How to Make a Kydex Knife Sheath

hey guys aren't here from Gough garson today I'm going to show you how to make a pay dirt sheet by hand basically the same way that I do for the resolute mark 3 so let's get stuck into it alright so let's quickly go over the tools that you're going to need to make your Kydex cheese the first one is something that not a lot of people have but it's very very handy and I recommend buying one and that is an infrared thermometer basically pointed at something and it tells you what temperature it is I also recommend having a pencil a heavy duty retractable knife a 12-inch steel rule a small centre punch a hammer of any description drill cordless one is nice and a quarter-inch Brad point drill bit it's very important that this is a brad point drill bit and not a regular drill bit because a regular drill bit won't cut nice clean holes and Kydex then one of the last things you're going to need is an eyelet setting tool for setting your eyelets in the sheath so you're also going to need a method for heating up your Kydex so this is just a small basically an electric hot plate or griddle it works very very well and I highly recommend buying one of these if you're going to do any number of medics sheets once the Codex is hot we're going to use what's called a Kydex press to press the hot Kydex onto the blade in order to make your sheet and the Codex press is basically two pieces of very stiff heat resistant foam inside folding shelves of description so making something like this is fairly easy and this one is just held closed with a clamp this is a standard f clamp the other thing that's really handy for making Kydex sheets in any quantity is a small banks law like this one this is just a little 8 inch woodworking pencil and it makes life a lot easier when trying to rough out the shape of the sheet alright and the last tool that you'll need for making sheets is a belt sander of some description really any machine that can take a sixty grit belt will do just fine for doing the final shaping of machine alright first things first we're going to take out sheet of Kydex and we're going to cut a piece of fat exits at least one inch larger on all sides then the blade about nine okay so next up we need to repair our blade for making the sheet with it and the big thing we need to do is put a couple of layers of masking tape on each side in order to create some room inside the sheet once it's made so that the sheets doesn't scratch the knife and so that it doesn't get stuck in there so I'm going to start with putting a couple of layers on one side okay so that's three layers on that side and then you're just going to take a knife and very carefully cut in around the handle and then flip it and cut around the plate once that sides done flip it and do the same on the other side one thing that I like to do with my knives is to put a drain hole in the end of the sheath and the way that I do that is by taking a piece of bamboo so this is just a skewer break off a small section of it and then split the end of it then once the end is split actually put it over the end of the knife like that and then that way when you make the sheath the space is a drain hole will be built in automatically alright so now we're going to turn on the griddle and preheat it to 340 degrees Fahrenheit so I'm getting 347 which is perfect okay so we're going to leave that until it's completely flat and until it reads 290 degrees Fahrenheit on the top surface okay so the Kydex sheets are now reading right around 290 for their whole shape so you can see how it's very flexible now we're just going to grab it put it in the press with the knife on top right in the middle and then close the press up and you're going to leave it for about 10 or 15 minutes so that it completely cools off before you take it out okay so now I'm going to go and mark out the location for the rivets the center of the rivers should be a quarter inch from where the flat part starts next to the sheet and then I'm going to space them out an inch and a half from each other down the sides of the sheet so consider the tip is about there and a mark up about a quarter inch in so now that we've got all of the rivet locations marked we're going to take a center punch and punch all of those positions and now that those are all mocked we're going to grab our drill with the Brad point drill bit and start drilling the holes and you don't want to apply too much pressure because you don't want to split the two pieces of Kydex apart you want them to stick together alright so now we've got all the holes drilled what we're going to do is put two rivets at the tip of the sheet and then we're going to split the hubs of the sheath apart so we can get the knife out then we're going to put the rest of the rivet in so to put the rivet in we could use a little rivet setter like this I personally really don't like these rivets others because they tend to split rivets and if you're halfway through making a sheath and you're unlike the last rivet or whatever and then you split it it's a real pain so I'm going to show you my arbor press rivet setter and said these will work but just be warned that you will have more trouble with these than you will with the slightly more expensive upper Pressburg alright so you can see my auto press rivet setter very easy to use just grab your rivets put them into the holes and then the rivet goes written down in the bottom part of the diet and you just squeeze them together that's it okay now that we've got rivets in the two holes right in the tip of the NIE we're going to grab some pliers and just pull out the bamboo drain four and then we're going to grab a six-inch rule and just use it to split the sheet here so that we can get an iPad now that we've got the knife out I'm going to go and put in the rest of the rivets on the sheet one thing to be careful about is to make sure that you put all of the rivet in the same way otherwise their heads of the rivets will be inconsistent in size okay now that you've got all the rivets in you want to go ahead and pencil in some lines that show the outline of what you want the sheath to look like for the most part this is up to personal taste except for the area around where the sheath locks into the handle of the knife in this area you want kind of a curved shape that allows it to lock in but you can still remove the knife and insert it making your first sheets you're going to have some experimentation to to get this to work properly I have made a lot of sheets of roughly this shape so I know pretty much how I want it to look on this side I'm going to do ramp for your thumb like so and then this side is going to be curved like sir okay let's go and cut this out on the bandsaw [Applause] [Music] okay now we're going to put in the final shape with belts and [Applause] [Applause] ok so now we've got our shapes sanded to roughly the right shape we need to test fit it so what we're going to do is bang in any of the crud that's inside there and then get a little knife and just trim off the excess plastic from around the loops of the sheet ok now that the sheath is nice and nice and clean we're going to grab our knife and just very carefully peel off two of the three layers of masking tape I'm going to leave one layer of masking tape on the knife and that's just to prevent it from getting scratched by the sheet the case there's any crud in there okay so now we've got one layer of masking tape on each cells and I'm going to test fit it in the sheet so you can see this too much material left here and the ninth one actually fit in machine so we have to go back to the belt sander and take off the mole material just here at the lips of the sheet [Applause] that's very close to perfect I've never moved just a little tiny hole material in the my good [Applause] okay so now we put out largely finished sheep you can see that there because of the way we made it there are no joint lines at all the joint lines would completely disappear it looks like it's made of one piece of plastic what we need to do now is go around and trim off any melted bits of plastic from the edges and then sand the inside of the lips rounded so the knife fits in more easily then we're going to sand the edges of the sheath with 220 grit sandpaper [Music] okay so now that the inside of the mouth of the sheath is all smooth I'm just going to double check the fit that's perfect so now that the fit is perfect I'm going to go around the edges and finish the rest of the sheet okay so sanded all the edges to 220-grit one of the final little touches for getting a really nice finished edge on the sheets is actually kind of funny in that you can just buff it on your jeans makes a big difference to how the edges look one of the other things that I like to do on my sheets it's a little bit unusual it's a very small thing is where your thumb pushes on the sheet here I like to put a little bit of a grip there and I do that by taking the milled part of a center punch and just rolling it into the plastic of the sheet just like that and it leaves a nice little nerve pattern that's grippy even when the sheath is wet just to give you an idea of the kind of fit that you should be looking for on your sheet it should snap into the sheet very positively it should come out easily with the push of a thumb and it shouldn't come out of the sheet when shaken a sheath like that's going to retain the knife under pretty much any sort of circumstances but it's very very easy to draw and use the knife one-handed no problems at all

Channel: Gough Custom

Views: 539,323

Keywords: custom knife, knifemaker, make a knife, sheath, survival knife, knives, knife, sheaths, outdoors, bushcraft, bush knife, bush, bushcraft knife, how to, tutorial, kydex, sheathmaking, rivet, thermoplastic, custom knives, forming

Id: AGj5a3B01m8

Length: 14min 24sec (864 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 07 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/Asron87]

God damnit, this is like super easy and I've always wanted to do it and now I know I can. It's like, "why didn't I google this at some point in my life?"

Thanks for the post. I'm doing this for sure.

[u/Eblumen]

I love his giant reminders to himself about adding the drain. It's so nice to know that other people have to resort to the same tactics as me.

[u/aarongough]

Hey guys!
I just checked reddit and noticed my video had been posted here! Thanks to /u/reuben_, very glad you liked the video!

If you guys have any questions please feel free to ask, always happy to answer!
-Aaron Gough

[u/ryanraad]

I want one of his knives so bad.

[u/mthead911]

I want to be as polite as possible, but is his depth perception good for knife-making?

[u/Cyberhwk]

This dude is the guy that turned me on to /r/artisanvideos.

[u/sk3pt1c]

This is cool but I don't really like the look of the rivets, is there an alternative to holding the two sheets together?

[u/Tyrog_]

Pretty neat stuff! Looks really sturdy!

I'm still curious at how he would attach this sheath+knife to a belt for a practical use.

[u/FravasTheBard]

Ok, what am I looking at here?

^{I'm so sorry.}