Knifemaking tutorial - Making knife guards like a pro

hey guys welcome to my shop i'm erin with aileen knives and this is episode four of the intermediate knife build tutorial i'm going to teach you several different ways how you can make a guard for a knife hey guys to this day the largest supporter of my shop is empire abrasives they're an incredible abrasives company they sell all kinds of abrasives especially my 2x72 belts that i use here in the shop i buy all kinds of different styles of abrasives from these guys they're great they ship super fast they've got great customer support and if you go over there and you decide to buy some belts from them at the end in the promo area just enter ailee knives and you're going to get a discount too so check that out so the first two methods that i'm going to go over involve using a milling machine now i know a lot of you don't have a milling machine so i'm not going to actually make the guard for this knife on the mill but i do want to explain both of these methods because this is however the method that i use on all of my knives now in fact the other method is slow and difficult to the point where i literally bought my milling machine to mill guard slots that was the sole reason that i bought this milling machine but you don't have to have a milling machine to mill these guard slots and that's exactly what i want to show you in this video i got really good at making guards cutting the slots with nothing more than a drill press and some files and i've learned some really neat tricks and tips to get that right so that your your guard fitment on your blade is awesome but if you do have a mill at your dispense there's two different methods that you can use to make a guard and for the sake of the video i'm going to use a piece of aluminum in the mill to show you those methods so the first one is real simple you're going to take your knife blade and you're going to put your bevel jig right on your shoulders you're going to orient the knife blade in your mill and you're going to take a thousandth or maybe two thousandths off of the tang on both sides which is going to leave you a shoulder right here and then you take your calipers and you measure your tang thickness after you've removed a little bit of material off and you select an end mill that is the exact size of your tang and then you mill your slot that way when you put this on here these these shoulders that stand proud will come down to your tang and there won't be any gaps that's one way that you can do it uh i can't show you that method because i would have to mill a little bit off of this tang and that's not how i'm going to complete this knife for the video but that is a good method i only use that method on larger bowie knives okay i don't think that removing any more material right here is a good idea this is probably a weak point already and if you go and mill a straight line here in a straight line here and put a guard up there to me that's adding a weak point right there right where it may flex between the handle and the blade so i don't use that technique on these smaller knives the technique that i prefer to use is to take your piece of of guard material and what you're going to do is you're going to measure your tang overall thickness okay you're going to select an end mill that is just slightly smaller than your overall thickness you mill a slot all the way through your guard material so you've got a slot all the way through and then you trade out for just a slightly larger end mill and then you mill a slot 95 percent of the way through so that you're left with a five percent slot that is slightly smaller than the tang so you have a step on the inside of your milled slot and what that does is when you go to drive this on there's a thin piece of material that squishes out of the way and basically hugs the tang of your knife so if you have any discrepancies or whatever when you hammer your tang on for final fit or when you hammer your guard on for final fit when you hammer it on it's going to drive that material that last five percent that stands proud inside of your tank slot it's going to drive it out and form it to basically whatever shape that you hammer it onto i found that that gives you the most supreme guard fit and it's the easiest way to do it it takes me very little time to mill a tang slot these days so i just i mic the overall thickness i choose a an end mill that is just slightly smaller i mill the overall dimensions of the slot out and then i get one slightly larger than that and i go through and i mill the same slot without going all the way through i leave about five percent of material so you know i mean that's just a little tiny sliver of material on the front face of the guard that's gonna sit right here now i'm going to show you what that looks like i'm going to throw this piece of aluminum in the mill and i'm going to mill the slots just in case you're not following me and i want to give you a visual as to what that step looks like before you would hammer it on the tank so i'm going to go ahead and jump through those processes right here and then i'm gonna take you over and actually pick up the piece of brass that we're gonna use here's my brass right here and then i'm gonna go uh build this with minimal tools and show you how you can do it with just a drill press and get it right and it's going to be awesome so stay tuned i've got some super tips when it comes to making this guard so what i want you to imagine is that i am milling a slot for my tang to fit right here if i was doing the guard obviously i would mill the slot in the middle but what i'm going to do is i'm going to mill a slot on the side so that you can see a cutaway of what this would look like [Applause] okay so we've milled our tang slot like i said this is a side shot of what this hole would look like if we plunged a hole and and milled it straight through a slot in the guard so imagine this is the slot a side profile view of it so this is the overall thickness of your tang that would be this original slot that goes all the way through this end mill would be slightly smaller than the overall thickness then we would go and trade this mill out for a larger mill very easily done and then what we're going to do is when we come in this time we will plunge cut all the way down to right there about 95 of the way through okay let me show you what that looks like [Music] all right let me grab a chip brush move all the chips out of the way okay so now what we're left with here is a small ledge this is that five percent of material that i was talking about that stands proud of this so this will allow your tang to slide through freely but this will be extremely tight against your blade because this slot the overall width of this slot was just slightly smaller than your tang and then what happens is when you hammer this onto the blade this little tiny piece of material right here is allowed to smush out of the way so with that little piece of material as you hammer the tang on see how that little piece of material is malleable and it can mold easily so as you hammer that onto the tang it will form around any imperfections that might be on your tang say one side of your tang isn't perfectly square maybe you know maybe this side was slightly thinner than this side that's okay because when you hammer it on this is going to mold to the tang and it gives you a really nice fit up against the tank this method here works exceptionally well and since i have a milling machine this is what i do 99 of the time on knives this size on larger knives like bowie knives i do the other method where i actually come in with an end mill and i mill off a little bit of the tang leaving a shoulder right here there'd be a shoulder on both sides so that when i slide it into my slot the slot would be the the tang thickness and this shoulder would hang over the top and it would conceal any small gaps or anything like that that might have formed during milling the slot so those are the two methods that you can use on a milling machine now let's move on to a more practical method if you don't have a milling machine okay guys so let's go ahead and get started with how you can build a guard for a knife with some simple tools and i'm gonna share some tips with you that i learned doing it this way that tremendously helped me so let's go ahead and take our piece of brass and we're gonna go ahead and lay some uh put some layout dye on it so that we can put some scribe lines on here for center and things like that so we're gonna go ahead and i painted that on there we're gonna just let that dry for a minute and uh let me walk you through the process here so you've probably seen a lot of other videos on how to do exactly the next couple steps that i'm going to tell you because these are steps that you have to do but it's the steps that follow that are really important that are going to help you succeed in getting your guard fitment really nice and tight with no gaps around your tang so what we're going to do first is we're going to scribe a center line on our material that's going to be the line that we drill our holes on the next thing that we're going to do is decide how wide of a slot that we're going to have to mill so we'll just take the mic here and what we're going to do is we're going to mic this distance from you you probably want to mic the distance from a little bit into your radius you know how your tang doesn't come to a 90 degree there so let's make the slot just slightly larger than the tang itself that's probably good right about there so that's the overall length of the slot that we're going to mill so we'll go ahead and mark that length you know for the slot and then we'll we'll go ahead and measure the thickness of our tang so let's just as an example tell you what the thickness of this tang is so this tang measures out to 0.130 now in a perfect world you would go and you would grab a drill bit 0.130 and you would mark it out and drill a whole bunch of holes in a line and you're good but it doesn't work that way here's why after you drill these holes you're going to have to connect those holes together somehow there's a lot of different ways that you can do that you can use a dremel with the rotary tool and you know with your holes here and you can connect those through and then take a file and file it you can do it all with just a file a small needle file to connect your holes but my point is when you're connecting those holes you're going to enlarge in the hole is that a word i think that's a word you're going to expand the opening with your file you will not be able to connect all those holes without making the slot slightly larger filing is incredibly difficult to do it squarely so what i suggest you do is go ahead and say if this is 0.130 overall thickness you certainly can't be any larger than 0.130 because you'll have a gap next to your tank i would choose a drill bit at maybe .120 okay and then that gives you some wiggle room while you're filing your tang slot that's the first tip but that's not the tip that's gonna really grant you success i'm going to share that with you after we get to that step so let's go ahead and and get into this so first thing i'm going to do is mark myself a center line right so we'll just measure the overall thickness and divide it by two so we're at seven five zero so we'll just cut that right in half so that's what uh 375 so we'll just mark this out at 375 there's 375. we'll mark a center line here okay wow i can do math okay all right so we've got a center line scribe then we go back to this measurement right here and we decided now this is really easy all right there's where it's at that's your the width of the slot we do need to go back to um actually here's what we need what we do need to do is look at our original design which i don't have like actually let me get the original design all right so here we go so our original design shows that the guard is flush with the top of the blade we we are flush with the guard right there okay so when we're milling this piece of material it's going to end up flush with the blade in this stage i'm going to leave a small amount of material on this side okay we can trim it down later but for right now i'm going to machine the slot in the guard leaving roughly that much material sticking out okay that's just some wiggle room so if that's sticking out and you know that we wanted the guard that big we're looking at we're gonna build the guard roughly an inch and a half that's perfect okay so i've got this thickness right here measured out right now just the thickness of the tang okay so i could just lay this right here lay the knife blank or the knife design right on my guard account for the extra material that i want hanging off i can just lay my mic right on that line and give myself a scribe okay let me show you what that looks like i'm gonna bring it in close okay so i've got my material here you can see hold on a second let me turn on this light too boom okay so i've got my material here you can see those two lines and you can see how the knife is going to fit on there there's the the slots i left extra material on this side and this side's going to be where the finger guard is okay so this is what we have this is what we have right now we have our center line we have the front of the tang and the back of the tang right there the top and the bottom of the tang marked out that's the length of the slot that we're gonna have to put in so now we need to go over and select a drill bit that is smaller than the overall thickness of this tank like i said this is this tang right here measures out to one .13 three point one three three is where we're at so we'll go and find the drill bit probably about one two seven somewhere in there you know one two five one two six one two seven we'll find a drill bit that mics out to about that thickness let's go over and pick out a drill bit okay so here's my drill bit index i'm just gonna come over mic out a couple drill bits and find one that's that's uh sitting right where we want it that's gonna be the one right there let's see point one two seven that's the one right there we're gonna use it wow that was quick and easy it normally doesn't happen that quick and easy okay so i'm going to go ahead and move over to the drill press basically the idea now that we have this right here is i'm going to step over to the drill press and i'm going to drill my first hole right up against this line here and then i'll drill my second hole right up against this line on this side so i've got the two outside holes drilled and then i will just drill holes as close to the center line as possible you could do this a couple different ways you could take a center punch and you can punch holes and uh and that can help you stay in the center but that's one of the reasons that we went with the slightly smaller drill bit you can really once the drill bit's spinning you can see how true this this drill bit spins and you can put it right on this line and you can punch these holes out without much um without much hassle okay once you get these holes punched out we're gonna connect them with the dremel tool all right here we go we were set up on the drill press this is just a drill press i'm just gonna hold this here nothing nothing crazy we're gonna drill on the inside of our mark right on our line just kind of give it a test there there we go right there perfect [Music] okay when you drill through a piece of metal like this you'll always get a burr i like to just scrape that burr off so that it doesn't manipulate how your piece of stock is sitting on the table so you can get a square hole drilled now i want to show you right here that that line is right on the outside of my hole so that's going to be on the outside of the shoulder of the tank so you drill the holes on the inside of your farthest measurements okay so now i'm going to drill a hole on this side next here we go there we go [Music] [Music] now we've got the um the shoulder holes drilled we can go ahead and just pop a couple holes throughout the center one thing about drilling holes right next to each other you want to make sure that you put the whole an entire drill bit length away from the first hole if you don't move it over far enough what will happen is your drill bit will jump into the previous hole and you won't be able to drill a hole straight through so just barely let them touch there we go right there and i'll show you what that looks like all right so right there there we go sorry guys okay so see how that hole is not connected yet it's the drill bit is just far enough over to where the drill bit wouldn't try to jump into the first hole okay here we go next hole [Music] so [Music] all right so there's not enough room for another hole you can try to come through and drill a hole sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't or you could switch out for a smaller drill bit i'm going to go ahead and just try my luck at getting it dead center and see if i can't get a hole to drill through we'll see if i get lucky [Music] nope i did not get lucky it's dragging my drill bit over into the previous hole yep right there so that was a no-go on that so i will have to remove the rest of the material with the dremel tool now it is a good idea at this point to go ahead and give yourself some idea of your overall thickness of your tang before you start hogging material off with the dremel so i just throw it on my surface plate with the height gauge i'm gonna come to my largest hole which would be right there whoops right there all right that was probably a little bit too high look at that see how we did here i have given myself some lines for the outside of my tang i don't want to go past those lines when i dremel these holes together okay guys so for this part you can use a whole slurry of different cutters for your dremel on this one i am personally using let's see let me try to get this in focus here so you can see it there we go right there it's just a spiral cutter spiral fluted cutter i'll probably use this and a couple others to get this job done now what i'm gonna do is i've got this laid in the vise like this for a reason i've got it laid in the vise at an angle so that i can rest the hand here and take the other hand and use my hand as a steady rest to put the cutting tool in there and put downward pressure so i can start to connect these holes together put on your safety glasses and here we go [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] pretty simple there the rotary tool makes that a whole lot easier however you do not have to use a rotary tool you can use a set of these needle files right here from harbor freight even and this is how i started out doing it and i would do it with just this one file right here this little small round file and i would get in there and i would literally just file these holes together very easily done and very inexpensive so this could definitely work now we move on to the next phase of making the guard now we're getting into the good stuff okay here is what we're left with after we've connected those holes with the dremel tool this is really as far as you want to go with the dremel or a round file and now what we're going to do is we're going to move to a good sharp flat file a small skinny flat file and what we're going to do is we're going to attempt to smooth out the side walls and get this to look like a nice uniform slot the way i like to do this is to put it in a vise that has nice square jaws that holds it squarely you don't want your file to ride on your vise but it does help to try to get as square as you can in the vise a couple pointers here when you're when you're cutting you have to remember the side of the guard that you've uh put your layout die on is going to be the side that has to have the refined slot this side you can have a mistake or two that's no problem but if you have a mistake on this side it's ruined that's why i like to put the side of the guard that's going to be facing the blade towards me so that i can see exactly what i'm doing if i wanted to error on the side of caution i would remove material on this side slowly leading up to this front lip i don't want to go in here at the wrong angle and remove material from the lip because that would make my hole too large near the tang so let's get in here and just start some nice flat filings just to connect the dots i'm gonna get you a better camera angle here all right that's a much better angle for you it's gonna be hard for me to work that's good on that side let's go ahead and flip it over let's get this other side filed in okay okay so see how our tang just it almost wants to fit in there that's good that's where we're at we're gonna stop right there and that's fine for it to be um right where it's at right now you don't want to be any looser than that and we're going to be able to fix the rest of this with the next couple steps okay guys so the next thing that we need to do to fit the guard onto the tang is to taper this tang down slightly right now the tang is the same thickness here as it is here and if you try to drive your guard on if there's any areas on here that might be slightly larger than it is here then this will expand your slot and then when it gets up here it'll be sloppy so the idea and and actually this is pretty common because you sand and grind up here so this will be slightly thinner than here because you haven't worked this at all this is really easy to do guys we're just going to walk up to a grinder and we're going to just add a slight taper on both sides of this you want your taper to stop right here you want this area to be full thickness where the guard is going to sit so i'm just going to walk up to the grinder and i'm just going to take some material off here and take some material off here here we go [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] and then you're going to want to just knock the edges off [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] that's it for tapering the tang i'm going to just walk over with my mic and mic it here and then slip it off if you can run your mic down here and slip it off and it doesn't open the jaws of your mic then you've tapered it well enough now that the tang's tapered we can go ahead and shore up our shoulders here that are going to meet our guard so we're going to bring our bevel jig back up we'll go ahead and clamp it down right there so we can clean up these shoulders this is one of the main reasons that i did not go to finish grit on the blade because i knew that we'd be putting this guard back on here we'd be handling it we could introduce new scratches so there's no reason to go for a fine finish at the point that we were at when we uh hand sanded this blade out one note that i'd like to show you on this guard guards never look right when they're tilted like this so when the blades coming forward you always want your guard to either sit at exactly 90 degrees or fall slightly forward if you've ever seen a knife where the knife maker made a mistake and laid the guard slanted backwards it doesn't really catch the eye correctly in my opinion so if you're going to error here error on the side of caution and lean the guard slightly forward of 90 degrees it will look better promise you can shoot for 90 but never go less than 90. always go 90 or slightly past 90 and normally guards look better if if they're not just at 90 to lay forward just a little bit you can go radical and lay a guard way forward but that makes putting on the handle segments a lot more difficult on this one i'm going to lay the guard slightly forward just because i like it that way so i've gone ahead and clamped this on i'm going to show you how i clean up these shoulders all right so i come up here with the fresh 80. got this on here i lay the belt off the side of the platen just a little bit and then i just come up to where this is square to my belt and i work it from the tang out [Applause] and then i flip it and i work the radius [Applause] so [Applause] [Applause] you can just as easily do this right here with a file but i like to use the machine so it's all that good i'm gonna give you a close-up on this and show you what it looks like um which i don't think that i can do here yeah maybe i can there we go so i've ground this shoulder up right here i've ground this shoulder in right here and i've given it a slight radius in both of the corners so they don't just come to 90 degrees i'll show you what that looks like on a piece of black granite so it really stands out the guard guard will fit through like this right there it will sit securely from this point right here to there and from this point right here to there so i've milled my slot from here to here i've still got a line scribed right there when i finish saying this you won't see that anymore so the next step in fitting your guard is to check the fitment and you're going to need a couple things for that you're going to need a good solid vise and a piece of leather that has no swarf on the inside that might scratch your blade that leather you're going to wrap your blade in like so and then you'll install it into your vise let's just go ahead and get this installed like so and you're going to want to clamp it down i mean really tight okay i happen to have a monster vice so that works really well the next thing you're going to need is another piece of leather and something to drive the guard on something hollow that the tang can go through so i found this socket works really well as long as the tang isn't larger than the socket so i can easily slide this up and down then i have a piece of leather to put right here with the slot in it so the slot goes over the tang and what this leather does is it protects my guard from being marred as i drive it on with this so what we do is we just set the guard right on the tank now remember we tapered this so this slides on pretty easy then we put the leather over here we put the socket on put on our safety glasses and drive it the rest of the way on okay and we check for fitment so this is a little loose actually looser than i would like that's exactly what i wanted to show you perfect okay so here's where we're at guys we have marked this out drilled our holes and filed it and we've made it too loose i've done this all too many times it's incredibly easy to make that mistake now it's not really loose it's just too loose you want to be able to take this piece and have to drive it on so that it fits really tight this can be fixed very easily and i'm going to show you how okay guys so even if you have a good solid fit you still want to do this here's what we're gonna do i'm gonna take a punch and what i've done is i've just rounded the tip of this punch slightly so that it's uh it's rounded over and not a perfect circle yeah i'm gonna come in here with this punch yeah what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna put the punch right here i'm gonna hammer down and i'm going to push this metal over and every time that i punch around this tang slot it's going to move the material over it's going to mash the material over and close this slot up so depending on how sloppy it is you'll have to move more material mine isn't very sloppy so just by tapping some some punches all the way around my slot is going to go ahead and close that gap up and i'll have to hammer this on and it'll be a perfect fit now you have to keep in mind if what you don't want to do is let this punch roll over your edge because you'll knock the edge off and that'll create a gap next to your tang you want to put the punch way out here and hit it squarely so your when you drive down it bubbles the material over into the tang area but not break the surface of this this uh slot that you've put in that's definitely not what you want to do so you just want to come around your slot like so and it will drive the material over so let me show you that let's do that first and i'm going to show you another cool thing all right this really does work super well oh that was a mistake oh but it was salvageable ah i did it again it hopped on me okay that's what you do so i just ran the punch and i punched a whole bunch of times around the outside of the hole and it moves the material in and you can see that that slot is now thinner than it was and i'll have to drive it onto the tang now listen you can do this drive it on the tang make sure that it fits and then you can sand this smooth again so that this is smooth as long as you punch these deep enough to where it move the material over deep in the slot then you can resurface this and you won't see these and it works out great but what i found out that looks really good is after you do this just continue to punch the entire surface of the guard until it's textured and then the textured surface really looks good against a uh a satin finish or even a high polish finish this looks really nice that's what i'm going to do for this blade because i really like the look so i'm just going to continue to punch all the way around this thing in just a random pattern and when i'm finished it'll have a nice textured finish on this guard so like i said you could take it from here assuming that you hit these hard enough to move the material deep in the pocket you can take this to your grinder or or a surface plate with sandpaper and you can sand it flat if you want a flat guard you can still use this method and get it perfectly smooth and mirror polished and you won't see any of these dimples however that's not what i'm going to do i'm going to go ahead and force these dimples throughout the entire guard and in order to do that i kind of just go for it you just random you want to make sure that you get all the spots you don't want any you don't want to miss any spots that's for sure you can always go back and hit some more let's see here whoops you i think we're there i think we are there yikes so it's completely textured rock pattern over the entire surface that will be the guard let's go and drive it on all right so before when we drove this on it went on really easily and i'm going to show you just how tight this is now look i can't even fit it over the end that's remember this is tapered so that just goes to show you how tight that made that slot i could i could literally slide this up and down the tang all the way to here before now that i've peened it in it uh it it grasps down on the tang i mean i got a hammer just to even get it started okay so here we go pull it up kind of center it a little better grab our piece of protective leather and boom a plus that is as tight as it gets there will be a little play on the side of the guard where the slot is slightly opened up larger than the tang that is fine when we put the handle on that area will be filled with epoxy and it will become very rigid yes that is an excellent fit that's what we needed to go for so we'll go ahead and move on to the next step now that we have the guard on the tang and nice and tight yeah all right all right guys now that we've got our our guard on the tang to remove the guard is real simple all you have to do is just loosen your vise take the same piece of leather that you're using on the top put it right there which lays on the top of your vise and protects the guard material from being marred and then you just very lightly tap the tang of the knife [Laughter] while holding the knife underneath underneath the vise so you don't you don't want to just let the knife flop out so i'm holding the tip of the knife blade right now and once it comes loose it doesn't look great right now but you guys just wait you'll love it well in this video i hope that i've shown you several different ways that you can shape and form a guard for a hidden tank knife this applies to larger bowie knives all the way down to even smaller hunting knives than this maybe even a bird and trout knife could have a guard on it you don't necessarily have to have a finger guard you can just have a guard just a piece of metal that the wood meets up to that's real common at this point right here we're ready for glue up what i'm going to do is i'm going to measure this out cut it off i'm going to slide this on we're going to get our handle material ready we'll slide the handle material on get it all glued up and pinned and i'm going to do all that in the next video you'll see how i do the glue up process a couple really neat tips for getting everything straight and nice and neat and tight i've got a couple jigs that you can use that are super easy you know i see these guys making all these elaborate jigs to glue these things up wait to see how i do it it's incredibly simple and you're not even gonna have to make a jig to do it so in the next video like i said we will finish saying this we'll get this blade perfect you'll get to see the hamon pop out because we will definitely want the blade to be finished before we put this guard material on it when you put this guard material on there you can't ever touch this surface again because your scratch marks won't ever meet the uh get all the way up to where the guard meets and you'll see a little ghosted line there so get your blade perfect so in the next video it's going to be really productive we are going to finish the blade we're going to cut this off slide the guard on get the handle material ready do the handle glue up and all of that so stay tuned make sure you stick around because this build's really going to come together quick and it's going to be awesome i know i don't know about you but i can't wait to see that hormone pop out on this blade we put a lot of work into that during heat treatment and the claying process and i think it's going to be really cool i'm going to be super bummed out if if this doesn't have a lot of activity on the blade but we'll see see you guys next time

Channel: Aleeknives

Views: 39,178

Keywords: Aleeknives, knifemaking, knife making, bladesmithing, knife guard, knifeguard, makingaguard, making a knife guard, knife guard how to

Id: 1GNliLAJDi4

Length: 59min 21sec (3561 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 19 2021