I’m Making a Legendary Longsword (Sold $65,000)

i'm making a legendary long sword that sold for 65 000 starting over is an option i cannot afford so sit back grab some popcorn and enjoy this four and a half month build [Music] what you're looking at is the sketch for excelsior [Music] the first thing we need to do is get our billets heated up and forge welded together i'm starting with so much steel that i actually have to make two separate billets and we'll combine them later on in the damascus making process after forge welding the billet together i grind the sheet metal off the outside of the billet the reason i had sheet metal on the outside of the billet was to keep oxygen from getting inside the billet it protects it from the atmosphere so i get very clean beautiful forge welds making the damascus is one of my favorite parts of knife making because i get to use my giant hydraulic press that my dad and i built years and years ago this thing smashes hot metal and just stretches it out it's so much fun to run [Music] [Music] [Music] after grinding the scale off and cutting the pieces to length we can then stack them back up to multiply the layers for this particular pattern i also want to add in an extra piece of 1084 this will add a nice dark line that will separate the two pieces of billet that way i can temporarily get the pieces held in place with the ca glue more permanently hold them in place with the mig welder and then permanently permanently hold them in place with forge welding [Music] i get the billet back in the forge heated up for forge welding more grinding and more drawing out [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] for the next forge welding operation we're gonna take four of these pieces and do what's called a four-way we put all four of them side-by-side by side by side instead of stacked on top of each other and that'll create a mosaic picture on the end of the bar that'll look something like a little explosion or starburst on the end of the billet now that we've forged welded all that together and re-squared it on a 30 degree angle it's looking very similar to the next stage of my drawing you can see the center line coming up through here not quite coming out at the corners and then these other lines coming off to the edges represent the center of our very starting billet [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] i've been working on this mosaic damascus for six days straight and it's almost ready to have its final forge welding session done to it right now i've got the bar surface ground and i've also ground the edges clean and we're ready to start cutting it up into tiles and tile welding this it'll probably get cut up into about 16 or 17 individual tiles and that's how we'll get the pattern of the mosaic onto the surface of the blade i want to show you how we want to fold the pattern and get the pattern from the end of the billet into what will be the sides of the blade the way i like to do this is just start by moving first piece kind of where i want it and then go on down [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] and now our tile mosaic billet is ready for the final forge weld this is the most critical forge weld of the entire project and it's also one of the hardest to pull off [Music] [Music] after several hours of forge welding the pieces and drawing out the billet in the hot july missouri heat i have yet to find out if we got perfect forge welds on all the tiles but we won't know if it's actually good until i grind into the billet later on [Music] the next thing we need to do is get this blade normalized i would like to introduce kevin the minion forge let's get excelsior in the forge and get it up to our first normalizing temperature of 1600 degrees [Music] i brought it into the dark room here and you can really see it's got a nice even color on it i gotta hang this thing up i'm getting that's hot that's hot that's real hot guys move it i'm about to burn up here yeah burn up kyle here come feel my pants burn kyle everyone feel that you're like oh i'm hot i bet your pants aren't that hot done normalizing the blade so now i have a lot of grinding to do and by a lot i mean a whole lot i'm using my 1958 benton harbor michigan coville surface grinder to surface grind this sword the problem is the table is only 18 inches long and this sword blade is 37 inches plus like a 10 inch tang in order to surface grind the blade i have to do small sections and overlap previous sections with the next section that i'm doing and slowly but surely get the whole blade surface ground as flat as i can [Music] let's pull it out and take a look and have our first reveal of the finished pattern [Music] [Music] i think it came out absolutely amazing it looks like our tiles forge welded together beautifully as well [Music] guys i'm super on edge right now because this is the final stage to where the sword could be destroyed i've spent two weeks working on this thing so far there's things that could happen out of my control and cause me to have to restart it's time to put it in the forge heat it up and then we're gonna quench it in parks 50. we've got a big ol long tube so we can fit the entire sword in there and get it hardened up this is where it all comes down to the wire though and we could end up cracking the blade or not hardening it properly or something right now could make it so we have to restart on this blade our blades have been soaking at 1550 degrees for a few minutes now we're finally ready it's the moment of truth i'm gonna pull it out get it into the park's oil as quickly as possible and i'm going to violently try to move it up and down to help break that vapor barrier and get it to quench nice and quickly [Music] [Music] it's warped the blade did warp during heat treatment later on after tempering we'll tackle the warpage issue and try to get the blade straightened out using some heat [Music] the brown color with a little bit of purple mixed in was the coloring from tempering the blade tempering the blade takes out a little bit of the hardness but it makes it much much tougher and less likely to chip and break and now is the time to start straightening the blade to do this i heat up only the center of the blade and then i apply pressure in whichever direction i want to undo the warp in i hold it in place and cool it off with a little bit of water this over time will fix the warping issues sometimes i can straighten a section after one cycle but sometimes it fights you and you have to do it over and over and over again before you finally get it [Music] excelsior is looking really good i was actually able to get her nice and straight without too much effort now actually the next thing we need to do is get the blade profiled [Music] i roughed in the profile of the blade before heat treatment but now that the blade's hardened and tempered it's time to finalize the profile [Music] here it is we've got excelsior profiled it's really starting to look like my sketch now and it's kind of exciting i got the layout for the fuller onto the blade on both sides we can go ahead and take it over to the grinder and i'm going to use a one-inch wheel and start grinding in this fuller [Music] grinding in this folder by hand is one of the most difficult grinding operations i've ever done on any project the sword is pretty heavy at this stage and i have to hold the whole thing horizontally it's not bad when you're grinding out in the middle but when you're grinding towards one of the ends your arm is holding the whole weight of the sword way out there and it became very tiring one tiny mistake could end up leaving a big ding or gash in the fuller and it would ruin the look of the blade i hand sand the fuller using the same round wheel that i used to grind in the fuller the only difference here i'm running it side to side manually and it has sandpaper wrapped around it i got the fuller ground in i spent two days grinding on it i also spent probably a full blown day hand sanding the floor got my lines on the edge of the blade about 40 thousandths of an inch apart we're ready to get all geared up i'm gonna wear a respirator glasses ear plugs we're gonna have a ventilation fan i'm also gonna be wearing a hat because i'm gonna be doing some really heavy grinding and i wanna keep those hot sparks off the top of my head we'll start going crazy on this thing [Music] i spent two full days grinding on this blade it has been tremendously difficult it's kind of like grinding a dagger only really really long because this blade is 37 inches we got a little pattern made of the guard and i'm just gonna outline around the pattern onto my anvil just so we can forge that uh piece of metal that's gonna be the guard we need to forge the lugs down a little bit there we go i can now use the torch and heat up the ends of that guard and forge them down this way [Music] after forging out the general shape of the guard i let it cool down in my heat treating oven then we can move on to grinding the shape further to get it closer to what i have on my sketch [Music] [Music] [Music] something really satisfying about removing this metal from the guard seeing the guards slowly take shape all that extra metal around the edges slowly disappearing and turning into fiery sparks [Music] got the entire guard profiled as far as i'm going to take it for now it's ready to move on to fitting onto the sword blade [Music] [Music] finally that time we need to make a big long groove through this five and a half inch long piece of premium interior mammoth ivory this thing is gorgeous there's no checks or cracks or anything and i really want to make sure i don't mess it up because this thing was something like eight hundred dollars and i don't have another one [Music] we've got our front spacer fitting and roughly profiled in we've got our handle material fitting and not profiled in the next thing is to move on to the pommel tv pommel not toothy pommel it's tv pommel [Music] i grind a long section of the tang into a quarter inch round rod this section of the tang will go into the pommel and it'll have threads on the end so the pommel nut can thread onto the tang [Music] [Music] so [Music] now that the tang is ready for the handle we can begin working on the pommel i take a large round bar of mild steel and begin cutting away everything that doesn't look like the pummel once i get the shape roughed in with a carbide cutter i clean everything up with a die grinder and files [Music] [Music] next we can begin working on the front spacer i've already fit the front spacer to the tang but it's still a big chunky piece of metal that needs quite a bit of material ground off of it the shape of the front spacer is going to be a lot of work to create it's not just going to be a flat oval front spacer because of all those curves it's going to be a lot of work to shape it that way and it'll be a lot of work to hand sand it and clean it up later too [Music] the front spacer and pommel are shaped let's move on to our fossilized mammoth ivory handle i give myself a few guidelines to follow and from there i manually shape everything else in using those guidelines to make sure i keep things symmetrical [Music] with the handle shape it's time to finalize the shape of the guard we've already got the profile of the guard finished out but we have another dimension of shaping we need to do and there's quite a bit of extra material to start hogging off [Music] [Music] [Music] i have the guard completely shaped let me tell you this thing is beautiful i'm loving the way this sword is looking the guard was the last thing that we had to really get shaped on here and now it's really starting to look like a complete sword now that all the handle components are shaped it's time to start adding embellishments the way we're going to embellish the mammoth ivory handle is by adding a bunch of straight flutes all the way around the handle i've never done this type of straight fluting before and i didn't realize how much work it was going to be to do i start by giving myself a layout for all the flutes with the layout complete i begin cutting in each flute one at a time with a small file once the center of all the flutes have been cut in i can begin rounding all the flutes over to make them have this really nice rounded look [Music] [Music] shaping the flutes was only half the story getting them finished out and removing all the file marks was the other half it took a long time to hand sand each one of these flutes and get them ready for polishing [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] i don't know about you guys but i need a break from all this filing and hand sanding and fluting i think it's time to go slice a couple pumpkins and maybe have a stab at a soda bottle [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] that pumpkin cutting was pretty terrifying on one of those cuts i think i had the blade tipped on a little bit of an angle and it caught onto the pumpkin and kind of drew the sword blade up as i was kind of going down and if you look back at the video and slow it down super slow frame by frame you could see that blade like flexing like this like serpentine it was it was going up and down at the same time but it did its job it stayed there the blade is basically tempered like a spring so it's it's technically made to move quite a bit and it's pretty thin we're ready to move on to doing the gold inlay on the fittings to start out with for the front spacer we need to get a good layout for the very center of the front spacer and then the center going this direction as well so i can get my name centered up on there really well got a bad feeling about this oh please be good please be good it's gonna look like just a big blotch of mud on the wall [Music] oh it worked oh it actually worked it looks pretty good oh i'm so glad that worked oh man i could have manually laid out each letter of my maker's mark on the front spacer and then engraved them one at a time i thought it'd be a little easier though if i used a stencil and electrochemically etched my makers mark into the front spacer and then used that marking as a guideline so i could easily come back in with my gravers and make everything deeper for the gold inlay i use a flat graver on all the straight sections to make the grooves deeper for our gold inlay and then i use a high speed dental burr that turns at 320 000 rpms to deepen any sections that have a lot of curve to them i use the dental burr on the curved sections because the flat graver won't be able to turn very tight on any of these curved sections and it would leave a really dirty nasty looking groove [Music] once the grooves are nice and deep i dovetail all the grooves that's what'll hold the gold in place you'll smash the gold into the dovetails it'll fill it out and mechanically hold it there permanently next is my favorite part of doing inlay and that's the inlay part itself it's so satisfying to smash the soft 24 karat gold into place [Music] [Laughter] so [Music] [Laughter] foreign [Music] i love doing gold inlay where it wraps around a piece and you have a seam where the two ends meet each other you smash the gold together right at the seam and when you're all done and everything's cleaned up and sanded the seam is completely invisible and it looks like one solid piece of gold going all the way around the spacer so [Music] now it's time to focus some more attention to the blade our blade has been ground and hand sanded but it has not been etched yet to reveal the damascus pattern first i clean the blade off really well and then i etch it in a water and ferric chloride solution for five to ten minute cycles after each one of those cycles i take the blade out sand all the oxides off with 3000 grit sandpaper and then put it back in the ferric chloride solution for another cycle [Music] two or three more cycles like that and this blade should be fully etched and ready to move on to polishing and coffee darkening after that the ferric chloride solution eats away one type of steel in our damascus pattern the 1084. the 15 and 20 is the other type of steel and it has a little bit of nickel in it the nickel resists the ferric chloride etch and keeps it shiny and bright whereas the 1084 turns dark and etches deeper and deeper the longer i keep it in the ferric chloride [Music] after spending a couple days etching the blade and getting the coffee darkening finish to come out just right here is our finished etched sword blade i think it looks absolutely phenomenal i could not be more pleased with how this mosaic pattern came out and since it's a sword blade there's a whole lot of it to enjoy [Music] my layout is done so we can start filing in the scallops i've already sort of roughed in two of them so far i've got 16 to do in total i like to start at the very corner and just make a nice little nick right on my line and that gives me a good starting place to go so my file doesn't slide all over the place and then i can slowly start adding more and more pressure [Music] if you're interested in how i went from a homeschooled kid making my first knife at 14 years old to making the knives and swords i'm making today then subscribe to my email list where we talk about just that link is in the description [Music] [Music] after finishing up the scallops on the end of the pommel it's time to do the 24 karat gold inlay on the pommel [Music] i am finally done with all of excelsior's gold inlay this pommel was the last piece to do and all the gold is in we just need to start sanding on all the fittings now i am done hand sanding the fittings all that needs to be done on them is for them to be buffed and blued and a lot can go wrong here and if it does go wrong you got to sand all the bluing off and re-sand your your fittings and it can be a pain so i'm hoping it goes really well as you may know my mom dad and brother work with me my knives are providing for three households when we took this custom sword order we took a lot of risks knowing it would be such a long project the financial pressure to finish was at its peak here in these last days making this sword could break us so many things could go wrong with the build of this caliper and starting over is an option we cannot afford [Music] one two [Music] [Music] oh baby oh it's so good it's so pretty oh i'm so glad i redid the pommel to get rid of those micro scratches now oh man all the bluing is done and i've sharpened excelsior's blade one more thing we've got to do and that's to assemble all the pieces and excelsior is done i've got all the parts cleaned up inspected everything's good to go this is such a surreal moment for me i can't believe excelsior is almost finished i've spent four and a half months working on this sword for eight to twelve hours a day and it's almost done [Music] excelsior is finally done i got all the tape off i cleaned it up i have spent four and a half months working on this sword the longest sword project i've ever done the previous sword was about three months this one took a little longer because it was fancier and oh boy it's just about the right weight where you can hold it with one hand and wield it it'd be a little unwieldy with one hand or you can get both hands on there because there's enough handle to fit both of your hands for sure i got the blade nice and thin we've got a nice taper all the way down the blade i'm so happy with how the damascus came out too this mosaic is just so cool looking the balance point is about six inches in front of the guard which is exactly where i was wanting it four and a half months it took longer than i expected but wow was it worth it it was such a great learning experience and i couldn't be more pleased with how this sword came out i absolutely love it i will see you in the next video may the forge be with you bye bye if you enjoyed this video check out this one where i show you how i make my first ever sword

Channel: KyleRoyerKnives

Views: 5,273,269

Keywords: knife making, how to make a knife, how to heat treat a knife, how to make a bowie knife, how to make a bowie, knives, kyle royer, kyle royer knives, making a knife, sharp, how to make knives, bladesmith, master smith, blades, damascus, knifemaker, diy knife, anvil, forging, custom, knife, great content, steel, bowie build, bowie knife, 10 inche bowie knife, blade, knifemaking, knife maker

Id: 53_cuLhObr8

Length: 39min 42sec (2382 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 29 2022