How to make a stainless Fillet Knife by BergKnifemaking

welcome deburg knifemaking.com today we're going to take a look at how to make a fillet knife now this particular fillet knife is made out of aebl stainless steel it's a hundred thousands uh thick material to start with and it has a very unique one-of-a-kind uh scales that were made by my friend rick schwarz out of fish bones so this is the finished product this is the very first fillet knife that i've ever attempted i started out by going out to my friend aj at long island waterjet he had actually drawn up the profile of this filet knife and he was kind enough to cut a few out of some stainless steel for me i'm always amazed at watching this water jet machine it just does an awesome job so that's the fillet knife blank i did put some dyke and blue on the edge and i scribed two center lines on the edge as i always do for this fillet knife just like with chef's knives i don't use a tilt table like i do on most of my projects i just use a 90 degree table on the 2 by 72 grinder i'm using a coarse grit belt this is a 60 grit and i'm using a push stick so what i do is i take one or two passes just to start the grind and get it lined up with the one side of those railroad track scribed lines the rest of the time i'm then just moving that bevel line higher and higher and kind of merging it the push stick is really nice because your fingers don't get burnt by the hot steel and you keep them away from the coarse grit belt this whole process doesn't take all that long so that the rough grinding on one side is done i'm going to move to the other that push stick actually has a little angle on the end and that's basically the angle that this knife is going to be beveled to so it's going to be a nice flat bevel and i just pull it side to side a little bit of pressure now this 60 grit belt leaves some fairly deep grind lines the next step is going to be to get rid of those so now i'm going to flip from horizontal to vertical i'm going to use a handled magnet and i found this on amazon i'm going to change the grid of the belt so this belt is now an 80 grit belt and i'm gonna this particular design of a flame that has a little guard that sticks out that protrudes uh past the edge of the blade you really want to stay away from that because that would get to be razor sharp um you know before the blade did so i'm at a slight angle and i'm just my goal here is to get rid of all of the coarser horizontal grind lines from the 60 grit belt and once again it really doesn't take all that long you do also when you're done getting rid of the grind lines you do also want to make sure that the handle area is completely flat and i just do this on a flat platen my flat platen does have a glass or it's a glass covering to it so it is nice and flat and that just assures that the handle material will fit properly when mounting it to the uh to the blank anyway these are the the blanks that are rough ground ready for heat treating so they're the ground down to 80 grit with stainless steel um you need a heat treating oven and this is a stainless steel tool wrap so you make a as airtight a envelope as possible you double fold all of the edges and you crease them with a heavy object i just use a hammer and you do that all the way around the entire envelope the goal here is to keep out as much oxygen as possible and therefore end up with with less slag on the blade the oven for aevl temps up to 1960 degrees there's about a 15 minute hold time and then what's really nice about stainless steel and and heat treating in this matter is that you don't quench an oil you plate quench and and that's really works out well especially with this thin material because it it helps keep that material completely flat while it's cooling so i clamp uh between two aluminum uh channels some people use uh solid material i like to use the channels just because i can blow air through the middle and and kind of cool it a little bit faster i'm blowing compressed air uh in between each of those channels and also inside and i'm holding my left hand up because you'll feel uh when you get a hot spot and then you can just spend a little bit more time blowing air over that hot spot with the goal being to cool it as quickly as possible after it gets down to room temperature i did put these in between blocks of dry ice for a sub-zero quench and then they go into a kitchen oven 395 degrees for two hours two cycles to temperate make it less brittle so now this is cleaning up the post heat treat blade i'm going to go back onto the 2x72 flat platen again with that handled magnet i am going to start right where i left off on the 80 just to quickly clean it up and then i'll run through a variety of different belts so i'll go to a 120 a 240 a 600 um i went to a thousand i think it was a fifteen hundred and then a two thousand um i wanted to see if i could get it up to a mirror finish and you can't it's fairly easy to get up to a mirror finish you just have to you know run through the belts every single belt i made sure that that handle area was completely flat and the entire time i'm cooling it um you know every few seconds in a in a bucket of water you don't want to get real hot after it's been heat treated you don't want to lose that temper and i am staying away from the guard area as much as possible so this is the mirror finished um you know like i said it's fairly easy a little time consuming but fairly easy to get to that point but i decided against it for a working knife now in the meantime my friend rick schwarz called me and told me that there had been a huge amount of bunker that that died and washed up on a local beach uh the birds and the sun left just bones after a couple of days and he harvested some of those bones so he thought it'd be a really cool idea to cast those bones into knife handles he works with wood making turned wooden bowls and he does a lot of aluminized work so he actually cast these bones into knife scales for me a nice clear casting no bubbles in them this is done with a luminite and a pressure pot i the only thing i really had to do was figure out what kind of backing or color backing would look good that would highlight those bones i went with a blue uh i added a blue liner and then uh in the epoxy that i glued this onto the liner i also added some additional you know blue coloring i mount my scales one scale at a time i use a backing board to drill through the blank as my drill guide in this case i'm going to use four 1 8 stainless steel pins rather than the big quarter inch pins that i normally use because they would chop those fish bones in half after i got both sides glued in place and the pins in place i went back to the 2 2x72 grinder and i just profiled the handles with a coarse grit belt this is a 36 grit belt anything anything less really gums up pretty quickly you can get that inside curvature by letting the belt overhang the right side of the platen a little bit and then you can just work that curve now i actually round over that upper edge to the handle i do as much work as i can on a 2 by 72 it just you know saves a little bit of time and then i'll smooth everything out and i'll go through a variety of different grits on an oscillating sander i'm very careful not to touch the blade to the belt because you could very easily ruin the knife at this point i'm also using a small wheel attachment just gets into that inside curve a little bit nicer and then you just run through you know whatever amount of belts you want to to get to the finish that you want for the inside on this one i think i went to a 240. so with this alumalite material um i used the oscillating sander and i started with um it was 320 and i went to 400 600 1000 and 2000 and once you get to that thousand you can really start to see how those fish bones are really going to come out i did hand sand in between each grit and then i polished or buffed on a buffing wheel with a little bit of compound and then i look at it real careful and i usually find some additional scratches and then i'll go back a couple of grits probably to the 600 grit and do it a second time usually two times running through and and buffing and i get to a finish that i that i like this is the finished product so this is my first ever fillet knife i i was you know pretty happy with the way it came out i think that that rick's idea of using those fish bones just absolutely put it over the top the blade is is is big it's a big filet knife it's razor sharp but really the most dramatic feature of it is the handles anyway this is the finished product i hope you enjoyed the video if you did i ask that you please give it a thumbs up and subscribe to this youtube channel i'd like to give you an invite to join us on our facebook group knives and knife making and if you're interested in making your own knives check out the book that jason northgard and i put out a couple years ago called introduction to knife making and that can be found on amazon.com thank you very much

Channel: DIYeasycrafts

Views: 5,372

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Id: AL00D1obMd0

Length: 11min 23sec (683 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 19 2021