How To Make A Knife Without Heat Treating | The Easiest Knife To Make For a Beginner

what's going on guys it's Alex here so today we're gonna be making a knife without doing any heat treating or at least the heat treating as you may know it we're actually gonna be heat treating this knife inside our home oven yes our home kitchen oven I'm going to be doing that using an old file now the nice thing about files is that they're actually already heat treated these things come hardened right out of the box which means we can we can skip the entire hardening process the whole process of putting this thing in a forge heating it up to critical 1475 1500 degrees and then quenching in canola oil we can skip all that we can go right to the tempering process now I explained the tempering process a little bit later on when we get to that point but first let me touch on something real quick so you are going to need some type of power tool in order to complete this knife this is not a knife that you're going to be able to make completely with hand tools now what I mean by that is you can't really file a file with a file without ruining both of your files we're already working with a hardened file out of the box and you can't file a hardened file with the file my suggestion is you're going to need one of these three power tools you're either gonna need a bench grinder a an angle grinder or a belt sander now there's a really good chance that I'm gonna be using all three of these during the boding process of this knife but you absolutely don't need all three of these you can literally get away with just one so the first thing we want to do is actually go ahead and clean this up with a wire brush on our bench grinder now if you don't have a bench grinder and are only using an angle grinder you can buy a wire brush for your angle grinder or you can just do the old vinegar soak and use a wire brush by hand so I'm just gonna use a wood template that I already have drawn up I've actually made this knife before I have a video making this particular knife but I'm gonna use the same design I'm probably gonna pair a cord wrap the handle and this is kind of a good handle sheep or paracord rat because it kind of has this up sweet back here and this down sweep and you kind of want that to hold your paracord one I'll probably just bring this up a little bit higher in the back here all right so there is our knife design transferred on to our file now is the most important part now remember we're working with a blade that's already been heat treated so the most important thing that you're gonna have to remember during this entire build process is to keep this knife blank cool as you're working it if you overheat this there's a good chance that you're gonna ruin the heat treatment that's already on this blade and really gonna have to throw it out or you're gonna have to start all over with a heat treatment process which is not really what this video is about so at this point I've transferred my knife design onto the steel and I've started cutting out the design with an angle grinder now I pretty much do the entire knife or at least 90% of it with an angle grinder including the bevels the only thing that I really use a belt sander for and the belt grinder is for finishing work but all of that could be done with sandpaper or by hand I do have another video where I demonstrate that and I'll link it below now you don't have to use an angle grinder you could use a bench grinder or a belt sander but again the key here is to keep the blade cool either by dunking it into a water bucket or spraying it down every couple of seconds keep in mind that the thinner portions of the blade will heat up way faster especially around the tip of a knife slow and steady wins the race here now I'm just using a combination of grinding discs and flat discs to shape the blade all of these can be found at your local hardware store home depot I'll put a link to this stuff below remember all of this stuff is not specialty knife making stuff these are all just regular common everyday tools now exactly how you shape the blade is really up to you but the most important thing and have I said this before is to keep the blade cool okay so what exactly does it look like when you overheat a piece of steel well good thing you ask because I'm going to show you all right so here's a cut off piece from a file knife and I'm going to clean this up real quick on the wire wheel because remember in the beginning I said the first thing you want to do is clean off your file that's it you can accurately see the color of the file if it changes temperature and I'm gonna demonstrate that to you right now so here we're starting with a nice clean piece of high carbon steel goodness and we're just gonna jam it right into a bench grinder now I'm showing you this in real time so you can see how quickly the steel begins to change colors starting with a very light straw color turning more and more goldish in the brown purple blue light blue grayish and finally a dark red now each of these three colors corresponds with a temperature change with a light straw color being around 400 degrees to the grayish being around 750 degrees Fahrenheit to the light red being around 1100 give or take now we need to remember these colors later when we go to temper the blade in our home oven but for now as you're grinding if at any point you begin to see the steel change colors especially that we start to see the purplish color you've pretty much overheated the steel in that portion of the blade and you can see here right around where all is cutting on the scrap piece with the angle grinder you can start to see a color change no good so again keep it cool alright guys so we're getting there our knife flank is kind of uneven it's not super refined or anything like that but that's okay we're using a grinding disc but I've got a secret weapon and that is the flat disk for the angle grinder this is the flat disc it's basically it's kind of like a bunch of pieces the sandpaper glued together so to speak and put on an angle grinder disc this is gonna give us a nice convex edge on this knife it's gonna make it super strong and we'll be able to do whatever we want with this but this is pretty much what a knife looks like after about an hour's worth of grinding with an angle grinder and finishing our bevel with an 80 grit flap disk now from here you can do one of two things you can either hand sand or if you have power tools you can use power tools so in order to actually toughen up this blade we need to put it in the oven and temper it at about 400 degrees now basically all that involves is placing this into your home kitchen oven on the center rack and 400 degrees for one hour then you're gonna take it out let it air cool for about 10 minutes and you're gonna put it back in and temper it for another hour at 400 degrees so we're gonna do two cycles two hours to 400 degrees that's gonna bring the hardness level down on this file and make it a lot more tough that way we'll be able to take it out and do pretty much whatever we want to it and not have to worry about a shattering into a million pieces so why do we need to temper well files are typically left very hard so that they can cut metal and file metal now very hard to do is usually exactly what you want in a knife blade as a hard blade aids and edge retention but you don't want too much of a good thing as a very hard blade is also very brittle and you can actually shatter a file if you simply drop it on the floor or do crazy stuff like Patania so in order to increase the blades toughness we do a process called tempering this softens a steel slightly and also increases its toughness now different Steel's have different tempering processes but for a file you can get away with tempering it in your home oven at about 400 degrees Fahrenheit now going back to the whole Steel changes colors as a teated thing if you remember the steel turns a light straw coat it when it's heated to about 400 degrees and if your oven is cooking at the right temperature you should see a light straw color appear during the tempering process now in my experience a lot of ovens are wildly inaccurate so check the knife every so often for a color change if you start to see faint traces of purple during the tempering simply turn the oven down so I'm gonna put a surface conditioning belt on my belt sander and finishes plate up on the surface conditioning belt in case you're wondering this is a surface conditioning belt it's basically a giant scotch-brite pad all right guys you pretty much what you see here with what you get we used an angle grinder to do the rough shaping the bevel grinding all everything has to do with shaping the blade we did with an angle grinder and then we took it to the belt sander to do some of the final finishing touches and then lastly we went to a bench buffer with compound to kind of put a nice little shine on the blade and needless to say the thing is crazy sharp [Music] alright guys so we're pretty much done with the zero heat treating final knife hopefully this video is enjoyable this is definitely a project that you can do inside of a day probably in an afternoon and honestly the longest part of this project is throwing this thing in the oven and cooking it for a couple hours definitely something you can grind out in an hour or so go in the oven and you're pretty much good to go this is something it'll last forever it's razor sharp it's a totally functionable tool and should get a lot of years of use out of it so if you like this video please hit the like button if you're not subscribe hit the subscribe button and I'll see you in the next video thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: OUTDOORS55

Views: 1,756,009

Keywords: knife making, knife making with basic tools, file knife, how to make a file knife, making a knife with a file, how to make a knife with no heat treating, knife, knives, file, basic knife making, knife making for beginners, knife making tools, knife making with hand tools, how to make a knife, knife making easy, knife making cheap, making aknife with an angle grinder, knife maker, knife makers shop

Id: arFzbyNt-2Y

Length: 10min 4sec (604 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 21 2018