How to Make a Knife Handle - Drilling, Profiling & Dry Fitting

hi Ben here and welcome back to the workshop and today we're going to show you how we go about actually putting a knife handle on a full tang knife so a few weeks ago but actually I look back it was actually beginning and March I think and we showed you how to prepare handle scales so how to saw a piece of timber in half how to prepare the surface and actually how to bond loin as if you're gonna use lioness to a nice handle so if you haven't seen that already check that out first then come back here but basically I use those handles that we prepared all those months ago but I've prepared another set same material so this is stabilized along with those black fiber liners in there so it'll be pretty much the same material so that's the inside so the next step is to go about actually drilling all the holes that we need to attach this handle to the knife blade itself so on the knife blade itself you have normally two fixing points this is gonna be for our loveless bolts or corby bolts if you prefer to use Corby's but to basically fix ins that are gonna hold the knife handle on and then not not always but I like to add what we call a foam tube or a lanyard hole at the end and that has a little breast sleeve that goes through the handle itself now these other holes are just weight reduction holes so we don't have to worry about those so if you if you're new to this game is sometimes easy to drill the wrong size hole so sometimes you can actually cover those up with tape so you're not confused but what I would say is it's best to do this handle prep stage before you actually grind or sharpen your knife blade it's just gonna make it a hell of a lot safer for you if you have already prepared your knife and you've actually got a cutting edge on there make sure you put some tape around there because you don't want to cut yourself while you're doing this stage what I actually do because I make a lot of the same knife is I actually prepare a purely just a handle handle blank so it's got no blade on there and it allows me to orientate that onto the handle itself and then I can clamp it in place and I've got no fear of that blade getting caught but in this instance what we'll do is we'll actually show you how to actually use the blade as you're drilling guide now the other thing we want to think about is grain direction so this has got a sort of nice sweeping grain to it so I'm actually gonna orientate this off handle itself so that the grain will flow down the curve of the handle you don't have to do that but I find that it just makes the whole thing look a lot nicer and then you've got to carefully make sure that you line up those edges of the handle so that when it's finished we want the grain of a handle to look like it's all laid together and it's like that we've actually just sort of split the block in half and put our blade between the two halves of the scales so we're trying to orientate the grain so it's all as it was when it was actually still growing as a tree and then what I tend to use and I find that these were the best are these quick voice voice grips these ones with the flat ends are quite good they pivot and they just sort of allow it to sort of move slightly to fit onto the handle scale itself and they want to be pretty tight you want it to be a quite an effort to squeeze that on there because you don't want anything to move now once I've got that blade sort of attached to that handle Bank I know that pretty much things are set so make sure you spend a little bit of time orientating that grain and get it correct now the next thing that we're gonna use is a pillar drill setup now often when people come into the workshop they kind of laugh at the amount of pillar drills that I've got they say that it is possible to actually slack in the chuck and remove and change the drill bit size but on this particular knife we've got a 6.5 mil hole for the thumb tube and then a 4 mil hole for our loveless bolts to go through ok that's only two drill sizes but if we're making something like a nomad we'll actually have six different drill sizes and we don't want to move that clamp so I'll literally have a different drill in each each chuck of each drill and just work down the line and it makes makes making knives a lot more efficient then in this instance we're only gonna use these two drills where I'll make the use three because I've got two four four mil drills setup but we'll show you how we go about setting up this this first hole for our thumb tube now obviously if you've clamped your blade on like this and you're just using it on a normal pillar drill obviously that's not going to stay Square and flat and true that's where you're gonna get a lot of trouble so what I've sort of made is these very simple little support blocks now these are what we call one two three blocks they're literally two inches by three inches long by one inch thick they're used in engineering as a sort of precision sort of parallel to keep things apart and things like that in this instance what we use in Amar's is just a set distance these are exactly the same sarees and exactly the same height from the bed of the pillow drill so we know that everything's gonna stay parallel and true to this drill bit obviously make sure your table is 90 degrees as well but what you can see is when I lay my handle slabs on there there is sufficient room underneath that my clamp is clearly the table so the actual handle scales are hitting those one two three blocks and I know that that's going to hold it nice and square and nice and true and that's half your battle when you're making a full-time knife you want to make sure that all these holes are nice and straight and parallel and square and then everything will fit together nicely now obviously this technique will only work with knives that haven't got a tapered tang and handle materials that are dead flat and parallel if you're doing tapered tangs or you're using things like jig bone or antler all natural handle materials that have got a non flat surface you have to do it a slightly different technique and we'll show you that another time now what I do is I make sure that my drill can pass through one of these holes in the one two three block and normally what I'd do is I'd run my extractor as well so all the dust would be removed from the drill and I won't be breathing it in but it'll be a bit noisy to do that so I'm just gonna do it without the extractor now I need to make sure that I hold this sufficiently firm and flat so there's it's not gonna move turn on the drill and then I'm gonna very carefully line up that drill so it goes through the hole in the actual knife Bank and once I'm happy that's in the right place hold everything nice and firm and just very carefully drill all the way through you might need to bring the driller a little bit just to clear and carefully when you get to the other side just drill very carefully so it doesn't tear out the other side and we should have a hole that's gone all the way through now if you've got a particular timber that's likely to break out you can sometimes just put a little bit of masking tape on this back side so that when you drill through it prevents any terror but this hours pretty good it's pretty safe to the gist real all the way through so that's our first hole done if you wanted to if you were thinking that this might move you could drop a little dummy pin in there to hold it in place but I'm quite happy that this clamp is sufficiently firm enough so we work down the line and we'll then work down to our next hole which is this four mil diameter hole that's gonna go through where that little first loveless bolt is going to go so mine right all the way through and you'll probably see even at this stage this is why I put the clamp in the very middle of the tang so that it's there's a lot of clearance between the clamp and the Chuck of my drills so that's the next hole down so we'll work down the line obviously I could use that same drill and just move it but I kind of prefer having everything set up ready to rock so I don't have to move the sort of one two three blocks too much line that up the drill all the way through [Music] and that's pretty much those holes drilled now now the important thing is we need to mark out the shape of the knife before we unclamp this so we'll go to the next bench and show you how to do that so I've got this very high-tech setup over here that allows me to lay my handle block on there still keeping the the clamp in place and just allows me to get biro and just mark all the way around there I mean some people use like a permanent marker but what I found is if you use a marker sometimes it it bleeds into the material so I prefer just to use a borrow if I'm working on synthetic handle materials I'll tend to use a scribe and scratch it scratch it around but with woody doesn't show up very well so just make sure you go all the way around then what we can do is we can unclamp it obviously if you've got a specific blade and you're working on multiples make sure you keep the blades and the handles together so you know which is which now we've got our profile drawn all the way around but the next thing we need to know is where the handle will finish when I position this I allowed sufficient waste in front of where the handle will finish so that I can trim this off it's a real pain if you handle materials too short and you've you haven't got it beyond where you actually want the handle to finish so make sure you have a bit of surplus both sides so this is where that handle blank that we were showing you earlier really helps because obviously that will actually show me where the handle scales will finish and I try and keep them all pretty much the same so that everyone is a bit consistent so if you haven't got a handle blank you can just mark where you want the handle to finish and then use a ruler or curve to just draw that line over there but what I find is if I even if I've been drilling a blade like that I'll tend to use a handle blank just to line up like so and then I can just mark that front area or that handle there so at this stage we've got our holes drilled but they still move around there too separate scales at this stage so when we take them to the saw to cut them out we want to make sure that we're cutting iron out so that they're a matching pair so at this stage this is where I use these little dummy pins so these are actually loveless bolts or certainly one half of them and I can use these as a sort of adjustable pin so I can slide that all the way through the handle materials and then I can adjust that little loveless bolt so that I can make it so that no add no sort of extra screw sticks out from beyond the other side if you don't do that and there's a bit of pin sticking out when you put it on the bandsaw to cut it it will Rock all over the place so having having these adjustable ones so that you can adjust them for different thicknesses of handle material is actually quite quite useful so that's going to lock that in place and just as an extra I like to even add a little bit of same material that I use for the lanyard hole but I've just squeezed the end in a voice to just create a little flared end so it gives me something to grip and it stops it going all the way through so that's how to carves sort of back together again so we'll take them to the saw and we'll cut mate so come over to the bandsaw this is the one that I've got set up for cutting wood so it's just got a normal paint in fact this has actually got a normal carbon steel blade on there I do actually tend to run metal cutting blades even on this wood cutting bandsaw but that'll be fine for cutting this wood now I go for a quarter inch blade because it allows me to cut these curves a little bit easier and obviously because you've got all this Hardware sticking out at the top you need to adjust your blade guides so that there is close to the handle materials possible but obviously so you you're sort of little pins I'm going to catch and then we're gonna carefully cut it now I want to turn the extractor on it'll be a bit noisy so pretty much cut all the way around the profile now we've got as close to that line as we dare but obviously we want to make sure that if anything we always aim on the outside of that that Penn line the only bit that really matters to clean up at this stage is this front the rest of it will obviously get cleaned up and shaped when we actually shape the knife handle when it's actually glued on but this bit is the bit that we need to concentrate on next so we're gonna take it through to the growing room and we're gonna actually put a final finish on this front of the handle scales before we go any further so come through to the grinding room and this is my sort of setup for any sort of wood growing in really so I've got a good extraction on this machine and I've got a 60 grit Zucco nion belt running on this at the moment and that would probably be coarse enough to remove any excess material don't run it too fast I mean this is where a variable speed really comes into its own because certain Hanul materials will scorch if the belts running too fast so first thing I had to do is set this fence and I want to make sure that that fence is actually pretty much square up so having a little engineer square you can around the workshop is always pretty handy and I'm gonna grind this front profile to my line that's the first task that I'm gonna do so turn the grinder on turn the extractor on one so that's gone right back to that pain line it's entirely up to you if you wanted to make it a little bit nicer to work with you could actually use the grinder even as it stays clean up those those egg is just work a little bit closer to the line I tend to do that because he's got to come off at some point so you may as well do it now and there's no stealing there [Music] makes it really nice to work so at that stage we've cleaned up that front if you wanted to you could try it on your blade and make sure you're happy with the shape and the overall length of it but because I'm following that same pattern I'm pretty happy that that's gonna work the next thing I want to do is I want to put an angle sort of front to the front of the scales so rather than adjust this this table because I want to keep that this nice and square I've just made my self this very simple little jig that just sits on there and that gives me the determine angle every time and what we're gonna do is we will now remove these pins and we've actually work on each half of the handle scales you will need them later and now this is the important factor if you haven't got liners attached to your knife handle it's very easy to groin the wrong side so I used to always just mark with a pencil outside and obviously inside when you've got liners it's really hard to get make that same mistake so I'm gonna grind on this outsides face I'll lay that dead flat on to my little angled slope that I've got here and I'm gonna grind away and I'm not gonna grind all the way up to that line and I'm gonna grind to the point where I'm just a few millimeters away from that edge really but you'll see as I go so turn the grinder on and I start to remove that extra material I'm looking at the moment I'm not I'm not growing in Carroll Alto and I get the juice my pressure Brown so I'm probably about a millimeter away from where that line of style and that's probably pretty good good place to finish at this 60 grit stage as you can see it leaves some pretty deep structures in there and we're gonna do the same on the other side just throw it out now you might be wondering why we bother to put that sort of angled slope on the front of the knife scales it basically allows you to any especially on the finished knife to sort of put your thumb over the edge so if you're doing things like just leave the grips and things like that it just makes the handle nicer to hold also put in that angled slope it really helps when you actually put your knife in your sheath whether it be a leather sheath of Kydex sheath that angled slope just helps the knife handle go into the sheath nicely without it's or hitting up on a square square edge now if you haven't got a grinder you can do this manually by hand with foils and some various grades of sandpaper but obviously this does speed the whole operation up so that was 60 grit we're gonna go through some grades of paper now so we're gonna change it over 120 grit next and I want to work through the grades right up to 400 grit on the grinder and get a really nice smooth finish so carefully work back on those slopes again legacy from 60 to 120 to already making a big difference and this is what I love about the radius master so much it's so quick to change the belts over I'll go for 220-grit now and at this stage you might even find the you wanna go slightly slower on the grinder so turn the speed down we've got one twenty two twenty look you can start to see that it's getting really smooth now and it's even starting to hit that loin of material and clean that up as well so change the bow again to 220 I think I'll normally go from math to 400 if you find that when you're working through these grits you look at the handle scale and you still see scratches from the previous grip they just go back a grit and then make sure you get rid of them really start of really look good now and it feels so much nicer on when you actually run your finger over so that stage normally what I do is actually put the handle scales back together again broke one of those pins in and make sure you drop at least one of those either another screw or the lanyard hole and you want to basically line them up there is a tendency that when you're grinding you might grind beyond and this might not actually be the same shape anymore so I'm very carefully gonna do is just hit that on the flat part of the grinder and just take off and make sure that it all lays up nice and parallel again so I'm happy now that that will match up on both sides of the blade it looks really bad if you get a knife sometimes one scale finishes a different angle to the other side the knife blade so the handles aren't matched and it looks really bad so you want to make sure that that he's really nice and crisp and symmetrical so we're just going to do a little bit of hand sanding a little bit clean up on that and then it should be ready for the next stage so we've got those fronts prepared on the grinder but it's a real nice thing just to finish it off a little bit by hand I've got various grits but I probably go from straight from a 400 grit on the grinder to probably a 600 or an 800 grit paper so this is actually this is actually 800 grit that should be plenty especially being stabilized woody tends to polish up really nicely with them still connected as well as one block of wood again I'll just rub it on that flat basically what I'm trying to do now is the grinder will put the scratches if any in that direction and I'm working across this way and what that will do is will actually show me if I've missed any of those grits and there's a deep scratch in there from like a previous grit like a 60 grit or something it will help me see if that's still there because of that stage I want to make sure that I get those out so you can see that cleans that up nicely let's do that side and then this other side because we've done all sort of preparation beforehand this is a very sort of minimal stage really just like so that's looking pretty good and then I will just hit the front where those liners sort protrude as well make sure that you polish any scratches that are there now these are vulcanized fibre but obviously you could be using g10 you could be using some other materials some people even use brass and things like that but they tend to polish up quite nicely the old dirt vulcanized fiber so that's pretty good and I mean that would be sufficient just to go on your knife as it stands but what I like to do next is just hit it on the buffer very very gently not too hard not too too too much pressure because it will scorch it and I'll charge this up normally right on my my buffs what they're for so this is for would I think that once codex down that end so it helps if you use one one particular mop of a particular material so we'll turn that on buffer probably the most dangerous machine in the shop really so you have to be a bit careful how you use it so when you turn it on it's spinning towards me and I want to make sure that I'm working beyond that center line so obviously that's the center of the spindle I need to be working lower and obviously we've still got our bolts and things protruding it's probably safer if you take those out but we want to try and buff those as one one one piece so just be aware when you've got those things protruding so turn that on this is just some very pale wax buffing compound I don't tend to use any of the colored compounds on natural materials all it does is stick in the grain and it'll horrible so that's just a very sort of sort of wax really just to help prevent it from like I say very gently working beyond that center line and I'm the buff one so you can see already look just the difference the one that's sanded and the one that's buffed it just makes it really pop and I think that's well worth it this side and then I tend to hold it square on and just make sure that I catch those those liners [Music] and you can see that that makes such a difference it's all these subtle little parts that add up to the whole the whole product really those little attentions to detail make a sort of heirloom quality product really so so far we've got our profile done and we've spent a lot of time making the Front's of our scales beautiful but at this stage it's worth checking to make sure that it's all going to fit nicely on your knife blade so we're gonna use the actual bolts from our loveless bolts that we're gonna use in this method of construction and I'm gonna slip those through those holes that I've already drilled and get our blade because we haven't actually fitted this handle either side of the knife blade itself yet so it's a good opportunity just to check that it all goes together so that's no problem but now when we add the next component which is obviously the thumb tube we want to make sure that that fits all together nicely as well so that's feeling pretty good now it's laying nice and flat it's also looking nice at the front end of the scale as well if we needed to at this stage we could adjust this if it was either sloping backwards or if you'd made the classic error of making the handle too long and he actually projected over where your plunge line is you could obviously make it shorter obviously we haven't ground this blade yet so if we are growing in the bevel we need to make sure that we don't grow in beyond where our handles finish so I normally put a little pen mark on there to indicate where I want it to finish it seems excessive to go to this point to sort of check that it all goes together but at this stage we could actually ream these holes slightly and make it all go together but at the next part of the process where we count of all these holes once you've done that it's very difficult to adjust so it's worth just checking it all goes together nicely before the next process really so I'm happy that that's all working nicely so you can remove those now if you were using mosaic pins or just pin stock they work pretty much like our a sore thumb tube works so you pretty much good to go really because we're using loveless bolts loveless bolts are effectively a what we call a sleeve sleeping up so it needs to sit into a counterbored hole so that it pulls up against the little shelf and that actually fixes the handle very securely to the tang itself the thing that I like to do first before I do those counter bores is I like to add some extra little holes on the inside of the scale to add a degen basically adds surface area and it helps the epoxy that we're gonna use really sort of dig into the handle scales and obviously bond the handle scales to the blade so I used to use different things for doing these counter bores actually found that using a countersink works really nicely especially if you've got handle liners bonded onto your scales if you're using things like fiber line are there the tendency to sort of tear out if you're just using a normal drill bit so I've got this small countable set up and it should give me enough travel on the drill and I'm just going to put a tiny little maybe three mil divot in the inside of the scale obviously making sure that I go way beyond the edge of the handle scale if you wanted to you could mark it out beforehand and it might seem excessive but I tend to run a little extractor on the pillar drill itself as well but put to me an affront hands into the handle and I thought a couple back here a few more there and then I'll flip it round but one man [Music] so that just adds extra area for the glue to sink into and obviously help bomb that handle on there now the advantage you're using that counter ball is it doesn't tear any of the liner material it just leaves a really nice neat smooth hole like I say if you use a normal twist bit it has a tendency to sort of tear a chunk out so we'll do the other one [Music] [Music] if you wanted to you could set the depth stop on your pillar drill so each one is the same depth but I sort of just do it by eye and as long as they're sufficiently in from the edge you're not going to sort of encounter any problems really now just in case there is a slight burr on that inside from from doing those tank that those little little recesses for the epoxy I like to just sand it on the inside it a bit just to tidy it up and what I find works best is actually a sanding disk and I've stuck it to a piece of marble these are some sort of cheap marvel cutting boards from the sort of like cheap sort of supermarket I wouldn't advise cutting your vegetables on it because it rips you nice but it's perfect for having a dead flat surface and what I can carefully do it's just the lay might handle scale on there and just very gently do a few passes and it will take off any of those little high spots and get a really nice flat surface it actually puts a slight texture to the liner as well out the blue bonnet is rough I wouldn't use a SuperDuper coarse grain and what you'll find is you'll put really deep scratches on your liner and it'll actually look like a gap when you actually put your knife together but that's smooth that up nicely and they're still bonding as one unit basically nice and flat so done the little recesses for the glue I'm happy they all fits together so now we can think about those counter bores so go back to the pillar drill we'll change the drill bit over and I'll show you my counter bore now you can buy counter bores that will correspond with the fixings that you using I find that their net never really that that sharp so I make these out of a conventional twist drill and I've actually ground it with a grinder so that I've actually got like a sort of lead spike basically that will be four mil that will match the diameter of a sort of loveless bolt and obviously will locate in those holes that we've already drilled and then we've got the outside diameter is the same size as the actual outside diameter our loveless bolt sleeve nut so these are 5/16 which basically equates to about eight mil so this is an 8 mil drill that I've ground and that will work perfectly for my my loveless bolts so what I'm gonna do is I want to slide this into the Chuck and I know from experience that if I line up that that sort of lead spike that I've created so that it almost hits the table of my my pillar drill table that will give me the perfect amount of material left on the reverse side of the handle that you'll create a really nice solid shelf for that and that's that lovely spot to sit up against so I need to adjust this this table a little bit I know some people will just let it hit the table but it has a tendency to sort of want to kick over so I like to make sure that there's a little bit of a clearance just like so and if you wanted to you could you could Lakia your table on you when you pill a drill to make sure it doesn't move but I know that that's gonna be pretty much good to go so when you're using these it's very important that you allow that that leads of toilet to follow the line that you've already drilled in there and then we're just gonna hold it really nice and firm and then go all the way down with our counter ball so that leaves that little shelf so we'll turn on the extractor let it find its way and then once you've found the center block it anyway so you can see we've drilled that hole it's not gone all the way through we're left with a nice little shelf that that little sleeve nuts gonna sit up against and we could do all four but I wanna show you how it fits together so I normally got a little came to sink on this drill I just take off that hard edge just like so and then we'll find one of our loveless bolts and you see that it goes in there nice is it not a loose fit wants to be quite a tight positive fit because we don't want any nasty gap when we glue up but that's looking like it's gonna work perfectly so we'll draw the other view [Music] so I've got the blade mounted in this voice now this is the voice that I use for glue up so it's got some soft jaws on there and it's not a bad idea to place your blade in a vise when you're doing that putting the handles on whether it's glue up or a dry fit like this because you need two hands when you're manipulating all the little different little components so it seems crazy but I like to do a little test fit to make sure everything's gonna fit together so we'll mount that in the blade I know that's not ground and it's not sharpened yet but you could do it at this stage or when the actual blades print but I'd always that Voorhies doing this before you get any epoxy near it because I'll use a an epoxy called G flex which gives you quite a long working time but if you're using something like a five minute epoxy those five minutes disappear so quickly and you've got all these little components and you'll be you'll be stressing so I have a dry run and it will really help you so we're going to start by putting one half of the the knife together so we're going to put those little sleeve nuts in in those count applause we've got you don't have to push them all the way at this stage if you don't want to because the other half will actually pull them to fit and then we get this half so we've got our other half of our loveless bolt that slides in there and then we'll even get one of our foam tubes again and slide that in there as well and remember when you're doing this with epoxy everything it's gonna be icky and sticky and sliding around so getting used to this process is a really good idea so line that up now I use a little cordless screwdriver with a bit in the end of it and that's gonna help me drive the screws in a little bit quicker but make sure you set it to a fairly low torque setting because you don't want to strip those those little sleeve button bolts so start it off nice and gentle to start make sure you get both of them started before you drive one all the way be careful that this doesn't slip and scratch the front of your handle scale like I say when it's all covered in glue II have a tendency to do that you can start to see now it starts to pull those actual sorts leave nuts or the loveless bolts together and there's that talk setting like I was talking about now the reason why the torque setting is important to fold one we don't want it to strip our threads on our loveless bolts but also you don't want to squeeze these so tight that when you actually squeeze them it squeezes all the epoxy out of the join you actually want to leave some epoxy in there to create that waterproof seal so make sure you don't squeeze it to death basically and that's pretty much it okay it's not ground and sharpened yet and we haven't got any epoxy on there but you can start to see how it all starts to come together and it's really nice to hold it up to some alloy and check you've got no gaps if you've got any gaps here you can take it to pieces and maybe do a little bit of preparation on the sanding discs that we showed you earlier and just flatten the handle scales if you need to but that's looking like it's coming together nicely now the reason why I like using loveless bolts is that there are mechanical fit so that's actually helping to hold that handle on there even without the epoxy and just so that you can sort of see how it works I grabbed all of the salt you can start to see I've got this sort of cut through so that's got one other sleeve nuts in there and what we've done is we've counterbored it like we did with that handle and you can see how you've got this little shelf that that the sleeve nut sits up against and then when you tighten it it's gonna squeeze it all together now when you grind the handle to shape this all gets cut off and you're just left with what I like actually it looks like a little decorative little bird's eye actually in the handle and it looks really nice that's pretty much it that's ready first the blade to be ground and cleaned up so that's how we go about making the handles for our full-tang knives obviously we haven't shown you how to do the epoxy in but we'll maybe do that in another video but hopefully that'll help all you avid knife makers out there if you've got any questions please feel free to just drop us a line and yeah remember to subscribe to the channel because then you'll be notified when we release new video or knife making or craft videos and things like that so thanks for watching and see you next time

Channel: Ben & Lois Orford

Views: 119,570

Keywords: knife making, fitting handle, lanyard, drilling holes, marking out, profile, blade, knife, how to, ben Orford, craftlabknives

Id: ge-Ilm1MG4M

Length: 39min 0sec (2340 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 20 2020