I’m Making The Biggest Double Edge Bowie You’ve Ever Seen

I'm making a buoy with a lapis lazuli stone handle and 24 karat gold inlays Edge buoy knife so far the steel is layered and four weight a couple times I've got a bunch of tiles cut up here I'll count them one two three four five six seven eight nine nine tiles I'm gonna get all these forwards welded together and drawn out all this metal you're seeing on here is the sheet metal that'll all disappear and ground get ground off and everything you need to get this thing piping hot though so I can forge weld these tiles together thank you got the Billet piping hot time to set these forwards well we want to be really gentle with it at first just running it in here very very gently I'm gonna do multiple Forge welding passes and just barely kiss it just like what I'm doing here not trying to draw things out or anything and we're setting these tile welds just one of these very very very gentle I've seen multiple passes of action just like this the sheet metal that's on the uh the front and back of the Billet here it'll it'll completely disappear won't even have to grind it off off the grind off the welds off the edge and the sheet metal hanging over with the sheet metal here on the side so the Press is hitting on it's going to disappear by the time we're done it's really thin and I'm going to be drawing this out so slowly that there's going to be a lot of scale fall out off and that sheet metal will pretty much completely be gone as scale by the time I'm done okay I need to put it back in get a four building temperature and do the exact same thing a couple more times is one of the most delicate Forge welding operations on the entire blade and that's because I'm welding together these little tiles that just have a little bit of an angled area where they touch each other so I have to be very gentle and make multiple Forge welding passes from heating the Billet up to four drilling temperature every time I don't want to reduce the Billet down aggressively I just want to be really gentle take little tiny bites and if I do multiple passes at forward dwelling temperature I won't end up with any ghost lines there are a couple more reasons why I need to take my time and draw the Billet out slowly one reason is it'll help keep the pattern more uniform and I'll get less weird Distortion in places it's going to distort a little bit but I want it to distort evenly down the whole Billet instead of having some really weird places that are extra distorted the other reason is that by heating this up multiple times to forge really temperature and slowly drawing it out and getting those welds set really well should ensure that I don't have any weird ghost lines show up sometimes in the past I had welded blades where you could actually see these kind of ghostly lines where the tiles welded together they were solid Forge welds and the blade was good quality but the welds showed up really badly and I definitely don't want that [Music] thank you [Music] oh that's hot big old pieces of scale flying out of there [Music] The Village too long now to get the whole thing in the board so I'm gonna have to work it in the front and back sections one of these days we need to get around to building a really nice long cord my billets keep getting longer and longer these days still making these very gentle board dwelling packs I've been doing this this way for a while and getting almost perfect results doing multiple board dwelling passes on my uh my tile welded billets almost perfect results and I think it might have something to do with the multiple really light board going passes not entirely sure but it's been working really well so I keep doing it also I haven't been getting any like ghost lines or anything between the tiles and I believe that's due to the multiple passes as well but it could be something else it could have just something to do with the temperature in the Forge and everything okay I'm gonna work the back section next see every time scale falls off the spill it with some of that sheet metal just falling right off the side by time I get this drawn out the sheet metal will be gone it's a good morning to be forging it's only like 80 degrees so far and it's going to be like a hundred today gotta get this straight got quite a bit of a curve to it right now all right I think that's good enough almost 16 inches so I've got to get it a few inches longer because the blade itself is going to be 16 and a half and then I need a couple inches for the Tang too but as I draw out the tip a little bit and continue thinning this down and then work it from the edges I think we're going to have plenty of Steel I think I've drawn the Billet out as far as I want to for now the next thing I need to do is get all the scale ground off the uh the edges the little bits of leftover sheet metal and also to get rid of the welds on the edges because the next process I need to do in the Forge is to start forging out the tip and get the get the blade forged out in this direction and I don't want to do that right now because it would shove all those welds and everything down into the Billet [Music] this table's been a long ways this used to be back in our log home it was our dinner table at night we had a big glass sheet on top of it I was homeschooled I did home homework and school work on this table it's been in the shop for a number of years we needed tons of stuff with it in the shop was dad's workbench and the welding side and now it's a grinder table outside currently speaking of dinner tables and homeschooling it actually got started making knives through homeschooling I was in a homeschooling 4-H group and all my friends were bringing their animals as like their project but I did not like the animals so I was looking for something else desperately mom read an article in the newspaper about a local knife maker Don Hanson who happens to be an amazing master smith and she was like you should try making a knife so I went to the library got a book made a knife out of a piece of deer antler that I found on our property a little JB Weld and a file and I loved it so much and it was a big hit with all my friends and that's basically what led to me grinding on this Billet right here years and years and years later got all the weld ground out of the sides I think I'm going to cut the very end off with the chop saw just because the end is kind of a weird funny shape and I want to I want to square it all up for when I start to forge this tip out a little bit I'm not going to forge the tip out 100 of the way because I don't want to distort the pattern too much but I want to do it uh just a little bit in order to stretch to spill it out and to make it look like the uh the pattern does get stretched a little bit just the right amount just a little bit the right amount amount back in the Forge continue drawing this out and start forging that tip in a little bit I think we need to turn the forge on too that might help it's our fortunate tip on this buoy blade because right now the tip is pretty blunt I want to forge the tip out but I don't want to forge it completely down to a tip I just want to forge it like maybe 50 of the way the reason being as I Forge that tip it's going to compress and smash that Damascus pattern and you'll actually be able to see it if you look very carefully at the finished pattern you'll kind of see this added Distortion at the tip and I like how that looks but I don't want to forge the tip all the way because it'll actually make it more distorted than what I want so kind of going for 50 now I'm forging the Tang of the knife out and I'm using a round bar to help me Forge out more material on one side of the Tang than the other the reason I'm doing this is because the ricasso is like offset from the blade and that means if I go in with the press and smash equal amounts on both sides the Tang is going to be severely offset from the ricasso so first I kind of need to forge in that offset ricasso shape and then go crazy with the press and Forge the Tang out so I'm pretty much just using this round bar as a die to make it so the metal moves more where I want it to instead of in places that I don't want it to [Music] [Music] ah after a couple of Heats I'm done offsetting the Tang material and I can begin using the press to really start stretching out all that material into a nice long Tang [Music] oh once I get the Tang drawn out I do a lot of fine tuning and tweaking with a hammer by hand I'm doing this to kind of push the Tang around get it centered with the blade properly and to get just the right amount of curve on the Tang I need the right amount of curve and I need the end of the Tang to end at the right place because later on in this build I'm going to end up threading the end of the tang and the pommel nut will thread right to the end and hold the whole handle up against the blade nice and tight that means if I don't get the end of the Tang located properly I might have to change my handle shape later or the Pummel nut won't be centered in the handle how I want it or something weird like that I like to forge my Tang out until I think it's in the right place and then I normally let the blade cool down hold it over my sketch make sure it looks good and if it doesn't then I'll heat it back up and tweak it again and repeat that process until I get that Tang right where I want it oh yeah there's one other thing I need to do before I let the blade cool down I need to make sure it's nice and straight if that Tang came out in the right location I want to be able to move forward with the blade and I can't do that if it's got some severe curves or warps in it I got the blade all forged out I had to let it cool down a couple times and uh heat it back up hold it over my sketch make some little tweaks to the uh the tip and the Tang but I think I've got it next thing I want to do is get this in the oven we're going to heat it up to 1600 let it cool 1500 let it cool 1400 let it cool and what that's going to do is actually normalize the steel kind of relaxing the Grain and hitting the reset button on the grain so it'll be better for heat treating and stuff later we'll get less warpage the blade should Harden better uh all that kind of stuff I'm going to pop it in there and get this thing heating up foreign it's the next day I pulled this out of the Heat Treating oven it normalized through all the different stages I went ahead and knocked some of the big scale and stuff off of it and now I'm going to begin surface grinding it I left this thing pretty extra thick so there's quite a bit of material to remove here I'm Gonna Get It All Surface ground flattened down on both sides I'll have to do it in kind of two sections for each side because it doesn't actually fit entirely on the magnet the the Tang hangs over quite a bit so I'm just going to start working this down get it closer to the final thickness that I want I'll leave it a little bit extra thick for the Heat Treating and everything but not much I love using this covel surface grinder it was made in 1958 in Benton Harbor Michigan and this thing is at Beast it's like 2 500 pounds it works so well to surface grind blades I can get everything parallel and flat after a while I got the blade surface ground down I got it to about 270 000 so it's a little bit over a quarter inch I also went ahead and cleaned up the profile a little bit I had a chunk I needed to cut off with the bandsaw right here I did a little bit of uh milling and grinding on the edge just to get stuff to clean metal got the tip pretty much shaped I want cut a little bit away here cleaned up the Tang I also went ahead and started the process of etching in my Maker's Mark on this one I'm going to do a little bit different Maker's Mark than what I normally do I'm gonna do Warrior on one side of the ricasso here so I've got some layout and then I'm doing Ms on the back side the MS is the one I already did I'm gonna go through uh the Royer next and get that etched on here and you might ask why I'm doing the Royer and the MS right now normally I do this way later after the Blade's almost done the reason I'm doing my Maker's Mark now is because I'm going to put gold in the Royer and the Ms and I don't want to have to do that after the blades hard because it'll be very very hard to Rave On I've already experimented with using the electrochemical etching to see if I could etch it deep enough to just go in and dovetail not really feasible it just washes stuff out too much but using the stencil as a layout is amazing so I don't have to customize each letter and like hand draw them in one at a time I can use this stencil to etch it in get it somewhat deep and then go to the engraver deepen it all up dovetail It smash some gold in there and then continue working on this blade so once I get the name in the Maker's Mark do a little rough grinding on the bevels then this blade will be ready for hardening and tempering [Music] I'm inside at my engraving setup I got the Maker's Mark etched in Royer on one side and Ms on the other side I need to deepen these grooves though they're not deep enough for gold right now so I'm going to deepen them up using the engraving equipment get them nice and deep dovetail them and then smash some gold into each one of these letters all right I just finished doing the gold inlay Warrior on one side of the blade and Ms on the other side it came out very nice I had a bit of a difficulty uh getting everything really crisp as far as the corners making sure they're nice and square but after messing with it for quite a bit of time I'm very happy with how it came out the name looks nice and crisp the MS looks nice and crisp I also went ahead and did a little layout I've got some Sharpie lines and stuff on here to do our double edge grind I want to grind away a bunch of this bulk material before I Harden this blade just so I'm not trying to to harden all that extra steel sometime I've noticed if you have too much mass on your blade it's hard to quench it fast enough you might end up with like Auto hormones or something up in the blades so that's why I want to go ahead and get these blade bevels roughed in before I heat treat I did a little layout with Sharpie and I also use my handy dandy height gauge over here and gave myself some scribe lines to follow on the edge this thing's pretty much ready for some serious heavy grinding and then heat treating you might have noticed I didn't really Forge in the edge bevels I did a little bit on the main bevel uh but it pretty much kind of disappeared once I surfaced ground the reason I don't Forge in much of the edge bevels with a knife like this is because I don't want to distort that really pretty Mosaic Damascus anymore it's had enough Distortion getting it to this stage and at this point I want to keep it all really tight clean and crisp I got the blade rough ground I've got the parks 50 oil heated up to about 110 degrees Fahrenheit the blade has already been soaking for about 10 minutes at 15.25 I think we're ready to quench this blade and get it hardened I'm going to take my little stirring stick out stick it over here to drain a little bit and here we go let's see please [Music] holy moly that is Warped a lot [Music] oh oh did you see how much that was warped that was like a quarter inch wow I hope that straightens out a little bit a little worried it had a Twist to it too I don't know a Twist a Twist could be bad twist could be real bad warpage I can handle but twist uh all right just gonna let it cool down now and then uh once it cools finish cooling down let it sit here for a few minutes then we can take it off see if it got hard and see how bad the warpage is it's been a couple minutes I think everything's cooled down I'm gonna pop this knife off of here and take a look at everything I'm a little bit worried because when I put it on the magnet it was it looked like it had a horrendous warp I can handle a horrendous warp but what I can't handle is something like a weird twist or something so if there's some kind of horrible twist in it then I'm gonna be hurting really bad if you did have a horrible twist it might involve heating the blade up and untwisting it and reheat treating and stuff but that's you don't want that to happen you really don't so I'm really nervous right now actually kind of terrified inside oh let's take a look at it okay wow it looks like it looks like it did straighten up a lot um I did do something a little different than I normally do I had this laying on its side in the Heat Treating oven I normally have blades sticking up like this but there wasn't much spine there to sit it on and I wasn't I didn't put anything to brace it up on so I had it on its side that may have had something to do with it I I don't know maybe because I did pick it up like this for a second while it was hot and just the weight of the blade itself could have made it you know sag down before I got it vertical so it might not have been a warp at all it might have been a Bend before I even quenched it just from the Heat it's it it's not too bad now though I do want to check and see if there's any kind of twist in it though but I'm already starting to feel a lot better about it but I want to make sure there's not a Twist in it though but I'm starting to feel better about it so I'm over my workbench on the flat Granite surface here I've got the blade right now the the warp is going this way so the ends are being lifted and it's kind of hitting in the middle and we should be able to kind of tell if it's worked by laying it on here first of all let's just check or it's definitely warped but we should be able to tell if it's twisted by laying it on here it's what I meant to say so I'm holding it down here we can kind of see how much of a warp there is just by pushing this in down so it looks like there's like a sixteenth of an inch or so which is a fair amount it's not nearly as much as it was I'm not kidding when I laid it on the surface grinder magnet that ricasso was up in the air like that it looked bad but I can handle a little bit of warpage now what we can do to tell if it's like Twisted is just kind of look down this Edge if it was twisted one way or the other it's likely that this led this Edge would lift or lower a bunch off of the granite and I gotta hold it down flat for that but you can look down that edge and when you look down that edge it should be a pretty much consistent distance from the granite surface if this Edge was like way lifted over here that means the blade would probably have a Twist like this if it was way lower to the Granite when I hold it flat over here that means the blades probably twisted like this so as I'm looking down this it actually looks really good and I don't think it's uh if it is Twisted it's not not much to worry about at all I could definitely straighten this little bit of warpage out so I think we're all good we do however need to test and see if this is hard real quick just by running a chainsaw file over it and see if it skates or cuts I've got a chainsaw file I'm gonna see if it cuts on the blade or not this is not a brand new one a brand new chainsaw file will actually cut some hardened steel a little bit because they're kind of designed to do that but this should give a good indicator here I want to see it just skate right off I don't want to see it dig in and cut the edges are definitely really hard in contrast to that the entire Tang didn't get hardened fully about that much of the Tang was in the oil and the rest of it stuck up out of the oil so this part isn't going to be like full-blown soft because it air hardened a little bit plus the oil just kind of sucks the heat out a little bit but we should be able to tell a difference when I file on the Tang here versus when I file on the Tang here it should cut in better down here and it should also make a little bit different sound more of like a digging in cutting sound instead of a Sharp skating sound over here can you test it children skating do the same thing down here on this end and there it's biting into it it's making a difference lower pitch sound hear the difference next I'm going to get this blade into the tempering oven I'm going to put it in my old oven though and just do a flash temper on it just to relieve the stress in the blade because right now the Blade's in a tremendous stress if I dropped it on the ground it could crack or could even crack just sitting here on its own so when I get a flash temper get it tempered as quickly as possible while the the main nice oven is cooling down so I'm just going to do that at like 350 degrees take out some of the stress and then when the big oven is cooled down I'm gonna temper it for a couple hours at about 400 425 degrees and give this blade a nice balance between holding an edge well and not being too brittle we want that perfect balance for this big buoy I'm going to slide it into the uh the old Heat Treating oven for that quick flash temper oh that just will that fit the Tang is just barely yup it fits 350 for a couple hours and I'm gonna put it in this other one once uh this thing cools down and do about 400 425 for a couple more hours once the blade is on tempering I get back to the grinder for the Post heat treatment final grinding grinding this style of blade is actually one of the hardest styles for me to grind the only thing that beats out the difficulty of grinding this blade are the swords that I've made this kind of buoy blade is even harder for me to grind than a dagger I think it's something about that large bevel and the little bevel combination together and because you've got like a dropped clip and it all needs to come together at the tip after I finish grinding the main bevels in there is lots of hand sanding to do and I mean a lot this is a massive 16 and a half inch blade that's about two inches wide so it's got lots of square footage on it it also has a really delicate Center Line that runs all the way down the blade where the two bevels meet and I want to keep it as crisp as possible so I'm doing my best to really stay off that Center Line and not roll it over at this stage I want to get the blade hand sanded up to 600 grit then I can move my focus to making the handle and everything once the handle is done I'll come back in and sand it to an even finer 1000 and do all the final etching and everything 600 is a good place to stop for now and as I'm making the handle I won't have to worry too much about accidentally scratching the blade if I had the final finish on it now then the whole time I'm working on the handle I would have to be very careful not to scratch anything or it would take hours to hand sand back out again okay pause right here I know you can't hear it because the camera was on time lapse mode but there was an explosion about four or five feet away from my head so what even exploded well Dad has this moisture collection system for our pressurized air in the shop because the pressurized air can a lot of times be really wet and have a lot of condensation and it can hurt some of your tooling so this is basically a filter to get rid of the water and it was in a big PVC pipe with a bunch of these little beads it would soak up the liquid so there's a bunch of little beads in this pipe that would soak up the moisture from the air well that pipe decided to blow up and it blew thousands upon thousands upon thousands of these bees all over the shop they will never be completely cleaned up ever even when I move and I go to the next shop and generations from now when somebody ends up with this shop they're gonna find these little beads in random places here's a little of the aftermath that's starting to clean up everything suck up some of these beads that are all over the floor you can see the pie types are just completely shattered and broken this thing just blew up and grenaded it was about a six foot long or maybe eight foot long section of pipe and like half of it just blew up and there's like pieces all the way across the shop with a lot of those little balls and Beads and stuff all over too it was quite the experience and everyone in the shop definitely got their hearts racing after that happened these little beads were in my coffee on my sandpaper in mom's hair all over the workbench all over the floor they went everywhere thank you anyway after that excitement we're back to working on the knife I've got the blade sanded to 600 grit and I really want to see how the Damascus pattern looks I haven't seen how the Damascus looks since I just did a quick etch on the end of the bar before I even tile welded it so I go ahead and clean the blade off and get it submerged in some ferric chloride I'm just going to leave it in there for a minute or two though this isn't the official etch this is just me not wanting to wait for the entire handle to get done to see how it looks we didn't record live audio of my reaction of the blade at the time so I'm gonna do my best to voice it over right here the patterns feel wow look at that it came out so good wow it's so beautiful look at this Mosaic it's so even wow I can't wow I can't believe how beautiful it is look it's cool it's perfect it's so beautiful I finished hand sanding the blade as far as I want to take it for now I got the bevels all the way up to 600 grit I'll take it up further before we do the final etch but I normally do that after the entire handle is completed and finished I also went ahead and shaped my ricasso got all that shaped got the Tang surface ground down a little bit just preparing the blade for the guard and then I went ahead and did a quick Etch in ferric chloride because I really had to see how the Damascus pattern looks and I think it came out incredible it looks super uniform and even and I'm very happy with it so at this point the blade is completely ready to move on to guard fitting front spacer the stone handle and all that sort of stuff coming up next I will see you you in the next video May the forge be with you bye bye foreign [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Kyle Royer

Views: 215,430

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: pEAccDruAcE

Length: 29min 26sec (1766 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 08 2023