I Forged A Knife From Hundreds Of Tiny Steel Cubes

hey guys welcome back to the shop today we're going to take this Square tool steel rod cut it up into a bunch of tiny pieces and make a super cool knife if you're able to purchase small steel cubes I'm not aware of where you can do that and so I have to make my own the only thing that I found that was remotely close was a bunch of magnets and while those might Forge well together I decided to go with a carbon steel that I was familiar with this is W1 20 steel pretty decent blade steel high carbon with a little bit of alloy component to it these are 316 in square rods and I started with 36 in pieces 10 of them and now they're down to a a length that I think I need to go ahead and clean up all of the surfaces while I can still hold on to them pretty easily and that is something that has to be done on the Bel grinder this has some Mill scale on it just your typical cold rolled or even hot rolled surface finish on your steel and I don't want that in there because these pieces are all going to be Forge welded together in a canister once we finish processing them the total prep time on this took me an entire day while I was working on this I also cut up some stock for a bunch of other normal pattern welded Damascus billets so that was that was good the saw could run while I did that and then while I was actually cutting up these little pieces here I was just uh kind of hanging around the saw and uh restarting it every 316 of an inch you can see here in the beginning I was trying to figure out how to contain or retain these uh little cubes of Steel and I know you're going to say why don't you clean out your saw and get all those shavings or saw saw particles out of there well a quote Barney five if you do everything the easy way you never learn anything but the real answer is even if I did that all of the saw particles would still be mixed in and I would still have to separate them out so yeah it would not be easy no matter how you did it finally settled on some paper and just uh picked it out now I'm trying to clean it all up this is the next day got some acetone in this container and trying to clean all these up get all the little particles of of uh saw particles out of there I'm going to fill the canister that I prepped halfway with these steel cubes and then put in my nickel content powdered steel vibrate that down and then fill it up the rest of the way I don't want any voids I want to make sure that that powder steel is all the way in there and if has to travel all the way from the top then it may not reach all of the voids so doing it half and half should work better be more reliable my canister of course is a 2in square mild steel tube coated inside with white paint and the titanium dioxide content in the paint keeps the contents from welding to the can this is me struggling to get this out of the uh leg Vie got it all welded up minus a little vent hole little pin hole so that it doesn't explode in the Forge and we'll start heating this thing up I got this Billet nice and hot and there's a range of for welding temperature you want to have here it all has to fuse together into a solid piece theoretically all of the contents are protected from oxygen by this canister the initial Forge weld heat is long enough that I can press it several times in the forging press the second heat here you'll notice that the Billet is sticking in the squaring dieses and the reason for that is because of residual borax flux on the floor of my Forge from previous uh regular pattern welded billets and it's a pain in the neck it destroys your Forge sticks to your work pieces that you're not trying to flux and there you see I'm scraping it out it's like molten glass but we got our Billet forged up and all solidified into one Mass so it's time to peel this mild steel jacket off of it if everything goes well it should just be a matter of cutting it in several spots and then using a punch or chisel to separate it from the contents I've had really good luck with uh with the white paint even at this higher heat here it uh still did its job I have had the uh stainless steel foil actually Forge weld partially that sometimes you can use to create that barrier so now I just need to forge this out into some stock Dimensions that we can then Forge a blade from and as per typical with canister pattern welded you'll get some surface cracks or inclusions where the Billet was being pulled in a lengthwise fashion while also being squished it's just a uh physics thing and that material on the outside didn't have a chance to fully Forge weld before it was pulled apart but that is why I added those uh pieces in the corners to minimize that and it did help now that we've got the Billet drawn out and the surface cracks and dealt with cut this off at an angle and start forging the blade we have enough steel here for several knives but I decided to make one large knife out of this Billet I think having sort of a larger canvas to display this pattern should be cool I hope I hope it turns out that way anyways at this point the steel is still about 516 inch thick and I'm going to forge the bevel in a little bit but first i'm going to establish the tang and to be honest I was originally going to do a hidden Tang design but then as I started to forge down the step here it really just kind of uh worked itself into a Full Tang just the way it was looking it it was uh inspiring inspiring me to go ahead and do a Full Tang and so I did it did that and it uh I think it turned out pretty cool with the with the profile or the design Forge out the stock taper it out a little bit on the handle you'll notice that the end of the Tang on the handle has got some stuff there that I'm going to cut off that's uh just the end of the Billet that's not usually the best bit of Steel regardless of what material you're working with and now on to forging the bevel I'm going to leave it pretty thick but I do want to forge it in a little bit just to maximize the use of the stock we have here and stretch that out a little bit still dealing with that flux pooling at the bottom in the bottom of my Forge there brush that off every time I pull it out otherwise you leave it on there and you Hammer that into your steel creates a big old divot not fun so straightening the blade out here and finishing up the final forging process before we go into normalizing and further Heat Treating I cleaned up the profile on the grinder and I'm really liking how this is looking overall seems to have some good balance to it although the front end of the blade specifically is going to be quite a bit lighter by the time we're done with it so we'll normalize this at, 1600° pull it out after a soak time and we'll let it air cool and then I'll follow this with a couple of grain refinement Cycles at450 so this blade is actually a large part 1080 powdered steel and then that powdered steel has about 4% nickel content in it and of course the blocks of Steel are W1 this is where my camera glitched but we got it quenched and hardened this is right after the quench just checking for straightening as the blade slowly cools down and check for hardness after a pretty decent decarb layer got down to nice hard steel after two tempering Cycles the next day we'll finish grind this big old chopper start by taking the corners off of the uh bevel with a worn out belt and then just getting the scale off with the same belt and switch to a clean belt or fresh belt and uh grind in the bevels putting a convex grind on this blade using my slack belt attachment for a big Chopper like this that'll provide that uh Edge stability and toughness as well as a uh edge geometry that'll help uh pop out the uh chip of whatever you're chopping branches wood whatever got the sand sanded up to 220 GP and put an edge on with the 220 GP belt and then buff it out for a razor sharp edge and we're going to run a just a quick test on this chopping through a 2x4 a couple times at the start of the test it did take hair off I wouldn't say it's the sharpest but it was shaving and we'll go through this 2x4 a couple of times and it still took hair off following that test of course this is a combination between steel selection heat treatment and edge geometry final test here just to see if we can do the cardboard tube test and it was not the best at it but it would it would cut through there final hand sanding and then we can etch the blade revealing the pattern all right guys well we've run into a serious issue been etching this knife cleaning the oxides off per usual and it uh started looking pretty cool pretty cool knife all the way around but as as I continue to do the etching process third or fourth uh trip into the etch here starting to see some unsettling things here and that is specifically and I'll show you some close-up pictures of it here but around the perimeter of some of these different pieces of W1 steel I'm starting to see all throughout the blade specifically in certain areas uh tiny little what appear to be uh cracks or something to that effect and they're filled in there's no voids but little striations around the perimeter and into the interior of the diff of these different pieces of W1 almost as if it opened up and then was filled with the nickel and steel powder and from what I uh know as of right now that can only mean one thing that this got overheated and to a to a uh level that it should not have and you know there's one it's one thing to have an issue it's even worse to not know how it happened fortunately if that's what this is and I'm 90% sure that's what this is I do know how it happened I recently modified my Forge closed off the back end and put in a new front piece that's a little bit smaller opening so the forge gets hotter running at the same PSI than it used to and that could be good or can be good but if you are not taking that into account when soaking a canister or Billet that um that's not good and so there was a point where I looking back I can say okay yeah I think that uh that got overheated and now I'm seeing evidence of that so I cannot in good conscience finish this knife out and sell it as much as I would love to because this was going to be this week's project and I need the money but I can't do that so I'll show you some pictures and I'll show you some pictures of what I am seeing here that necessitates ending this project uh obviously the theory of sound and keeping track of the the temperature of the forge or the piece of work in your Forge is as always important and uh I just wasn't paying close enough attention used to the um typical soak time for a Billet like that that I normally do but the modifications to the forge raise that temperature and um I should have turned the PSI down if I was going to leave it in there for longer and uh I didn't so that is a bummer uh sometimes these things happen but uh get this video posted up for you guys and unfortunately there will be no knife to acquire from this particular build I really like the profile on this I might save this for a template and uh I don't know that's not really how I Forge stuff but yeah don't know what else to say so that's a bummer but uh I guess that's the real real real world stuff that you get sometimes so appreciate you watching and we will see you on the next [Music] video [Music]

Channel: Fire Creek Forge

Views: 90,679

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Id: Z478rC6JIYU

Length: 16min 35sec (995 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2024