How to make a kydex sheath for your knife (tutorial)

hey guys it's Kayla here so today I'm gonna teach you guys how to make a sheath for your knife so I do only Kydex work I don't do any leather work hopefully someday I'll be able to do some leather work but for now I just work mostly with Kydex so I get all of my Kydex from index fasteners they have a huge selection of Kydex to choose from and they're really inexpensive too so you can get all kinds of different styles I've camo you can get kryptek you can even get like silly patterns like Pomeranian dogs and stuff like that so as you guys can see I've gotten some really cool stuff from them over the years and I've been using them for the last leg she's four or five years now so they're awesome definitely check them out that's where I get all of my kayaks from alright so basically you're gonna need a few things to start out you're gonna need a press now this is just a regular homemade press you can get your memory foam from I believe I got this from knife kits if it wasn't Knight kits and it was us a knife maker so you can get all these things online you can even just just type it into Google and I'm sure all these different places will pop up so you're gonna need a press you're gonna need kayaks obviously you're gonna need a tape measure a marker you're gonna need some eyelets these are quarter-inch eyelets you're gonna need an eyelet press now I got my press as you can see from a friend but again you can get that online and they're fairly inexpensive as well so you're gonna need a drill press a bandsaw definitely comes in handy as well if you don't have a bandsaw than just some good old snips work fine too and you're going to need some clamps and of course you're gonna need a heat gun so I have a Waggoner heat gun here and then I just have some urban quick clamp grips and I got all of these just at my local hardware store all right so basically what you guys are gonna do is you're gonna want to cut your Kydex out so you grab your sheet of Kydex so i have this for this knife I have all my knives here that I just finished and I'm gonna make some sheets for so I have this knife I have this one and then we're gonna do this one right here so you wanna choose your style I'm gonna do this and I have this right here what you're gonna do is you're gonna you're gonna want to lay it out and I'm at the point where I just eyeball everything I don't know if that's the best decision but it works for me so also guys everybody does everything a little bit differently so you may find that this doesn't work well for you this is just how I do it if you find an easier method or an easier way to do this then by all means please do that this is just how I do it this is how I've been doing it on the last couple of years when I first started out I tried different different ways and this is what I just found works best for me so feel free to try different things and see what works best for you okay so you're gonna take your Kydex you're gonna lay it out like this and you're gonna put your knife on there and you're gonna want to do it so that I do all pancake sheets so if you want to do it where you have two different pieces you lay one on top of each other you can what I'm gonna do for you guys today is just show you the pancake style so basically what that means is you're just gonna be folding this over all right so you can take a marker or you can take usually everything's dusty for me in here so I can just draw it right on there with my finger but you want to just kind of eyeball it make sure you guys give yourself plenty of room if that's one thing I learned over the years it's that you want to make sure that you give yourself plenty of room when I first started out I wasted so much Kydex because I wanted to make sure that I wasn't wasting any kind axe and instead I wasn't making my sheets big enough and then the eyelets were hanging over the edge and it was just a mess so make sure you give yourself plenty of room all right so I'm just gonna eyeball this so I have enough room for my eyelets up here I'm gonna do two up top couple down here and then I'm gonna do like an imaginary line like so so there's enough room on each side okay and then I'm gonna cut this out you know use your snips or the bandsaw and I'm gonna end up with a piece that looks something like this alright so what we're gonna do next is we're gonna lay this down and we're gonna start heating it up so I have a piece of g10 on my press and the reason why I have that on here is so that when I press this down it's going to leave a good impression on the top part like so and then the back is going to be flat and the reason why I do that is because if I want to wear this on my hip it's nice and flat against my body so honestly you can do it however you want you can have it so that it leaves an impression on both sides it really doesn't matter this is just how I found most people prefer their knives to be and it also leaves a nicer impression on the top part here as well okay so I just have a piece of the g10 here to do that and I'm going to start heating this up and then once I get that all nice and hot I just pancake it over so I'm gonna start heating this up now and I'll show you guys how to do it alright so this is just a regular Waggoner heat gun it was like 35 bucks at my local hardware store so I have half of this laying on the g10 here the sheep and then this other half here I'm gonna heat this part up I don't really need to heat up this side too much just because it's gonna be flat anyways so you just want to make sure you go back and forth nice and slow you don't want to leave this in one place for too long because if you do it's gonna overheat and it's gonna start leaving little bubbles on the Kydex and then it also will leave a shiny part on the front side here so you definitely don't want to do that so just go around nice and slow take your time and also make sure that you have your clams ready to go because when you are done heating this up you're gonna want to do this pretty fast so make sure these are all set and ready to go now you can tell when this is all nice and heated and ready to be pressed because it's gonna be nice and pliable you can see how that is starting to move and this gets hot fast so be careful people always make fun of me for having my fake nails out here but it comes in handy for lots of different things so having fake nails I don't have them on now obviously but having fake nails and doing Kydex is awesome because I can burn the [ __ ] out of my fingers and my fingernails and I can't feel it because my fake nails are acrylic and they don't get up so can make fun of me for having them but smart-thinking telling you all right so this is pretty much good like I said you don't want to overheat it it'll start leaving little bubbles and a shiny spot you know up front too so we don't want to do that alright so that looks good so now I'm just gonna place the knife like this so that I have enough room on this side for my rivets for my eyelets and then on the top part here as well okay so you're gonna want to do this kind of fast so once you turn that off you quickly want to put that down you want to make sure that the spine of the knife is right up against this part so it's gonna look a little something like that alright and then we're just gonna want to close this really fast and then clamps on make sure you give them a nice good squeeze so they're on there nice and tight so these are just like I said the Irwin quick grip clamps they're like maybe six or seven bucks apiece you gonna met the local hardware store you can get all of this stuff at your local hardware store you have like a bail or harbor free anything like that you can get all those supplies there alright so I'm gonna let this sit for about 5-10 minutes you just want to have that Kydex hardened up and then after what we're gonna do is it's gonna look something like this okay and you're gonna take your tape measurer here and you're gonna take your marker and we're gonna draw some little dots on there for where we're gonna drill out our holes for our eyelets so I use like I said a quarter-inch eyelets you're gonna make sure you want to put a quarter inch drill bit in there and when you do the measuring here you want to make sure that they're an inch to an inch and a half apart the reason being for that is you want to be able to put a tech lock on there alright so all we do is just measure this out really fast all right then we're gonna go over to the drill press and we're gonna drill some holes in there all right so we've got our holes drilled out it's gonna look a little something like this and then I'm going to go on the bandsaw really quick and I'm just going to get it rid of all of this excess Kydex [Music] all right so as you guys can see and then I'm gonna take this on the grinder and I'm gonna just start shaping it and smoothing it out making it look nice and pretty so guys make sure you give yourself plenty of room you don't want to put your eyelets in there and have them hanging over the edge I've definitely done that before too so just remember you can always take more off you can't put that put back put put more back on yeah put more back on something like that all right in anyways it's been a long day so yeah just make sure you guys give yourself lots and lots of extra room okay so it's gonna look a little something like this I'm gonna go over the grinder now and I'm going to start shaping this out all right so that's what's gonna look like something like that and then you also are going to want to take a piece of sandpaper and you're gonna want to go in there and you wanna you're gonna want to get all of this crap out of there you can peel most of it off but just smooth it out the best that you can so take a piece of sandpaper crap that's coming out of it and then you can also hang a little bit and get some of that crap out as well all right and then what we're gonna do is we're gonna go over to the buffing wheel we're gonna buff all of this and make it nice and shiny and then after that we're gonna put our eyelets in so at this point it should look something like that okay all right and guys make sure please wear your safety glasses when you're grinding Kydex I swear I've gotten pieces of Kydex in my eye before and it hurts worse than getting metal in my eye and trust me I've had my fair share of metal pieces flying to my eye and take it out so Kydex sucks make sure you wear your safety glasses okay all right so now we're gonna put the eyelets in after we've buffed this up and we'll do that in just a second all right so we have our eyelets make sure that you put your eyelets in the correct way so the way that you're gonna do this this is the flat side on the back you're gonna take the eyelets like this and you're gonna put them in this way okay see so when you go and put this into the press it's gonna be laying down this way okay so you're gonna press down this part's gonna get rolled over the back on the flat side all right so we're gonna put those in really fast and then we'll press them down so you guys can see all right so it's gonna look like this all right so now we're gonna go over to our press here okay so when you're putting this into the press you want to make sure that this side is going in this way okay so just so you guys can see one more time this way just like this okay then just press down nice and hard put some muscle into it and all you're doing as you guys can see is just rolling over the backs here so it looks like this you're gonna roll it over all right nice and simple so looks like that alright and then what we're gonna want to do now is try to fit it into the knife and if you're lucky you'll you'll be able to get it first try so I can already tell this is gonna be super snug so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take my heat gun here and I'm just gonna loosen this up a little bit you guys you don't want to get it stuck in there and then not be able to get it out I've done that plenty of times and I've definitely learned my lesson so this is all trial and error there wasn't a lot of videos when I first started out on how to make sheets and how to make knives and all this stuff so a lot of it was honestly just trial and error and I got a lot of cuts to prove it so you wanted to eat this up a little bit another good trick - for making sure that this can slide in and out nice and easy you can go back through when you our g10 and you can grind some of it down so what I'm doing right now is I'm just heating up this part and I'm gonna take my thumb and I'm just gonna push up here and that way I'm just loosening this up a tiny bit but I'm also making it so that it's easier to get my hands on this so I'm making like a little thumb ramp so that I can get this in and out see now once you do that it's going to be a little bit loose but you should be able to get this in and out a lot easier and just doing that little thumbprint thumb ramp gives you that extra grip to get it in and out easier alright so looks like we got it okay so you don't want to heat it up too much because then you could take away you know the whole entire mold and it's just gonna fall right out so you want to make sure this is nice and secure you shake it it's not gonna fall out on you yeah so that's pretty much it let's check this one out really quick though and see how this turned out nice looks good so I'm just gonna take this and I'm gonna go through all the steps again and hopefully this video helped you guys like I said everybody does things a little differently um maybe I missed some stuff hopefully I got everything give it a try let me know what you guys think and how it ends up turning out for you guys but this is how I do it and it's been working for me and hopefully it helps you guys even if it helped you a little tiny bit then you know that's all that matters so hopefully you guys enjoyed this video and if you guys have any questions leave me a comment without here for five freaking minutes and look how do I manage to get dirt all over me geez alright guys have a great day I gotta get back to work I'll see you guys soon okay

Channel: Kaila Cumings

Views: 88,105

Keywords:

Id: oSfcMSRPEuA

Length: 17min 55sec (1075 seconds)

Published: Fri May 25 2018