How to Make a Kydex sheath for Hunting knives

today I'm going to show you guys how to make a Kodak sheath for your hunting knife so if you have a hunting knife that you carry in your Satchel or your hunting pack or whatever when you go out in the woods to deer hunt or whatever kind of hunting where you're going to be skinning gutting whatever and you don't want to put your nasty knife back in a sheath like this well I'm going to show you how to make a nice Kydex sheath so you don't have to ruin your normal sheath you can use codex that doesn't really get dirty and when it does you can clean it really really easy so we're going to be doing that today it's going to keep your bag clean and you're not going to worry about putting a dirty knife back in that Kydex sheath because you can wash it right out when you get home all right guys if you like videos like this please hit that like button subscribe to the channel as well and let's get going with this video so for this video You're gonna need a few different things first be in the Kydex well you can buy this Kydex pretty cheap on Amazon I picked up about six sheets for I think like 30 bucks but I know it's not too cheap but when you can make a lot of different sheaths and everything with it it doesn't seem too bad but this is a .08 Kydex and it gives you the mix of thickness and flexibility when you're making sheets some other tools you're going to need is a heat gun or those little toaster ovens that you can get you can also heat up the Kydex but you need a way to heat up the Kydex that way you can form it also you're going to need a hammer and a rivet Setter so you can purchase a rivet Setter like this on Amazon I'll put the links below I think it's like five to eight bucks but this will get you by it may not be the prettiest when it comes to actually making the eyelets but it does get the job done you're also going to need the eyelets and what I use are these 8-8 eyelets uh the wordings about ran off there in 100 count you can get these pretty cheap as well but essentially you're going to be using those and for this project you're only going to need about four and that's what they look like you're also going to need some type of way to cut your material so ah just like a simple box cutter but if you do have a bandsaw or scroll saw that's going to make it a lot easier when it goes to shaping the Codex once we get it molded also you're going to need some type of way to mold your Kydex so what I have here is just a block of wood and I got some old foam here and you can cut these out of like gardening pads that you use to like kneel down in the garden on you can buy them in Walmart's garden section or pretty much any garden section and cut these to size I am going to be redoing these soon look they're a little wore out but you're going to need at least two pieces of that more would it be preferred and then another block to clamp down so your sheath is going to be getting molded in between that and then you can use some of these clamps I got these at Harbor Freight for like five bucks and I got two of these and I'll use those to clamp that closed and guys that is about it when it comes to the tools and stuff that you need so you can get by really really cheaply and uh to finish off the Kydex at the end we'll be using some sandpaper and that is literally it um using one of these Sharpies like this with the silver shows up really really good on that black Kydex so something to Mark with a pencil works really good too and you can erase the pencil really easy uh but that's it guys that's all the tools and stuff you need let's head into this project right now so I got my .08 Kydex here and what I'm gonna do is flip it over on this side so we can actually Mark and stuff on it you really don't want to mark on this side because this is the side that's going to be showing on the outside of the sheath so we're going to go ahead and do all of our marking and stuff on the inside which I've already done and we're going to be using this knife and pretty much I've laid it out as if this was going to be folded over in Taco style so instead of using two halves we're just going to fold this over and pretty much what I'm doing I'm leaving myself enough room up here closest to the the Tang of the knife so I can pretty much have good retention right here because this is what's going to cause that retention going in and out of the sheath and that's what's going to hold it in place pretty much right here and then maybe a little bit up here where the blade starts will give us some retention too so I want the knife to be sitting probably about a half inch to three quarters of an inch down inside the sheath here and then you can see I've marked a spot up here and that's where we're going to cut it off and I'm going to go ahead and take um go ahead and take my triangle here and I'm pretty much going to mark off where I need to make my cuts and this silver Sharpie works really really good for marking on the Kydex and this doesn't have to be extremely perfect guys once again we're making a simple really quick and easy to make sheath and the only reason I'm making more precise measurements here is because I really want to use this excess to make other things with I might make a belt loop or something with this part right here that I cut out and then this over here could be another taco shell sheath maybe for like a smaller a thinner knife uh or it could be other belt loops or something else that you want to make me or maybe a Ferro rod holder or something like that all right we're going to go ahead and make our Cuts all you really need is a box cutter and this stuff Cuts pretty easily then it should been pretty easy after that there we go so look how easy that bent okay and then you just bend it back and it just breaks off super super easy to work with this kind of stuff then we're going to cut the other piece of excess off and there's a piece we're gonna work with make this nice little taco shell sheath okay one important step you want to do before you get too far into this is to actually take some masking tape and tape off the blade that way when you actually put this in the Kydex press and press the Kydex together it gives a little bit of space in there once you take that tape off when you're actually going to use the sheath for real it'll give it a little bit of room in there but essentially you're just going to tape the whole blade off with probably two layers of this tape all right we got it taped up and it doesn't have to be perfect I'm telling you this super quick and easy DIY sheath doesn't have to be a work of art so I'm just get two layers of tape on there and you're going to be just fine okay the next step is actually pretty easy too and it doesn't have to be too expensive to do it you can use a heat gun like I have here or you can use like a small toaster oven or something like that or even a regular oven and Heat this stuff up and I'm just going to heat this stuff up until it's really pliable all right I'm gonna keep you guys in suspense too long but I would say you probably do this for about say two minutes maybe maybe not even that long as this is heating up I should have probably done this beforehand I'm gonna go ahead and get my Kydex press ready and then I got the other half here that's gonna be the top and then you want to get your clamps ready yes so you can see this is really pliable go ahead and throw some gloves on really quick because this stuff gets hot really close you can see how pliable this is I mean it's it's like rubber almost keep going a little bit longer we could probably go right now if we wanted to I want to have as much definition as possible though [Applause] all right we're gonna go ahead and throw it in there now foreign this thing as close to the edge as possible let me get this lined up the best I can get this part put in place for the drain hole all right then we're gonna go ahead and put the other part on Top this is where it gets tricky you got to use multiple hands it's kind of hard with are you trying to hold the camera and get those clamps in place all right I got one clamp on and kind of grab the other clamp and if you had more clamps you could even do more than this there we go all right so get that all clamped up and you can see how that foam's all mushed down in there that's what we're looking for that's going to add that definition to that Kydex that we're looking for okay we're gonna let that set for probably around 10 15 minutes all right we're back after about I'd say probably 20 minutes or longer check this out see how it is so one good thing about the heat gun is if you make some mistakes you can kind of fix them pretty easy so when I put that allen wrench in there to kind of make that drain hole well it it didn't do as good as I wanted it to so it kind of left a big indention there but what we're going to do is take the heat gun and I'll show you how to get those imperfections out of there thank you just take my hands and kind of squeeze that together it's still gonna have enough for a drain hole all right there we go fix it nice little imperfection we had see we did get this a little bit too hot with that heat gun so it did get a little shiny that's what you kind of want to avoid but because it really doesn't matter honestly it doesn't affect the quality or anything so that's why I'm not too big about it right now uh like I said this is like this simple quick and easy way to do it see it's fairly straight there is a little bit of deviation towards in there but that's one thing with this kind of press where you just have you know you're doing it horizontal that's what kind of results you're probably going to get it's not going to be perfectly straight especially if you're using foam that's been a little wore out you can tell I've used this quite a bit but in the next video I'll show you guys how to make a really nice Vertical Press that's going to take these issues away and you're going to have a nice even crease every single time all right guys The Next Step here is we're going to start making our eyelet holes and you can do this however you want but the one you want really want to focus on is the one right here because that's going to give you the tension on these spots right here so you don't want to go too close you're not going to be able to get this knife out but you don't want to go too far away or it's going to be too loose so we're going to try to find a happy medium there probably around right there it's going to give us a good mix of good retention and it being able to slip in and out of the sheath easily that's pretty even good enough all right we're gonna go ahead and drill those out oh four right here and you can see it kind of leaves a mess sometimes they'll peel off pretty easy but one thing you want to focus on is getting the stuff out of the middle right there you don't want to put a grommet in and all that crap be stuck in between the sheath there so we're also going to go ahead and get our knife out of here then we're ready to move on and put the grommets into these things all right we're gonna get our tools to set our eyelets and all I'd use is just this cheap set right here I got on Amazon for I think like eight bucks maybe even cheaper just a small Hammer that way we can kind of strike it really easily but what I'm going to do is at first until we actually get the eyelet started rounding off I'm going to go flip it on its back right here and that usually does a lot better and they should insert pretty easy if you use the right size drill bit if you didn't use the right size drill bit then you're going to struggle all right I'm going to hold this really firmly try to hold this where I can get a good camera angle what I'm doing is I'm trying to get this rounded off or starting to round off so as I'm hammering it I'm going to try to roll this around and falling out there I'm gonna try to roll that around as I'm doing it hopefully you guys can see that it should start to round it out you can see a little bit how it's starting to round it out some that's what we want is nice and easy because if you go too fast with this you're going to end up messing the eyelet up okay as you can tell starting to round out a little bit better now you can kind of see the lip on it so what I'm going to do so we don't crush this one on this side I'm gonna go ahead and flip it over we should fill a seat all right there we have it all right we got them all set and guys it is pretty hard doing it with this so I mean you have to practice at it and I haven't done it too much and you can tell they're they're not perfect but once again this doesn't have to be that's still gonna hold it in place really really nicely all right the next thing we have to do now that we have our eyelets in place is work on the retention trimming this up and also trimming out the shape of the sheath itself all right it's gonna have a nice little swoop to it cut that out and if you have a a bandsaw or something like that scroll saw it's going to make this a lot easier because this is the simple way to do it if you don't have that many tools because I don't have all those things either we're pretty much just going to use our box cutter to do all this because this codex Cuts pretty easy okay so we don't want to lose a lot up here but we're going to cut down this down here or something like that and it should give us pretty much what we're looking for I'm gonna go to town just kind of Shaving this away this does take a little bit of time to do this okay get that shaped out pretty much where we want it all right let's start working on this cut out up here good to pretty much even on both sides let's check it with a knife so got our nice click so if you have a belt sander it's going to make this a lot easier but if you don't you can take a piece of sandpaper or if you have like a file or anything like that you can kind of make this a little bit easier all I'm doing is just trying to round off the edges and now I got this little sanding block it's got like a finer grit on it and that just kind of works works the little Burrs and stuff off and makes it a lot smoother all right there we have it nice little DIY sheath super super cheap to make one of these and if you don't have all the tools and stuff there you go well here you have it super easy way to make a little packable sheath and like I said I use this for gutting deer skinning deer and it's not necessarily something I keep on my belt because I don't really wear a belt when I'm hunting you know I'm going to put this in my fanny pack or my backpack and when I'm gutting a deer you know I don't want to put this dirty knife back in a nice leather sheath or something like that or a nylon sheath but this right here can be washed so you just go ahead and throw that dirty knife back in this Kydex and when you get back home you can wash it right out and you're not messing anything up so that's one reason I like one of these pack sheaths it's really really nice for that kind of stuff all right guys so we're done with the Kydex sheath it turned out really really good and this only took probably I would say 30 minutes total and that's including the time it took to actually set this in place and mold it so not too bad guys to save time and stuff when you're in the woods and you know this one's really simple because it doesn't have a belt loop it doesn't have anything like that it's just streamlined you throw this in your pack you gut a deer you throw it back in and you're good to go so not really a bad little deal here and you can do this for any type of knife I mean literally you can make your Little Neck knife put you a piece of paracord and you got you a neck knife obviously I'd probably make it a little bit smaller use a smaller knife but a nice little neck knife sheath uh does it have to get too elaborate when it comes to these Cottage sheaths you can make belt loops and things like that and I'll show you that in future videos but not a bad little knife you can see the retention is really good you hear the click hear that snap in there like I said the retentions were created right here around this little Tang but every knife is going to be a little bit different all the retention uh is going to be based around you know the curvatures of the knife and stuff like that but not too bad guys once again this isn't like super super high quality but it gets the job done I've been using a sheath like this on another gut knife that I use actually let me see found it right here this is what I've been using for years to gut deer with just an old Gerber gut knife and look how simple this one is this one's like a pancake style I didn't even round out the edges I didn't do anything guys this just was in my hunting pack and you know after I got a deer throw it back in there and I'll wash it off when I get to the house it's super simple and this gets the job done guys that's all you need so if you like videos like this please help me out on the channel go ahead and subscribe like the video as well and guys we're going to be making more knife sheaths and stuff in the future out of Kydex and maybe even some leather stuff too but we're getting more into the knife stuff I've been collecting knives for years maybe we'll even break out the knife collection I have way too many knives but I hope you guys like this video if you did you know check out videos on my main page I have tons of outdoor related videos and guys I'll catch you in future videos thanks for watching

Channel: Blue Collar Outdoors

Views: 3,884

Keywords: Kydex sheath making, Hunting sheath, Simple sheath making, How to make a Kydex sheath, Taco Kydex sheath

Id: riUY3Mttbcg

Length: 22min 29sec (1349 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 06 2023