How to Make a Knife - The Crooked Finger

hey guys Jeremy here was simple of life and welcome to another knife making tutorial the goal with this knife was just to kind of make the knife making less boring you guys ever get bored doing the things that you really enjoy doing your hobby sometimes I found that once I went full time with knife making it actually it did turn into a job I mean it's a great job I am doing something that I enjoy but it is a job and so every now and then I've got a really kind of kicked myself out of this little boredom rut that I fall into and so that's kind of what this knife represents I wanted to try something completely different than anything I've ever made before and I mean obviously it's a knife and Scott handle scales and processes are the same but as far as the shape of it this is something I've never really tried and have never even really been overly I've never had a desire to try a knife like this but I thought you know what I'm gonna do it anyway so I'm gonna call this one the crooked finger now just like I do most of my prototype knives I kind of drew out a template based on stuff that I had in my head and came up with an idea put that on the paper cut that paper out use some adhesive included onto the steel and I showed early in the video the steel that I'm going to use is oh one tool steel and I do all my prototype work in oh one tool steel it's not my favorite steel anymore I still really enjoyed it's a great steel but I'm really really falling in love with a lot of these stainless steels just for their wear resistance characteristics obviously they're stain resistance and some of those stainless steels it is amazing at the edge retention that they have a really really blows my mind so cut every note on the portable bandsaw and then we profiled it with our belt grinder there this is just some other profiling parts we got the 10-inch contact wheel on here and we're just kind of you know working that little that little curved part there make it kind of a it's not really a clip point I guess kind of a real real pokey stabby kind of a looking knife and then the last day to the profiling process will be with the small wheel attachment here can I get this finger groove all sorted out and using ceramic grits here this one's a 50 grit it's fairly worn out but it works good for the rough profiling stuff and then once we've got a profile I'll kind of draw in where I think the scales should end and leave that line there so I can visualize it and then I will draw in where I think the two screws or pins or whatever we're gonna use to hold the scales to the knife so in this instance we're going to use screws with the little standoffs inside there I get a lot of questions where I get my handle hardware I get all mine from USA knife maker com I have no affiliation with them but that's where I buy it from so you can check out the stuff as far as sizing goes there's so many different sizes and it all depends on what you're making so have a look you may need to go through the materials that you have the stock that you work with and take some measurements but they've got a lot of stuff there and it's really really good I don't know how competitive their prices are because once I found that stuff I haven't really shopped around for it I just kind of use it because I ignore I can get it from so I'm also going out a couple of holes mostly for weight reduction the way that we're gonna grind this blade is going to take a lot of weight out of the blade portion so I don't want the handle too heavy and then with the g10 I mean it's a fairly heavy material anyways that's what we're gonna be using for handle scales and so I just wanted to remove a little bit of weight from the handle just to kind of keep it a little bit more balanced and then we use the center scribe jig and marked in the lines that we're going to grind to now one thing I'm gonna do with this knife that's a little bit interesting is I'm gonna do the 36 inch radius platen basically so it's gonna be a hollow grind but you see the platen that we put on there it's a 36 inch radius so it's not you know most my hollow grinds that do with it like a 10-inch this is gonna be much less pronounced almost you can't even tell that it's a hollow grind when you're setting up your grinder in this fashion freehand grinding with this type of a platen is very difficult because as soon as your angle changes a little bit it really changes basically where the grind line is where you're grinding on the bevel and stuff so I find when I'm using these 36 inches it's so much easier with the jig so this was a simple jig that I did my rough grinding width is a piece of angle iron was a little jacking that I've been using this thing for years and years and then we set this to about 5 degrees now I do have another type of a jig that I'm gonna use later on in the video and that is a 5 degree jig too but just for my rough grinding that way can you know use a vise grip unclamp it back and forth really quickly and we're gonna go down to about maybe 40 50 to add thickness we're not good too thin here especially once we get up to the point of the blade there I mean that's there's not a lot of material there and just kind of worried about warp edges and stuff so we're not getting crazy with the rough rides but we're definitely setting in our grinds there once we're heat-treated we'll go and clean everything up and the belt that I'm using here is a 50 grit ceramic typically I'll get about two knives of this size out of one belt and then I'll just kind of retire that belt for profiling but not use it anymore for putting in bevels so now we're gonna heat treat this blade with my o1 tool steel I take it to 1600 degrees because I find that it the the distance between the oven and the oil it cools down so much you know if I take it to 1450 or 1500 I'll quench it and I'll take a file to it and it is not hard like the file will cut into it like nothing and just I don't know it could be my it could be my kiln too right it might be kind of off and so I go to 69 degrees and that's what I take it up to and then quench it before I do any temper cycles I'm throwing it in liquid nitrogen the big advantage even with the carbon steels like this is a one tool steel I mean for a lot of stainless steels you really do need the cryo to get the most performance out of them but all stainless all steel sorry benefit from a cryogenic treatment and with the old one a lot of high carbon Steel's I've done a lot of research from a lot of very reputable sources I mean I haven't I don't have a laboratory that can't test this myself so you kind of pick and choose where you get your information but from the things that I've looked into in red you can get like a 400% increase in wear resistance on a one tool steel with a cryogenic treatment and so that to me makes it worth it and I can actually tell a difference I can notice the difference in the wear resistance especially when it comes down to my finish grinding it grinds much slower after cryo so that's why I pretty much every single knife make now gets a deep cryogenic treatment and then here's that second jig that I was talking about this is a piece of just like bar stock I think there's a three quarter inch by one inch piece of steel bar and I machined a 5 degree bevel into it and then I've got a hole tapped in there that I can actually bolt the knife to through the tang and I'd like to use this for my finished grinds because it's a little a little easier in the hands I can kind of fit ass things and a lot of times I find that when I'm finished grinding sometimes you're literally just touching on a certain area right it's not like you know when I'm doing my rough grinds typically I'll start at the plunge and it's a full drag across the blade to the tip plunge line full drag but I find one I'm often doing a lot of these cleanup things you'll kind of look back and forth between the two sides and a lot of times I'm like okay I'm just gonna work this part of the belly just a few passes here and there and often they'll go back and forth between one side to another just to keep the geometry right make sure everything all the lines line up properly but I find this jig works really well for that it's really quick to switch back and forth but it's a lot of a lot of control in the hand with the way that I can hold it now after he treat my grinding progression is a hundred twenty grit ceramic belt that's what I go to and then from there I'll go to a a 65 try Zack Bell that's what I'm switching out to right here kind of finish everything else right here's where I'll really concentrate on the plunge line make sure I have the same radius on each side make sure that the the grind line the bevel line is really nice and flat and I find a lot of times if I'm having little Wiggles here and there just minor ones I can I can kind of fix them a lot better on these try Zack belts and I can on the ceramic and I don't know if that's just kind of like my mindset or if it actually is a little bit easier a little more forgiving but that's definitely what I do I don't really spend too much time getting everything perfect with the ceramic belts I put the tries act on and these are kind of like my cleanup belts where I really start worrying about the details and then once I've got everything cleaned up on the try Zack belts I'll usually finish up with a scotch-brite belt and this is a fine grit scotch-brite belt and this is like the ultimate level of blending and and kind of forgiveness but you still get to maintain those grind lines from the grinder and right here is like a half speed shot you can see it's a really nice satin finish but it's still a belt finish and I really I really love that you know I hands and sometimes it's not my favorite thing to do but I love sometimes when you can you know you figure out the process and the steps that you that you need to get a good belt finish for the way you grind your knife so for me post heat-treat it's 120 a65 syrup on the try Zack and then these Scott red belts that works really well and now what I'm doing right here is cleaning up the flats on the trys act now for you to take a scotch-brite belt and do this you would end up putting scratch lines into your bevels so when I'm cleaning up the flats I always just finish at the a65 it's a little bit coarser it looks a little coarser than the bevel but I think that's okay it doesn't bother me that much it's still really nice and clean you know not really heavy lines once we've invested all that time in the bevels we'll tape up the knife protect those bevels and then I'm just gonna pick which type of material I want to use and I really had no clue kind of wandered around thinking what am I gonna use and I ended up setting the Ling on just plain g10 with a red g10 liner and the idea behind this knife what I'd wanted to try to do was very clean hard lines you know I wasn't doing a lot of contouring on this I wasn't gonna you know make it really comfortable or it's a meat it feels great in the hand they'll get me wrong it's not like an uncomfortable knife but I wanted it to be very simple so essentially I'm gonna cut out the profile but what I wanted to do with the handle portion of this was try to get a really clean very consistent just execute a 45 degrees really well and you'll see at the end of the video or when we reveal the knife I think it's amazing when you take something as simple as just like a mono colored g10 but you put the time into it and get it right it actually you know in itself it stands out well it can hold its own I mean it's a great-looking handle when it's all said and done but really there's absolutely nothing special about it's not one of these beautiful Brule's are some fancy type of you know composite or anything it's just a piece of black g10 that is very lightly sculpted just took out 45s on it but it's been done well at least in my opinion mean you know I put a lot of work into this thing and I think it's amazing so it's a good lesson sometimes you know you can do something very simple but if you do it properly it can look really really good so what i'm doing here is pose glue up we just epoxy these two pieces together and then flatten them out a little bit once I cut them to size I'll flatten them a little bit more but I had some big hanging globs of epoxy that I need to get rid of before I could even make a decent cut on these so kind of mark roughly what size we wanted this to be and rather than gluing up like two separate sets of handle scales like the right side in the left side I'll just glue this whole piece up together and then cut it in half definitely works well and then now that we've got that done now we'll go ahead and get it nice and flat clean it up I get a lot of questions on what is it that I cleaned the belts with and those are just called a rubber cleaning stick a little abrasive rubber stick a lot of places that sell sanding materials and supplies abrasives sell those it's just like a really really soft rubber and it just kind of cleans out the little valley of your braces so that the they cut faster for longer it's not like it makes them last longer but they just cut better throughout their life so once we've got those flattened up now I'm just gonna take my two pieces stack them so that the insides are touching the inside and the outsides are to the outside and then place the knife on top of that and then we're just gonna use some can't twist clamps to kind of lock everything down and drill it I know a lot of people like to drill one scale at a time I used to always do that but I love this method because first of all if I was using pins I don't need to pre-cut any pins and then also like for something like this when I'm not using pins you know I can just kind of drill holes I'm just gonna marking my quarter inch hole so we can transfer the exact location and then what I'm doing is I'm drilling the diameter of the screws it's gonna go in there and this will kind of make sense once you see is kind of bolting the knife together now the one thing with drilling one scale at a time and a drill press if you're using a set of say burl scales that are kind of matched like bookmarked scales it's really hard to get them exact whereas you can stack them on top of each other line everything up put the blade on top clamp it all together and you know that those pins are gonna go through pretty much the same part so I find especially when you're using different you know woods and scales that have some grain that you want to keep lined up clamping them together is by far the best way to go about it at least that's what I've experienced so now I've kind of just traced out described out with a line the general outline of the knife there we can kind of trim off some of the excess g10 we're not gonna get a too close right now because we're gonna finally profile it to the tang of the knife itself but just get it sort of close and then what we're gonna do here is just counter bore a quarter inch hole and this is gonna be a little bit of a recess where the little standoff with a little threaded aluminum portion that we put into the handle that's gonna be the clearance for that and then on the other side what we're doing here is we're countersinking just deep enough so that the screws will sit flush and they won't be sticking out into the handle at all and that's a little bit of just kind of fitting it up drilling a little deeper and then using whatever means you can it could be a stop on your drill press I'm just using the dial indicator gauge on my milling machine here but you just want to kind of control the depth from one side to the other and keep things fairly consistent and now that we've got that fit up there we can lock everything down and start grinding that g10 to the tang of the knife and I'm using my 10-inch contact wheel here with a work rest and that work rest is exactly 90 degrees to the surface of the contact wheel and I find that it's really nice rather than I used to kind of hold it you know and grind vertically look down it this is really nice because I know everything's flat and true again here this work rest on my small wheel holder it's perfectly 90 degrees and it's really nice when I can just worry about keeping the thing flat grinding all the g10 to the tang and knowing that I've got a nice even you know basically all square edges to work form I think that's really really important I've noticed a huge improvement when I've started using these work rests and then when I was setting up these work rests I was being very very fussy when I made them to make sure that they were exactly 90 degrees to the grinding surface so now that we've got that done we're gonna take out the blade and then we're just gonna finish up the part of the upper part there um just a 45 degrees there clean those up shape them on the belt grinder and then we're gonna finish them up by hand and you know the nice thing with the bolt on scales is that you can kind of adjust this put it back on the blade see if you like it or not you know adjust that put it back on back and forth it's not like when you're gluing the scales on where this part has to be completely finished you can kind of keep tweaking it and then you can polish and buff all the scales and sand them up to their grits as you go and then at the very end obviously put them on the knife so what I'm doing right here is marking out where I want to grind that 45 degrees to and I'm just using a little ruler there stainless steel ruler just to kind of shim it up a bit and then leaving a pencil flat on the ground at surface plate to mark in in my line and then this was the work rest that I made the adjustable tricular Timor crest and I've got this exactly a 45 degrees and we're just grinding everything in to that I'm taking everything on a 80 grit belt here with the g10 I mean it's a softer material it's not hard to sand so really I took this - 80 grit on my profiling and then I finished everything up by hand from there so from 80 I went to 220 400 800 and then we actually went up 2,000 grit and then we buffed these skills so really really was fairly quick shaping all these the hardest part the part that I had to focus the hardest on was the inside radius and that's what I set up the smoke wheel for and then again I had a work rest on there unfortunately I mean looking at the footage afterwards you can't see and do the grinding my hands are right in the way not visible they'll work rest I had for a five-inch contact wheel so I just switch out that main arm and put the work rest on that I need and so this is for the small wheels and again there's my fingers you can see exactly yes my fingers are doing great job here can't see any the grinding going on but this was a part that I really had to focus on and it's weird cuz he almost can't really see very well what's going on so it's kind of like a light grind and look and a light grind and look this part was a little bit frustrating for me because I like things to go quicker than this did but I found that you know when I was looking and grinding I mean I had to go so slow I had to take so many passes just because I couldn't really see what was going on when I was grinding but we eventually got it right and then we put this thing together and the reason I bolted everything together for finish sanding is that way I can put it into my little knife makers vice this way it can kind of rotate it you know tilt it up and down wherever I want I've got both sets of scales the only part that I couldn't work on here was that the ricasso area but everything else I sanded up first and this little vise works really good then again you know if I need to kind of correct things I can always take these scales off do a little bit more work to them but having them on the knife like this makes it really easy to you know I've got good traction there they're rigid and I can sand I can move them around do whatever I like works really really well and the nice thing with this too is that I really don't have to do any work on the parts that we've ground to the tang so basically you know all along the spine where the spine comes into the handle there I'm not touching that now like I finished that on the belt grinder I don't need to be rounding anything over so I don't need to worry about that getting scratched up and this was actually really really nice very the very systematic way of doing handle scales and again I just really want to focus on getting really great straight lines keeping everything flat so we've got a consistent 45 degrees everywhere and the overall result I'm really quite happy with it very very simple very elegant kind of tactical I guess sort I mean it's not I say elegant but I know I was really happy with the way these turned out and then I'm just using my buffing wheel the one thing I forgot to film was I had the a buffing wheel with some black compound just to kind of smooth everything over with a G can you do need to be a little bit careful because you can actually do some material removal with a buffing wheel and compound so it's not like you're really hogging material off there but just kind of really smoothing everything and blending it all in and then the last step that I did to these scales was use some McGuire's 20 X scratch remover and this was after I'd taken up to a thousand grit and then I just did a really really soft mop you know these little buffing wheels is the kind that's not sewn together at all so it's literally just you know a couple inches of flexible fabric and this is essentially just giving a really quick buff to get a nice shine on the scales and then after it's all said and done really really nice the way that g10 finishes out with the scratch remover I'm sure you could use other brands I just use McGuire's but it just does a fantastic job of just putting a really nice sheen on there and here you can kind of see the execution that I was going for simple lines it's just a 45 but I wanted it to be a 45 done you know where you'd have to look for a heck of a long time to find a flaw in there and really really happy with the way it turned out now speaking of flaws I mean this is I'm doing an acid stone wash this is a great way to hide flaws in your knives but I honestly love knives I love acid stone washes I know they're kind of a personal preference thing a lot of people hate them actually I'll let you know a little secret here it's coming in the video when I was making this knife I did one of them with an acid stone wash in oh one tool steel and the other one I did in nitro V and I did not do an acid stone wash object the metal finish so it went two different directions look the same knife is kind of fun I've just you know kind of doing it while I was going on here to keep it interesting but anyways this one is the main build that we're following here I didn't plan on doing the other knife I was just kind of kind of into this one I thought you know what I mean I really love the shape of it after I'd profiled it and roughed in my bevels I thought I really liked this I'm gonna do another one really quick so I'd already started filming this one and I thought well follow this build along but I'm gonna show you that other knife momentarily so we throw the sucker in here we got the rocks going on in here this was a little tumbler that I made and literally it's just gravel in there I tumbled for about 20 minutes and that just does a good job of putting on enough random scratches in there the one nice thing I really liked about the acid stone washed is that for an EDC type knife and if that's gonna be used a lot they do a great job of hiding you know the little if you drop it on gravel you might get the little errant scratch here and there but it's gonna kind of blend in far more so than if you just have like a mono finish you know a sanded finish or a hand sanded finish or whatever so now I like to always put my makers mark on my knives and a lot of times with the removable scale I'll often hide the maker's mark so I'm actually etching this into the steel but it's gonna be underneath the handle it's still there you know if somebody wants to say is that a homestead knife yes they can look and find my logo but I didn't want it to distract from the lines of the knife mostly for my own reasons is because you know this is a profile in a shape that I've never made before and when I look at it and evaluate it when it's all said and done whether I like it or not I don't want anything to take away from what my eyes see including my logo I just want to see the shape of the knife I'm going to see where the plunge line is where the bevel is and you know not be distracted so that's why I decided to hide the knife or the logo on this knife here and I did the exact same thing with this one this is that other knife that I was talking about so this is 3/16 inch thick nitro V stainless steel the other knife that we were working on was the 1/8 inch oh one tool steel and then again we've got these burl scales here with a composite it's actually glow-in-the-dark kind of carbon fiber composite stuff two completely different directions with the same blade profile and I thought is actually it's actually really fun to kind of work on these and finish them up at the same time this one here I put a swedge or a false top like a false edge on the top they're just purely for the aesthetics of it so there's a line that you could look at and it's really interesting to see you know these things side by side the you know this one's a beautiful slicer it's a little thinner almost more utilitarian the other one feels more like a showpiece I ended up sharpening this one that I didn't film it I took this to the paper wheels and it literally took just a few passes because end up grain is - about ten thousandth of an inch at the edge after heat-treat but really really nice sharp knife and really happy with the way that this one turned out here's some Beauty shots of the blade very very clean this next shot here you'll see you see he'd like just those lines that's what I was going for is going for just just really subtle nothing fancy but almost I'm almost wanted to look like a factory knife right like people say wow this was a CNC machine that didn't is like no that was me freehand grinding on my Bell grinder so that was kind of the goal and then this one we took similar styling cues up at the the top there where it meets the blade but when it at a completely different direction and I'm really happy with the way this one that turned out too we had some really great grinds this was a really good grind for me the swage was done all freehand there again the bevels on this knife we're done with the jig just because of that 36 inches it's weird and I'm still getting used to it but at the end of the day we've got two knives under the same knife done very different ways and it was a lot of fun anyways guys it was a lot of fun to share this with you I hope you got something out of it and I hope you really enjoyed the video and as always I thank you so much for watching Cheers [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Simple Little Life

Views: 204,648

Keywords: knife making, knifemaking, making a knife, how to make a knife, knife maker, tutorial, knifemkaing tutorial, diy, how to, maker, make, blade, bladesmith, handmade knife, knife, how to heat treat a knife, knives, custom knife, do it yourself, diy knife, handmade, steel, forged in fire, homemade, how to make, simple little life, tools, craft, belt grinder, alec steele, walter sorrells, excellent, fantasy knife, maker movement, simplelittlelife, koss, custom knives

Id: -h7P3Atv8Do

Length: 22min 50sec (1370 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 17 2019