10 worked pretty good though I will say it came off pretty fast you want to be a little careful I normally start off with a sixty grit belt I don't like getting it all the way flush with the sixty grit belt because you have to get those sixty grit scratches off in the metal of your tang so I normally get it really close and then I moved to either a 120 or a 220 grit belt to take it all the way flush after we get the handle scales flush to datang we'll move on to doing the little shaping here with a sixty grit belt you can see that I'm rocking the blade back and forth this has given me a little bit of curvature on the outside of the scales you can see here that I have that curvature but at the top and the bottoms are still flat so after we get that initial shaping done I'll move on to a J flex one-inch scalloped belt I think it's klingspor that makes these belts I also get them from both actually I get these belts from both True Grit and from pops knife supply so that's the finish with a 200 grit J flex scallop to 1 inch belt I then move on to some hand sanding here I start off with some 320 grit rhino wet right yeah Rhino wet sandpaper and you can see me using a sanding bar there I use a sanding bar to get the spine nice and smooth and all the scratches going in the same direction after you use that scalloped J flex belt you'll have some horizontal scratches and in your tang metal there so I used that sanding block to get that nice and flat and then I bring the whole blade up to a thousand grit finish and then that last step you saw me do there I was taking the scotch brite belt and I was just hitting the the spine of the knife and then all along that aim to make sure that the the whole tang all the scratches are going in the same direction and it's a nice satin finish then we get it clamped up in our sharpening jig here and we move over to our Wynn water-cooled sharpening system I did a review on this sharpener recently so you can go ahead and find that I'll put it in two cards but I really like this thing it works it works pretty good after you get a couple of the kinks worked out with your technique and your tools so what you can see me doing here is I'm bringing that stone up to a nice clean 220 grit on the rough side of that dressing stone and then I end up moving to a thousand grit later on the smooth side that right there is the tormek angle finder that thing is a godsend it's way better than the one that comes from wind and it will allow you to target some really nice secondary bevels I'm targeting on this knife around a 19 degree secondary bevel and I have about 10 to 15 thousands behind the edge so like I said I really like this sharpening system it goes from a zero edge to an edge maybe in about 15 and 20 minutes and then I come over here to the leather wheel and strop it and this knife came out super sharp and you know like I said pretty fast too so it's nice being able to get nice repeatable results with a sharpening system that's pretty easy to use and then one of the last things I do here is I take a little bit of mother's car wax and I wax this entire blade from tip to stern there just to make sure that this blade is nice and protected going forward I got that tip from from horse right he's on Instagram I put a put a picture of his instagram handle here he's a wealth of information his name's Dave and super super awesome knife maker he makes great knives he's all a wealth of useful information too so I really like how this knife turned out you know this boat knife turned out I hope for those out there who use boat knives that I did it justice but I really like the g10 on this one too so I'll definitely be buying some more from Alpha a knife supply so that sums up this build here if you liked this video go ahead and hit the like button below also make sure to hit that subscribe button along with the bail notification so you will be notified whenever I post new videos going forward until then I'll catch all y'all on the flip side you [Music]

Channel: Red Beard Ops

Views: 61,874

Keywords: j keeton knives, boat knife, how to make a knife, knife making, knifemaking, knifemaker, making a knife, edc knife, how to make a boat knife, wharncliffe, wharncliffe knife, sheepsfoot, coping knife, spyderco ronin, spyderco yojimbo, how to make a knife handle, how to make knives, knife making tools for beginners, how to make a knife at home, hand made knife, gentlemans boat knife, walter sorrells, alec steele, homesteadknives, simple little life, forged in fire, jKeetonKnives

Id: QAxgDN_jpbQ

Length: 30min 3sec (1803 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 04 2019