I’m Making One Of The Biggest Damascus Bowies

in this video I'm making a beautiful Mosaic Damascus buoy with 24 karat gold inlay in the fittings you're about to see this whole project from start to finish so sit back and enjoy this epic build the first thing I need to make for this buoy is the Mosaic Damascus pattern I begin with my favorite Damascus steel combination of 1084 and 15 and 20 Steels this combination will give a beautiful high contrast pattern in the end knife [Music] we're probably up to about 22 2300 degrees I'm gonna pull this bad boy out it barely fits in the door and get it forged welded together in the Press be nice and quick gotta strike while the Metal's hot or slowly fresh while the metal is hot rather laughs [Music] [Music] now time to re-square the Billet to get the pattern to go across on a 45 degree angle so to do that we take our nice Square Billet and and we put it on a 45 degree angle and re-square it by Smashing the corners in so we're kind of forming a square again only now the square is formed from the previous squares quarters [Music] now that the bar is one inch square and the pattern goes across on a 45 degree angle I want to cut the bar up into four equal length pieces we're then going to stack them up a little bit different than before we're going to do something called a four-way where we stack two on top of each other another two on top of each other and put those two next to each other and that will form a four-way Mosaic Damascus kind of picture on the end of the bar at this point our Mosaic Damascus Billet is virtually done the only problem is the pattern is only on the end of the Billet so we've got to cut this thing up into tiles and tile weld all those little pieces together to transform the pattern from the end of the Billet to the sides of our blade and that's what I'm working on now foreign [Music] oh I love it look at that came out amazing that is gnarly dude here's a sneak peek at the pattern on the end of our Mosaic bar I think it looks absolutely crazy I love it it's kind of got a big flamey X thing in the middle we've got some like mushrooms or something going on here on the sides I think this is going to look absolutely killer cool foreign [Music] in order to get the pattern on the end of our Billet onto the sides of the blade we're going to cut it up into a bunch of tiles on a 35 degree angle so I've got seven tiles laid out here I've got them CA glued down to a 2x4 which is something different I haven't tried this before I normally tack weld the Billet onto a bar of Steel and cut it this time I thought I'd try CA gluing it to the 2x4 so we can cut up all these tiles on the bandsaw and clean them up get them laid out and ready to forge well together later foreign [Music] got the entire Billet all cut up into 35 degree tiles let's go through the process of flipping these all over so we can get the pattern on the sides of our blade instead of just on the end of the bar what we're going to do is flip these in a way that each piece mirrors the next piece after it so we want this Edge to connect with this edge of that tile and now we want this top edge of this one to connect with the top edge of the next tile and we can just kind of flatten these out a little bit just like that and that's how we want the pattern to mirror itself all the way through we flip it over like this all these Sharpie lines on here represent the Mosaic pattern on the end of the Billet and it's now on the side of the Billet once all this stuff's forwards welded together [Music] thank you foreign [Applause] [Music] got all the tiles welded to a piece of sheet metal and then sandwiched it on the other side with a piece of sheet metal sealed up all the seams completely so we can do zero atmosphere Forge welding I'm gonna pop this in the Forge heat it up real hot smash and Forge well all the tiles together draw this out grind some of that sheet metal and stuff off and turn this into a knife blade [Applause] [Music] let's see what's up [Music] foreign [Music] I got our massive 14 inch blade forged out it's looking really nice I tried to leave the blade extra thick as well because there's still a little bit of that sheet metal left over on the sides of the blade I haven't ground that off yet most of it's probably gone though because it naturally fell off as Forge scale as I was forging the blade so we don't have to worry about it too much next thing I'm going to do is grind the scale off with the angle grinder and then get this blade surface ground after that I can finalize the profile of the blade [Music] thank you [Music] I'm pretty much done surface grinding the blade for now I want to see how the pattern looks so I sanded on it with the broad back up to 320 real quick just with a round wheel let's stick it in some ferric chloride and take a look all right let's see how this pattern looks awesome oh it looks super cool I love it I love it oh look at that oh it's so cool how you can just do subtle little changes at the very beginning of the pattern it changes it in the end so much wow I love it since the pattern looks good I can move on by finishing up the profile of the blade I did a little bit of the profiling while forging but I want to clean it up and continue refining it with the Grinders and bandsaw I like to forge the tip shape about halfway and then grind and cut off the other half of the material in order to not distort the pattern more than what I'm looking for foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] foreign hahaha [Music] I just finished profiling the blade I decided to make the clip come back about an inch further than I had on my sketch and I'm really liking the looks of that quite a bit the next thing I'm going to do is grind in the blade Pebbles I'm going to leave a nice little bit of extra material up here at the spine though because we still have to heat treat this blade and I don't like to do too much of the grinding beforehand I'm going to grind in the main bevels though and hog off some of that extra material we don't need on there for the heat treatment if I left all the material on the edge of the blade we'd have to just needlessly grind all that extra Material off after it's hardened the reason I don't Forge in the reason I don't Forge in the blade bevels on a mosaic Damascus blade is because I don't want to distort the pattern anymore that's why I grind in those blade bevels on this type of Damascus [Music] I got the bevels wrapped in and I put a 120 grit finish on them to reduce the chance of it cracking when we heat treat I'm gonna pop it in the Heat Treating oven at 1525 degrees bring it up to temperature let it soak for a couple minutes and then we'll quench it in some 100 degree parks 50. oh it's hot in there [Music] the Blade's been soaking at 15.25 for about 10 or 12 minutes now I'm going to pop it out and get it hardened [Music] not a lot of room to move it up and down I probably should have poured a little bit more Parks 50 in here I did bang the tip into the bottom of the tank too which isn't ideal oh that pattern you can really start to see that pattern looks like it didn't warp too bad it looks pretty straight let's run a file over it and see if it got hard the end of the Tang should be a little bit softer and the file should start to cut in there the big difference in the sound big difference in the sound [Music] soft hard the heat treatment looks like it was really successful I'm gonna get this thing in the oven to temper as soon as the oven cools down I'm going to temper it for like two hours at probably about 425 degrees and that's going to take away some of the brittleness make it a tiny bit softer but a lot tougher right now it's so hard that if I dropped it or even just sitting here naturally on its own it could crack and break so that's why we want to get it tempered as soon as possible I just got the blade out of the oven it tempered pretty much overnight I ran it through two two hour cycles and let the oven cool down in between I'm gonna be grinding on this blade pretty much all day starting with surface grinding I'm going to get all these flat parallel surfaces cleaned up and then move on to doing the bevels and straightening and stuff to start though let's go surface grind these Flats foreign [Music] the blade I noticed there's some warpage and I want to go ahead and straighten it right now to straighten the blade I heated up with a torch near the spine of the blade kind of to a straw or maybe a little bit of a purplish color then I pull the blade in the opposite direction that it's warped in and cool it off with some water sometimes after one or maybe many attempts I'll get the blade perfectly straight before we move on to more grinding foreign [Music] straight I'm going to finish grinding in the bevels of the blade and then move on to getting the rough hand sanding done on the blade bevels [Music] next up it's time to grind the clip in I'm going to use a work rest set up on a really long angle to get the a clip grounding accurately on both sides and then move on to hand sanding the clip [Music] the blade bevels and clip are hand sanded to 600 grit I've been grinding on the tang I've kind of prepped that for the guard before we can actually fit the guard I need to get my Maker's Mark etched onto the side of the ricasso so I can finish sand the ricasso and then we can do the guard fit early on in my knife making I used to stamp my Maker's Mark onto the ricasso but I had to do it when the ricasso was soft and before the blade was hardened and it added a lot of complications so for many years now I've been electrochemically etching my Maker's Mark onto the ricasso to electrochemically etch I lay a stencil on the ricasso with my Maker's Mark cut out in it and then I use a little bit of low voltage DC current an electrode and some electrolyte to etch away at the steel it takes a couple of minutes and I get a nice deep Maker's Mark in the future I'm hoping to experiment by getting a CNC laser and seeing how I like using that to make my Maker's Mark and to do some other fun things that I have in mind too [Music] foreign [Music] for now I'm done working on the blade and it's time to move on to the handle and fittings first up I want to work on the guard by twisting up a portion of our Mosaic Damascus pattern I'm going to twist it super tight until it looks like all thread twisting this little short bar for the fittings is kind of awkward so we're going to do a ring around the rosie Style with Dad on the next go go go go go go go go go [Music] okay wow I actually feel kind of dizzy thank you that was a lot more fun than a normal Ring Around the Rosie with Dad for the win now that the Mosaic is twisted up nice and tight I'm going to start forging out the guard shape I need to forge it into a flat bar and then Forge the ends of the Guard to have a nice little curve to them foreign some of the scale off and everything and now I want to start Milling in some flat spots so I can easily clamp this up in different directions in the milling machine [Music] [Music] there's no way [Music] [Music] our guards now got flat parallel surfaces so we can easily clamp it in the Vise and the next step is to start Milling out the slot for the Tang so we can fit the guard to the blade [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] the slots milled all the way through the guard and now I'm Milling a little bit of relief where the ricasso is going to touch the guard [Music] I hammer the guard onto the blade with a special punch since the ricasso has left an outline I can follow that outline with a high speed Dental bur and slowly remove material and keep hammering the guard onto the blade until the ricasso is actually set into the guard about 10 to 15 thousandths of an inch [Music] after a few cycles of hammering the guard on and removing material with the high-speed Dental bur this is how the finished guard fit looks [Music] the next thing to make is the pommel nut it's going to be made from some of the same twist Mosaic Damascus pattern the Pummel nut will hold the handle assembly together onto the blade the Tang will go all the way through the handle and thread onto the pommel nut and cinch everything together [Music] foreign [Music] and threading the Pummel nut I can Chuck it up in the lathe and begin turning it down to size you can actually see quite a bit of deflection on the Pomona as I turn it down on the lathe the Pummel nut is chucked up in the lathe with a 1032 bolt which isn't super thick and since this is Damascus steel even though it's not hardened it's still harder than mild steel so as I work it it's deflecting and moving around I only rough in the shape using the lathe Cutters once it's roughed in I then move on to files in the Dremel tool to fine tune and refine the shape of the pommel nut foreign [Music] I finished making the pommel nut so it's time to start fitting the handle the handle for this buoy is fossilized walrus Ivory and I've glued a piece of wood to each side of the handle material that's because the walrus Ivory is a weird inconsistent oval shape and I want to be able to easily clamp it up in the milling machine so I glue the wood to the sides of the handle and shape the wood down until it centers the handle material in between the two pieces of wood that way when I clamp it up in my milling machine it'll go to the exact same location when I drill from one end of the handle or flip it over and work on the other end of the handle or take it out and put it back in the milling machine once I'm done drilling all the holes going through the handle for the Tang I Can Begin widening out the slot a little bit and making it so the Tang fits better using some brooches once the handle fits up to the blade I add the Pummel and Pummel nut we can assemble the knife for the first time even though the fittings aren't all shaped yet [Music] I do a bunch of shaping on the handle and fittings but it's mostly hours of me standing at the grinder slowly removing little bits of material until things look the way I want them so we'll go ahead and cut right to the fun stuff the 24 karat gold wire inlay on the fittings to inlay gold in my fittings I engrave a Groove for the gold then dovetail that gold and then smash the soft 24 karat gold into place and the gold is soft enough that it'll fill in the dovetail mechanically holding it in place after that all I need to do is clean up the surface with a little bit of hand sanding [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] today I finished up the 24 karat gold inlay on the fittings and started doing some hand sanding I've got most of the guard up to 600 grit and 320 grit on the pommel and front spacer I've also started hand sanding the handle I've got it up to 600 grit and it is now officially time to get this handle bedded in epoxy foreign I've covered all the pieces that we don't want the epoxy to stick to and Vaseline and I also put a piece of tape on the pommel so I can fill up this end of the handle material with epoxy for the epoxy I'm going to use some really high quality G Flex West system epoxy this stuff will take quite a while to cure but I like slow curing stuff because it normally comes out a little bit stronger and lasts longer and it also gives me more time to clean it up got the epoxy mixed up really well I'm going to fill up the handle for the most part and then we'll put the knife together that's really good I want the epoxy to run out the front putting some pressure on I'm happy with how much is coming out the front there I'll go ahead and take this tape off the back and let some come out the back as well [Music] go ahead and add the pommel nut I put a bunch of Vaseline around the outside of the pomelette and some inside on the threads as well I just finished sanding all the fittings to 600 grit since these fittings are Damascus I want to harden them and temper them the same as the blade the reason for that is because they'll etch better when they're hardened because our pieces are mostly finished I don't want them to form scale when we go to heat treat them so I'm going to use some brown Nails anti-scaling compound foreign to begin with I just heat the parts up to a couple hundred degrees and then apply the Brownells anti-scaling compound then I continue heating the parts up until they're a nice orange color and quench them quickly in my quenching oil right next to me I'm going to repeat that process for each part being extra careful to make sure each one is coated with the anti-scaling compound so we don't get any scale and to make sure that I don't accidentally overheat the part or I'll melt my gold out to harden the fittings properly I need to heat them up to 1500 degrees but the 24 karat gold melts at 1947 degrees that is a couple hundred degree window so I should be good but I am just going by eye so I need to be very careful not to melt out the gold the anti-scaling compound gets very bright when I'm heating it up with a torch so it can throw you off a little bit if you're trying to see the color of the steel itself you kind of need to take the torch off the part for a second let your eyes focus and dilate and get a truer sense of the color of the steel that's also why you see me wearing these shaded glasses is because of the anti-scaling compound gets so bright that it's a little overwhelming [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] got all the pieces hardened and now I've got them on the turkey fryer burner in some water and we're going to boil the water and that should remove the excess anti-scaling compound sometimes it all chips off sometimes it kind of sticks on there after hardening the fittings I did a little bit more hand sanding on them etched them in a ferric chloride solution and now we're going to begin the process of gun gluing the fittings [Music] the key to good bluing is clean Parts I start with Dawn dish soap and running water to get the big stuff and then move on to an ultrasonic machine with a chemical cleaner in it then I get the parts in the bluing salt solution after the balloon's done I submerged the parts overnight in water displacing oil and then clean the parts off the next day to see how the bluing looks the blued finish on these Damascus fittings came out amazing [Music] [Music] I just finished hand sanding this massive 14 inch blade that took a while it's all ready to go it's time to reveal the Damascus pattern this thing's got a really cool Mosaic Damascus that it's made of but we can't see it yet until we do our etching and coffee darkening [Music] [Music] it's been a few minutes let's take a look at the blade [Music] whoa look at that that is so cool look at all those tight W's surrounded by large areas of 1084. oh I love it that's gonna be so cool finished out [Music] yeah foreign [Music] I just finished the last etching cycle on the blade now I'm going to get it in a really really strong batch of instant coffee to hopefully set in some nice black oxides onto our 1084. after leaving the blade in the instant coffee for eight hours I took the blade out dried it off and let it set overnight next I'm going to add a protective coating of wax to the blade this will make the pattern in the blade pop a little bit more and like I said add a protective coating to me [Music] things are done there's one more thing I have to do before I can put the knife together sharpen the blade the Broadbent sharpener made short work of this massive blade [Music] do you want to level up your knife making then check out learnknifemaking.com where I teach you from start to finish how to make high quality beautiful knives if you want to learn from me then Now's the Time all of our online courses are 40 off from now until Christmas so buy a course today and learn the skills you need to make better knives and there it is this massive 14 inch buoy is complete I love the Damascus fittings and instead of leaving them the same like etch color that the blade is having the Damascus fittings gun blued so they're nice and black really looks cool I love the finish on the gold too having that burnished finish on there is different than anything I've ever done before it gives the gold a really raw natural yellow tone instead of having it super highly polished having all those little little tiny burnished marks really just give it a little Sparkle it's hard to put words around what it does to it I absolutely love this buoy this is probably the best coffee Garden finish I've ever done it went so smoothly on this one I got it the first try we've got the nice durable wax finish over it that just came out really really gorgeous this knife also probably has one of my favorite clam shell guards I've ever done and I kept each one of the little clamshell scallops a little bit larger than I normally do on a guard and I think it looks really really good I love the Twisted Damascus guard the pattern in it and the twist Damascus on the pommel looks really cool and then I love how I decided to use the Mosaic Damascus from the blade untwisted on the pommel and the front spacer from the side view on the front spacer and pommel we get nice straight lines and then if you look at the pommel on the very end you have the same Mosaic pattern that's on the blade seeing this knife finished and come out so closely to what I was picturing in my mind when I first started is so rewarding it's so cool to be able to actually spend time creating something like this and having your vision come to life into a real object so no matter what you're creating I hope you're inspired to get out there and make something really cool with your hands I will see you in the next video May the forge be with you bye-bye level up your knife making with our online knife making courses only at learnnightmaking.com

Channel: Kyle Royer

Views: 450,298

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: dP4O87Ye6qQ

Length: 33min 58sec (2038 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 17 2022