Knifemaking: Building The Classic Bushcraft Knife | Kephart Blade, 52100 High Carbon Steel

hey guys welcome back to the shop today i'm going to bring you along on a batch of kep art style knives that i'm building starting out with a bar of 5 30 seconds thick 52 100 steel and it's an inch and a quarter wide or just a little bit over that i've got my pattern here that i'm going to scribe out multiple blades and i can shape that to that specific pattern so a little bit about the kephart blade it's a style of knife that was popularized by early 20th century outdoorsman and writer horace kephart and he was a prolific outdoorsman and wrote i believe he wrote for outdoors publications but he also wrote at least one book and that's well known among the outdoors community even today and has a lot of good information for the woodsman camper or as the term goes nowadays bushcrafter but this was before this was before bushcrafting was cool you might say so his uh his preferred blade style was very similar to what i'm building here and as i said a minute ago this is that's what i pattern this knife after and he talks about it in his book i believe the books called book of woodcraft and he mentions how he had it made by some local blacksmith and he even calls the knife ugly and compared to the uh buoy knife influenced market of the time of the day it uh it's it's rather plain looking i suppose it doesn't have the fancy clip point etc but it's very practical very functional even utilitarian and that's why he liked it i'm using 52100 steel for these blades which in my opinion is one of the best if not the best high carbon blade steel available to knife makers today it's not quite as simple to use as some steels such as 1075 or something like that but the performance that it provides is uh is really good and i i really like it it's also very ubiquitous which in my opinion is an important factor because even if a still steel is really good and or cost effective if you can't get it or if it's not cost effective that doesn't help you very much so you notice that i heated the blades up and set them on on a hook to air cool and that's done multiple times this is a very important step to get the carbon in the steel into an appropriate condition to then quench it which is what i'm doing here quenching is what hardens the steel and then following that we have to temper it to remove some of the hardness and uh impart some toughness so we're really looking for the perfect balance between hardness and toughness and this combined with the carbide content of our steel gives us the edge retention in this blade that we want now you'll notice this is what's known as a stock removal technique there are some people out there who believe that forging a knife is better than stock removal however if it was an inferior method of building a knife i wouldn't be doing it this steel has already been forged down immensely at the mill where it was made and i'm now doing some relatively in in comparatively very minimal shaping to make a knife you'll see here what i'm doing is demonstrating the layer of decarburization that happens during heat treating and grinding off as much as a sixteenth of an inch to get down to the hardened and good steel that's necessary especially at the edge of the blade where the steel must have those qualities i think one of the reasons some people think forging a blade is superior to stock removal in principle or just across the board is because of what the forging heat does to the steel so this steel comes to me in a spheridized or annealed condition spheridizing is a form of annealing and that means that the carbon in the steel is segregated into large carbides and not necessarily readily available to a heat treat or hardening process the normalizing and thermal cycling that i do prior to quenching the steel is crucial to unlock this carbon and pull it and then break it down pull it out of those those uh stable carbides and put it into a condition that is readily available to an austenizing cycle at which point it's quenched and converted to martin's site so there's some things to know about this steel in order to get a good a good blade and that is one of them and another thing that some people have a misconception about 52-100 steel is the the temperature at which you austenite it austenize it um this is kind of getting off into a rabbit trail because i love metallurgy but the point is is you don't actually want to put all of that carbon that's in the steel into solution you want to leave some out of solution but there for the abrasion resistance that it provides altogether a properly heat treated 50 to steel blade is just as tough as your 5160 with much better edge retention and that's what we're doing here today so the knife that you're seeing right here i'm putting a hickory handle on and since i'm working a batch of these blades there's going to be multiple different handle materials but this full tang construction here is the strongest way to build a knife that i know of most durable and when it comes to a very practical uh using blade like this one you know it just it makes sense to me and in my opinion it's also an attractive way to build a knife now that we have the holes drilled for the handle bolts we can use our countersink you'll notice this actually creates a shoulder down inside that hole so it creates a very strong mechanical lock these are called loveless bolts because they were first developed by the famous knife maker bob loveless but i'm combining the two scales together to grind and polish or grind and sand the front end of the scales because i can't get to these after they're on the knife without marring up or ruining the blade once the front of these handle skills are finished we can go ahead and attach them to the knife tang you'll notice that i have i've drilled holes in the tang besides the bolt holes and in this case that's simply for weight reduction if you're using handle pins that can also help the epoxy to secure the handle skills but the in this case the bolts are more than adequate so now we have to shape this uh basically block of wood and steel down to a comfortable functional handle and something that i concentrate on with all of my knife designs or all of my blades is a very comfortable functional handle because you know you can have a great blade you can have great steel etc but if the user to blade interface if you will is inadequate or no good you don't really have a good knife and in most cases a simple is a simple design is going to be your most functional and most comfortable and that's certainly the case with the kephart [Music] i'll use the belt grinder as far as i can as long as i can to finish this knife out but there comes a point in time just as with the hand sanding of the blades or the flats of the blade you have to put some elbow grease into it and there's multiple surfaces on this knife still that haven't been finished out such as the spine the tang and of course the handle would so finishing this out by hand that's that's part of the process here and it creates in my opinion a superior product this particular handle skills like i said are hickory but i'm using a walnut stain danish oil to bring out a little bit of the contrast and i think it turned out pretty cool at this point i just need to put an edge on the blade etch my logo on there and we're very close to having this finished the initial bevel is put on with a 220 grit belt and the width behind the edge is about 12 000 so pretty thin thinner than pretty much any of your production type bushcraft blades out there and you'll see that that makes a difference here in a few minutes using my wet stone and my arkansas stone and finally a strop to put a razor sharp edge on this knife as per usual so as you can see it slices paper with ease and of course shaves as well and there is the finished package complete with a handmade leather sheath and of course i make myself as well there's the kephart from fire creek forge all right guys don't go away the fun is just beginning thanks for watching the video up to this point where i've shown you in detail how i build my version of the classic kepp art knife design but now i'm going to start putting it through some paces and i'm going to push the envelope a little bit on what this knife is intended to do it's kind of a routine part of knife making for me anyway it gives me confidence as a maker and it also provides confidence to a potential client in the product that i'm presenting to them it's going to help us understand how this knife is to be used comfortably in a normal situation but also what it can do if need be so let's get into it so i'm going to start out with some basic whittling here this is a dead dry stick not a super hard wood but it's not super soft either but as you can see this knife has no problem cutting whittling this this stick and uh using the spine here to scrape off some of the dead bark but it just gives you an idea that of what you can do with the spine and we'll move on to some some use of the tip here now this is uh indicative of something you might do if you're building a bow and drill fire starting set or so anything along those lines but being able to use the tip to carve or whittle out a a hole in a piece of wood is in my opinion an important function of any bushcraft or outdoors blade the spear point design here provides a a good balance between finesse and and durability this is a pecan stick and it's dead and dry as well it's a hardwood and you can see how easy this uh you know i'm putting some pressure behind it of course but how efficiently this kephart here whittles through this this stick that is not just the fact that it is sharp uh cutting clearance is also an extremely important factor in the functionality of this of this knife and that's why i use the the flat grind here and grind my edge to the thickness that i mentioned earlier there's other grinds that can work as well but you see you can see how well this flat grind kepart is performing chopping through a a about a two inch um dead dry branch here and then using the knife to split it as if we're using it for kindling something like that we've got a few knots there and this isn't too crazy this is a little bit of batoning here i mean it's not it's not absurd um the knife isn't isn't really intended for this per se but it will definitely handle it no problem you know horace kephart and his contemporaries and even you know generations before and after him batoning was was a foreign to them you know they carried a little hatchet or an axe if they needed to do chopping uh but again i'm using this knife sort of at the edges of the envelope and you'll see that even further in a minute just to demonstrate its ability and the quality of the steel and heat treat and so forth so we've got about a three and three quarter three and a half inch branch here that we're going to chop through and this is really kind of outside the envelope of what this knife is for but you'll see that it it can handle it no problem the biggest problem we have here is that the blade is not quite long enough to get all the way through this particular branch and and still leave me something to smack with my baton but as far as the edge retention and the edge durability it had no issue whatsoever [Music] all right just getting to the end here and sped that up for a little bit because it'd be laborious to watch and it was laborious to do so we'll uh make it a little less painful so the question is does it still shave and it does in fact take hair off the arm still so great edge retention there and and no deformation nicks or anything on the edge which the camera is not in focus here so hopefully you can see that but another thing to note of course is that this steel is easy and simple to sharpen with your strop or fine hone so restoring that absolutely keen and razor sharp edge is is not much of a chore so there's the rest of the batch just to show you how those turned out and hey as always i appreciate you guys watching and we will see you on the next video

Channel: Fire Creek Forge

Views: 40,283

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Id: PIwB9h-vnTI

Length: 15min 2sec (902 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 27 2022