I'm Making The Most Beautiful Recurve Knife (Full Build)

my name is Kyle Royer and I'm making one of the most beautiful recurve knives I've ever made so sit back and relax as you watch this epic build come to life first thing I do is prepare my two types of Steel for the Damascus Billet I'm using 1084 and 15 and 20 steel both types of Steel are very similar to each other one has a little extra Nickel in it though so in the final blade when I etch it in ferric chloride the nickel in the one type of Steel resists the acid Edge and the other one etches nice and dark That's How we'll be able to see the finished pattern I seal the Billet together with sheet metal on the outside edges this will eliminate any oxygen from getting into the Billet as I'm forging it and make it so we have perfect Forge welds the bill is prepped it's time to light up the forge and Heat this steel up to 2300 degrees Fahrenheit [Music] foreign [Music] to forge Weld and draw out this massive Billet I'm using the 40 ton hydraulic press my dad and I built years and years ago when I first started out making Damascus [Music] once the bill is piping hot I began forging the Billet out with the hydraulic press for dwelling all those separate layers into one solid Billet [Music] foreign the sheet metal from the outside edges of the Billet I don't want that sheet metal to become part of the Billet I just wanted it to keep the oxygen out during my first four dwelling session [Music] foreign [Music] whoa that's looking good these are going to be some great W's next up I grind all the forge scale off to get to clean steel again Mark the Billet into five equal length segments and cut it up restack seal it all up with mig weld and get it back in the Forge foreign [Music] heated up I set the forward welds and begin drawing the Billet out so we can cut it up and restack again later as I'm drawing the Billet out I also re-square the Billet this will make the pattern on the end of the bar shift and go across on a 45 degree angle this will be important later for our Mosaic pattern [Music] just like last time after the billet's cooled I cut the end of the bar off and take a look at the pattern [Music] this time I cut the Billet up into four equal length pieces because the next process I'll be doing at the forge is four weighing the Billet [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] still has a few steps to go through so once again I draw it out into a piece that's long enough to cut back up into multiple pieces and here's the beginning of the Mosaic pattern you can see an explosiony star in the middle outlined with a bold black line kind of forming a diamond shape I once again grind the Billet clean and cut it up into four equal length pieces when we combine these four pieces and four-way them we will have an awesome pattern instead of there being four stars though we're gonna have five stars in the pattern because a fifth one will form in the Middle where all four pieces come together [Music] thank you [Music] after the Billet reaches 2300 degrees I set the four-way welds using squaring guys and then begin drawing the Billet out this rectangle shape will be important for the tiles we're going to cut the Billet into [Music] foreign [Music] what's the deal with these tiles that you're talking about well the problem right now is all the cool pattern in the Billet is only on the end of the bar currently the pattern on the sides of the Billet just looks like a bunch of straight lines so we're going to be cutting this Billet up into 35 degree angled tiles flipping all these tiles around in a certain way to make it so the pattern repeats all across both sides of the blades we can actually see this cool pattern instead of just seeing straight lines before I cut the Billet up into tiles I surface grind the two broad areas so the tiles later on will have nice flat areas to forge weld to here you can faintly see how the side of the Billet just has straight lines in the Damascus pattern next I do the layout for cutting the tiles on the edge of the Billet at a 35 degree angle foreign [Music] [Music] haha [Music] [Music] if I line the tiles up just right the pattern should be continuous down the blade without noticeable seams I like to tack all the pieces in place with the TIG welder and then seal up the Billet with the MIG welder [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] and now it's time for the final and most critical floor dwelling session foreign [Music] now that the tiles are all forged welded together I can forge the blade shape out [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] after flattening and straightening the blade I move on to normalizing after all that extreme heat from the four dwelling sessions over and over again this normalization hits the reset button on the steel and makes it so it'll accept a good heat treatment and harden up properly later on [Music] if you're wondering why the tip of the blade looks kind of wonky right now it's because I need to cut a chunk of it off I don't like to forge the tip of the blade too much because it distorts the pattern more than what I'm looking for so I only forged the tip a little bit and then I cut the rest off foreign [Music] now it's time to clean up the profile of the blade I start out cutting some of the bigger pieces off with the bandsaw and then move over to the broad back grinder foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] after finishing up the profile I began rough grinding in the edge bevels the reason I didn't Forge The Edge bevels into this blade is because once again that would distort the pretty Mosaic Damascus pattern more than I want sometimes it looks good on certain knives but with this one I wanted the least amount of distortion I could get [Music] thank you this Mosaic fighter is ready for heat treatment this is where the knife gains its Soul I'm gonna heat it up to 1525 degrees and quench it in Parks 50 oil this is going to harden the blade in fact it's going to make the blade extremely hard and brittle so much so to where if I dropped it on the ground it could actually break in fact it could even break just sitting there on the Shelf waiting so it's important to get it tempered quickly after hardening tempering will remove a little bit of the hardness make it a lot less brittle but make it much more tough the tricky part is to temper the blade just right if you temper the blade too much then you'll make it softer than it needs to be but if you don't temper it enough it may still be a little too brittle and the edge could chip as you're chopping or doing something really hard with the blade [Music] the Blade's been hardened and tempered it's time to begin the final grinding of the edge bevels I give myself some good layout lines to follow and start going to town on the 2x72 broadback [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] once the edge bevels are nearly finished I convex the edge of the blade this convex edge with a flat grind will allow me to get a small refined sharpening bevel on the knife that's also strong and resilient because the metal backing it up behind it this will give a nice balance between a knife that cuts well and a knife that holds up really well to chopping foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] sharpen the knife so I can performance test the blade and make sure that it holds up [Music] [Music] after hacking through a 2x4 a couple times the edge is still hair popping sharp with no chips [Music] next I want to clean up the plunges of the knife using my special plunge grinding attachment I give myself some layout scribe lines and then use my special platen to make perfectly symmetrical plunges [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all the grinding is done on the main blade bevels I like to go ahead and get these hand sanded now up to about 320 or 600 grit before moving on to the rest of the knife [Music] thank you [Music] after grinding and finishing out the clip and ricasso I focus my attention on the guard and front spacer for these I'm going to use 416 stainless so I cut off a big chunk and begin forging them out into a usable bar [Music] foreign [Music] once the stainless bar is forged out I anneal it in my heat treating oven and begin Milling a slot in it so it'll fit up to the blade in the past I used to just rough Mill out my guards and spacers and then do a lot of filing to get the final fit but these days I've been getting a lot of enjoyment out of being more accurate on the milling machine and doing less filing by hand it's kind of a fun challenge to see how close I can get it on the milling machine without doing filing sometimes [Music] foreign [Music] for the guard fit up I hammer the guard onto the blade once it's close enough I scribe a line around the ricasso and then Mill a little bit of a relief then I continue a process of hammering the guard on and removing material with a high speed Dental bur over and over again until the ricasso is essentially inlaid into the guard making it so you'll never see any gaps and it'll have a beautifully tight fit once the garden front spacers are fed up I move on to the handle I'm using a beautiful piece of dyed and stabilized Maple for this handle [Music] foreign [Music] to make the slot in the wood handle I drill holes side by side by side and then I use the drill bit in a way it's really not meant by holding the block manually and giving it side pressure to connect those holes [Music] foreign [Music] before I do the final shaping on the handle and fittings I want to bed the handle in epoxy I'm using high quality West system epoxy I coat all the pieces that I don't want the epoxy to stick to like the fittings and the end of the handle and the tang with Vaseline and then I fill the handle with epoxy assemble everything clamp it in place and let the epoxy set up about 75 percent of the way before the epoxy is fully cured I removed the handle clean everything up and put it back together this will give me a perfect glove type fit up between the handle and the Tang so as I do the shaping on the handle and the fittings nothing will move and everything will go back to the same place every single time now the handle is bedded in epoxy I can actually shape it and turn it into something that's not just a rectangular block [Music] thank you [Music] let me down [Music] when we first met him [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] with me [Music] after shaping the handle I move on to the guard and fittings I want to get those shaped before I start hand finishing everything [Music] her actions will be forgiveness [Music] [Music] thank you my front spacer is actually a three piece assembly two of the smaller pieces are argentium silver and I decided to do some nice delicate file work on the silver liners [Music] right now [Music] before this knife's finished I still have a good amount of hand sanding to do I need to get the blades sanded to a finer finish I need to hand sand the handle and finish hand sanding the fittings it seems like hand sanding is actually a really big part of my life I really don't mind though because I like listening to audiobooks music and podcasts while I'm hand sanding foreign [Music] and now it's finally time to reveal the final Damascus pattern on the blade I'm gonna etch it for multiple cycles and some ferric chloride this will eat away at the 1084 steel and it'll leave the 15 and 20 steel the one with Nickel in it alone once the etch is deep enough I then move on to the coffee darkening this will help give the blade really high contrast it'll make the black look amazing on the finished knife so we can see the pattern better foreign [Music] finish and a bunch of polishing here is the final Mosaic Damascus on this recurve fighter I love how all the little explosions are outlined with these bold Diamond black areas [Music] no matter how pretty it is the knife needs to be sharp so before I add the guard and handle I want to get it sharpened up so I don't have to worry about scratching any other components of the knife after sharpening it's time for the final glue up once again I'm using West system epoxy this time I'm coating it on the tang and on the inside of the handle I don't want this handle ever coming back off again [Music] once the epoxy is cured overnight I drill out the hole for the argentium silver domed pin that I'm going to add to the handle to finish out this build the epoxy I'm using is such a good quality that you don't really need a PIN but I still like having a pin in there to have a mechanical hold and it adds a little Sparkle to the handle when you have that delicate little domed pin right in the middle foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] and after what was for me weeks and weeks here is the finished Mosaic fighter I think the fighter came out fantastically some of my favorite things about this fighter are how beautiful and shiny the handle material came out to be I love how curvy the blade is and the handle together I think they flow nicely the high contrast etch on the Damascus came out beautiful and I love all the extra bold areas in the pattern especially and to top it all off my last favorite part are the argentium silver spacers with that delicate file work on them I will see you in the next video May the forge be with you bye bye don't forget to check out our Black Friday sale all courses are 50 off

Channel: KyleRoyerKnives

Views: 2,345,648

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: kKmk2HbN0kk

Length: 32min 55sec (1975 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 24 2022