I Made My Own Chef's Knife

we're going on a field trip [Applause] normally i'm confined by the walls of this kitchen waving my knife around like a crazy person and making some of the wildest creations on youtube you know it's funny i get a lot of comments on this knife here and this this is no ordinary knife in fact one might argue knives don't get better than this it's damascus ever heard of it this one here was hand forged in japan and it has a pattern so beautiful that i've often wondered it'll distract the viewers from the actual meal aka me i'm just kidding we all know manny's the real meal these knives can take up to two years to produce because this deal has to be layered over and over and over and i have no idea what i'm talking about so for that reason i'm gonna stop talking because we're headed to a secret location tucked in the wilderness of new hampshire where a master bladesmith will show us his ways i don't want to get anyone too excited but he also may have made us a special damascus knife that he says can cook and be thrown [Music] how are you hey nicholas nice to meet you hi just me thank you for having us thanks for coming up what's going on man all right this is the shop yeah welcome to the uh the studio that's where the magic happens this is where it is i shouldn't i knew i was going to say that this space i call it the hot shop this is kind of where all the nastiest stuff happens nastiest forging is over there which is mainly the fire over here i've got four different stations for grinding which is where a lot of the refinement and shaping happens both to the metal and the wood everything in here can kill you slowly or quickly what are the odds that manny would accidentally fall into the welding booth or something pretty unlikely over here is the machine shop so this is woodworking and metal machining some cool machines in here this is a world war ii era bandsaw for cutting metal this is a 1968 bridgeport milling machine and under that cloth there is a big lathe and the cool thing is that between the milling machine and the lathe if you have the expertise which i don't you can basically build the entire industrial revolution oh wow on those two machines that's crazy yeah that's pretty rad they're really powerful yeah that's awesome today we're going to learn how to make damascus knives we're gonna go all the way from this to this you ready let's do it let's do it so this knife has high contrast damascus whereas the one next to it i've removed the contrast there's a chemical compound essentially that's producing that contrast and it's when you've made damascus it's two different steels when you finish the blade you then etch it in acid basically and the etching eats away one of the steels more than the other so there's a topological difference but in that process it also deposits a layer of black iron oxide all right so let's make some damascus this is what it starts out as i get these bars they're 48 inches long and then i cut them down into six inch sections this is two different alloys of steel okay one of them has a little more nickel in it which is what gives us the contrast at the end when the blade is finished okay and then i shuffle them together and i weld them into a packet like this which is called a billet you can see we're going to heat that up in the forge which is over there that we're going to light and it's going to get up to about 2500 degrees 2500 degrees fahrenheit that's nice we're going to cook it when this thing gets up to a nice even temperature glowing bright orange yeah we'll take it out into the power hammer okay and we'll give it a series of blows over the whole thing and that will literally make it fuse it's called forge welding and it will literally weld each of those layers together so that it'll be a solid block of steel with the differing alloys okay that's it wow that is powerful put your arm into your fire [Music] around this side clean we cut almost all the way through from the other side and then i'm literally gonna fold it in half double the amount of layers the grinding for that part was the most amount of sparks that i've seen today yeah right it doesn't look like totally dark in here a little bit so again it's loud inside and i wanted to come out for just a second but basically what's happening right now is he's hammering back and forth going into that super hot fire and then hammering hammering hammering and it's finally starting to take the shape of what looks to be a knife we're going to take this block of steel that we've got layers running through right here's the bar we're now looking at it at the side and we're going to press ridges into it they're going to be staggered for one side a little hole that indents yeah like that's on the side of it yeah is that right and what that's gonna end up looking like is okay makes sense this and the layers will be running like this and then we're actually gonna grind off the high spots so you're left with a flat bar with layers running wavy okay so it almost be as if you took like this piece right here and you bang this part down bang this part up bring this part down take this part off and then just cut off the outside so it was a straight line and then you get that wiggle exactly right got it and you can actually see if you look real close you can see the layers themselves wavering inside of there you can you can see the little the wavies you see the waves edge yeah those right there are the layers so the next step here would be to grind off those ridges right yep and so you're just going to go back in your little hut back there keeps all the sparks from going out right yep [Music] this process takes a while right we've been in this really hot room for a while this is 2500 degrees does anything ever snap break on you yeah it's heartbreaking uh if you know what you're doing you can avoid it okay but if you don't treat the steel right you can end up with steel that's too hard too brittle and it'll literally just snap in half no way yeah can we try yeah let's do it yeah so this is a demonstration on what not to do yep right [Music] wow so now that's about 1200 degrees okay that's about 600 degrees maybe less i'm gonna break steel today oh my god that wasn't even harder [Music] so if the steel is too hard it takes nothing it started to pull this thing so first things first you're going to be shaping this just against this super coarse sandpaper yup is that it yep and is is that hard is it yes and no so like i've spent hundreds or thousands of hours on the grinder yeah it's something you really need to develop a feel for it's hard at first for sure um but then once you get it you kind of get it okay so this is the roughest grind of the blade this is like the first time yeah okay all right so we took a little bit off on the grinder here and it took kind of a you know a little bit of an uneven shape and made it a little bit more refined yeah literally in seconds you have turned it into actually what it looks like this already kind of looks like a knife yeah right this is crazy so we finished around the knife and now we have to uh etch it to expose the pattern the the etching the acid will reveal the two steels differently we have to etch it yep and that means what soak it in an acid it's a lot like developing a photograph how bad is this acid how dangerous is it not very uh i mean you wouldn't want to drink it obviously but like i could stick my fingers in it right now and i'd be fine okay i'm not gonna do that no probably not swish take a look you can start to see it oh it starts to wow minnie don't talk okay that's insane i can't believe we got from the starting piece today you know and now we need a handle so this one we're going to take one of these little blocks and shape that into our handle that's right and did you pick one out already yeah yeah i've got a piece of black curly maple this is a piece of curly maple which grows locally this piece has been dyed black ah okay i was gonna ask i was like i've never seen a black tree yeah that's right okay perfect and we're gonna carve this into what are you laughing about so we're gonna turn this into the handle yeah so i'm literally gonna lay it on here let me take this so you guys have like a sick beard to be a blacksmith yeah it's in the rules you gotta have it yeah that does not no that doesn't count get out get out [Music] so now we're gonna take this handle right here and you're gonna run between these grinders and you're gonna somehow polish this into a perfect smooth knife handle yeah so after all of our hard work which took the entire day right this is what we end up with and we're not even technically done yet right but we put these two things together and polish it up and that's what you get yeah right so can we see some of the finished products here absolutely i did tell people that maybe there would be some sort of surprise of the knives i haven't seen them yet so this is the big reveal yeah right this is crazy all right ready first one wow look at that so this goes that's insane that's crazy so this one right here is the finished product of this one here if we were to polish it all the way up and dip it more yeah that's it yeah and etch it more and really get those patterns pop right that's what this right here is the big reel for the second knife yep i wanted to give you choices oh wow this is crazy ready holy sh i've never seen a knife like that yeah i really have never seen a knife like that how did you get it so dark is my first question so that comes in the etching and the finishing process and uh the contrast is boosted with a finishing edge of super concentrated instant coffee this is coffee yeah technically it has coffee it's a coffee yeah yeah the tannic is a coffee knife this is crazy and also who the hell would think that you could use coffee to yeah to like bring this so it's essentially you're bringing here to here with coffee that is the weirdest thing yeah the last thing i feel like we need to do with these knives however is the sharpness test right because that's if it's not sharp what is it going to do it's got to cut can we see the demonstration here absolutely see there you like butter right butter that is just so satisfying i think indeed they passed the test and and it is crazy how perfectly balanced they can also shave oh so i have to say coming today i had absolutely no idea what was going to happen which is probably why we came because this is what we want to show people and see um i can't believe that we went from this to this yep that's insane yep and hopefully now more people will understand how that works i'm glad that this happened thank you so much for having us yeah it's fun this has been absolutely amazing and i think you now know what's going to be my go-to knife in the kitchen love it awesome thank you so much yeah i appreciate it we are finally back in our kitchen and i brought my knives with me if i'm being totally honest i cannot believe we made this knife today i mean yes it took us the entire day but who would have thought we would leave this kitchen this morning and come back with a knife we made ourselves in fact not one but two knives we want to take you through all these crazy adventures that we go on so let us know what you want to check out next and as always don't forget to toss a like on the video and subscribe or else

Channel: Nick DiGiovanni

Views: 3,534,736

Keywords:

Id: HUgyB9KsHPY

Length: 10min 57sec (657 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 09 2021