Labor Time Per Knife - Making a Batch of 4 Knives

[Music] hey y'all welcome back to the shop today's video is going to be on batch work how I do it and then some tips and tricks on how to make the batch work process potentially easier for you to do I'll also give you some time stamps on how long it takes me to do each process when I'm working on a batch so you can see me here I'm starting off with a piece of 1075 from New Jersey Steel Baron and I'm going to be making four of these knives these are Skinner's they're very popular in my area and a lot of guys at work asked for these so I'll be making four Skinner's you know throughout the process it ends up being three Skinner's I made a mistake on one of them during the grinding so you'll see me skinny down the 1 but this first process drawing out and cutting the profiles of these knives took me around 33 minutes to get all four cut out so that's like eight and a half minutes per night more or less so I get them all drawn out here with that spray-on die comb blue layout fluid it's great and I just scribe them out and cut them out on the bandsaw miss Bower Bower bandsaw from Harbor Freight and the swag table here after I get them rough cut out on this deal I'll move on to the belt sander the bandsaw has a gap there in the in the swag table and I found that if you try to get too fine of cuts you can have pieces fall into that gap and hang up your blade and sometimes bust a blade so I don't go as fine as I used to on the bandsaw I still leave a little meat there and I just hit it with a worn ceramic belt in this case just to get the profile ground out so this belt is a VSM 80 grit worn ceramic belt you can get pretty close and the radius is there and you can get a pretty nice profile I'll later take it to I think a 120 grit on the on the profile there just to have a nice small grit line profile and then take a magnet and make sure that these blanks are flat or at least pretty darn close to flat before moving on to the next step so the profiling on the grinder took me about nine minutes there the next step is to lay out the holes and then drill the holes in the tang so once again I'm using this spray-on layout fluid I get all the blades sprayed on one side I actually go back and spray the other side as well then I took a scribe and try to line up where my holes were gonna go use the caliper to pick the center of the Tang and then use some punches to go ahead and center punch where I'll be drilling my holes so it took me about 40 minutes to lay out the holes and drill the holes in these tangs and these four knives and that's with me drilling a thirteen number thirteen hole for the core B fasteners in two spots I'm drilling an eighth of an inch hole in the center and then I'm drilling some lightning holes or I guess some epoxy holes all around with some old bits I think I have an old number twelve bit that I'm using to put the lightning holes in the tank so this is a setup that I use on my mini mill have one side that kind of has a stop there on that three to one block so if the mini mill ever grabbed that blade it would be stopped mechanically and not you know helicopter into me so here we go I'm laying out those bevel lines that I'll be grinding to and then using centerline scribe I lay out the center lines that I'll be grinding to for the edge you can see there I also put some marks on how far I want my plunges to come up I normally target that first line and then I end up moving them to that back line so this is kind of new for me I start off mostly using jigs and the last I don't know a year or so and I've been moving into doing freehand grinding and I actually attribute the jig to helping me do that so I I'll start off I used to start off grinding on the jig to get me to about you know eighty percent of the material taken away and then I would move on to a j-flex belt and finish out my plunges by hand because I found they had more control and now I've you know been able to advance to doing the whole thing freehand so if you're using a jig right now don't despair you will eventually be able to freehand if you keep practicing at it it just takes time it's definitely not definitely not an easy thing to learn right off the bat so practice makes perfect in this case or at least practice makes better I think I'm eventually gonna do a video specifically on grinding and what I've been able to learn just messing around in my shop but I take all these up to an 80 grit ceramic belt I actually didn't have anything of a lower grit so we started with the 80 grit as well this is a blessing in a curse it takes a little longer but it's you don't have those big grind lines to get rid of so I took this up to an 80 grit finish and then eventually a 120 grit you can see there I got it close to 90% done of a 40 heat treat so this is a J flex belt right there 100 grit so I'm just trying to knock down some of those big some of those big grind lines so there's still some meat here it looks more finished and it is there's still some meat on that blade to take down that full flat grind I like leaving a meat on the blade so that you can grind away any decarburization of the surface after a heat treat and it just gives you some room it gives you a little more thickness to so the blade doesn't pick up any warps during the quench so before the heat treat you got to make sure all your holes are drilled that your bevels are ground and also don't forget to put in your sharpening notch if you want to you won't be able to do this post treet so I'm using a 5/32 chainsaw file here to get that in so back to the times a little bit laying out and grinding to a 120 grit and notching out the sharpening notch took me about a hundred and forty-one minutes so almost two and a half hours so so far so far we're in this for about four hours for four off to this step pre-heat treat on these knives so this is for knives from cutting out to preheat treat about four hours so I'm getting to forage out here I tried blowing out the shop a little bit I do that periodically because I'm working in a garage here and all I have for dust fighting capacity is throwing some fans up trying to push that dust out so I blow the shop out pretty frequently if you're curious on how to heat treat 1084 or in this case you know 1075 is pretty close I have a video up in the cards you can watch on how to eat treat a general basic heat treating knowledge here I'll be normalizing these blades twice and then in this case I'll be quenching in vegetable oil that has pre heated to 120 125 degrees Fahrenheit and then I'll be tempering them for two tempering cycles at 410 degrees Fahrenheit so I got these blades quenched you can see they they file tested easily and then they're going into the temper for two to our cycles so one thing to note here you'll see in my future videos I've graduated to parks 50 kwench oil over to vegetable oil the vegetable oil requires a preheat it seems like the parks at least our data seat sheet says that you can quench and Parks from I think somewhere around forty five to ninety degrees Fahrenheit and get very consistent results so that's gonna be a nice a nice feature in the parks fifty I'm also gonna be using 5 gallons instead of one so doing multiple blades at once in a batch scenario should be easier because if you quench in one gallon of vegetable oil it will raise that temperature substantially and you'll have to spend some time cooling that oil before you can quench again to cool the oil I normally just use like a cold piece of steel and twirl it around in there until the temperature comes down and I can quench the next blade so here you go I have four four blades there and then you saw like a test blade that I was working on you know it's gonna be kind of a fun fact that one of these ends up being a test plate itself but the heat treat the blades that's not including the tempering process took me about an hour and a half about 81 minutes and the tempering process obviously took around you know four or five hours so I didn't count that in the time for making these knives so I had one that had a little warp in it and so I took a little time to get that warp out and my knife torturer vise device here I'm using a granite sink cutout as my flat surface to make sure this is flat and then the post heat treat grinding I start with a 120 grit belt and I take my edge down to the thickness that I was shooting for which is somewhere between five and ten thousandths and I also take off a significant amount of steel from the flats to make sure that I've ground through any decarburization layer from the heat treat so once I get them up to around a 220 grit finish I'll move on to either a scotch brite belt or a cork belt to kind of smooth out some of those scratches I'm not a hundred percent sure which one of those I like more I really like the scotch brite though but the corks I'm still playing with after I get the post heat regrinding done that took me around 3.6 hours about 215 minutes after I get that done I'll move on to ECHA ng my mark and then stone washing the blades so I'm using my DIY extra machine here I want to put a ton of cards in this video because it it's flexing some of the the videos that I've already made for sure on how to make some of this equipment but I go ahead and I put my my edge in here I get my stencils from TUS industries they do a great job with the stencils they last a long time and then I a cheese blades and acid for about ten minutes scrub them down a little bit with some baking soda and then put them into this tumbling device so I can tumble these blades and get that stonewashed finish I normally do this for around 10 to 15 minutes per knife and the cool thing is while I'm tumbling it I can also be itching the next blade so this process is pretty pretty smooth it takes me about 80 minutes or 1.3 hours to do all three of these knives if you notice I've moved down to three knives so so that's around 30 minutes a knife somewhere in that range so this is kind of where we're at here we have them all stone washed we're gonna be working on the handles next so the next step is to kind of lay out our handles profile the handles and drill the handles so I'm gonna be using two to two handles are gonna be g10 and the orange and the green and then I have some desert Ironwood here all of these handle scales came from pops knife supply so in the end they were great nice and flat already barely took me any time to make sure they were flat I go ahead i clamp them both together so I can use the knife tang as a drill guide and get my number 13 holes drilled to accept my Corby fasteners after having these Corby fasteners holes drilled and in my eighth of an inch center pin hole which I'm actually using a mosaic center pin for a little bit of flare here also from pops knife supply after I have all these holes drilled I'll draw the profile of the blade I'm sorry at the tang on to the handle material and then cut that handle material out roughly on the bandsaw is when you're doing batches it's very important at this step that you mark what blade goes to what handle material and not get them mixed up because they are now matched sets so I get it rough cut out and then rough ground on the belt sander to get all the the the layout of the handles the profiling done and the drilling of the handles it takes around the one hundred and fifty eight minutes for three blades that comes out to about fifty two minutes of blade there and that includes you know this forty five degree of the front of the handles and getting that finish up to your desired finishing for the whole handle so I took the front up to around the thousand grit here actually up to a thousand grit here on the front of the handles after I get the from the handles done I'll go ahead and hit those holes with the countersink bit to accept my quarter-inch corby fasteners I also got this bit from pops knife supply and it's been a game changer I had a DIY bit and its performance was not nearly as good as this one that's actually made to do this job so I get all these countersunk holes drilled into the handle material here and then we're gonna be off to the glue up so the glue up can be kind of boring to watch on screen so I cut around here a lot but long story short is I use G flex epoxy to glue up these handles and then I utilize corby fasteners to snuggly tighten the handles down and then you can see me hammering there I'm I'm tapping in eighth of an inch mosaic pin so gluing up the handles took about 52 minutes for three handles so that's about 17 minutes a handle there and then we let these sit overnight so I'm not including that time and in this in the final numbers you'll see later but then we let them sit overnight for about 24 hours at least actually was like two days before I got back to these but and that G flex epoxy says stick here in about 24 hours and I guess it slightly depends on the temperature of shop if it's hot or if it's cold so if it's hot it a cure a little faster so next thing I'm doing is I'm kind of spraying the blades down with a little bit of wd-40 and then I'm wrapping them with some tape so as not to damage the blades while I'm doing my handle sanding but I'll first profile the handle to the tang and then I will utilize these one-inch scalloped felts to do a lot of my handle shaping and rounding here so the rough grind these three handles it took me 77 minutes that's about an hour and a third to get all three done so it's about 25 minutes of blade and then I move on to the hand sanding so I bring these I start off with a 320 grit run on wet paper move up to 600 and after 600 I move up to a thousand on these knives to give them a pretty I like the thousand grit finish it's a good in my opinion working finish for a knife handle so the hand sanding process took me around 2 hours so about 40 minutes a knife there I got all three done pretty I felt I felt pretty quick one thing you can see me doing here is I have a sanding block there or a sanding bar if you're especially if you're using stainless I found the handle material is softer than the pins so you'll get doming of the pins if you just do it all by hand so I use that sanding block to make sure that all the pins are flat and you're not having like that dome the feeling when you run your finger over the pins lastly here we're going to be sharpening these blades so I take a piece of painters tape I spray down the blade first with some type of oil wd-40 ballast allwithout whatever I put a piece of tape on the top and then I put my sharpening jig over that piece of tape so that the blade doesn't get scratched and you know this is tormak style of sharpening system so these this jig was from wind but it's pretty much the same thing as a tormek knife jig and you can see the cards above and I have a very good review or at least I think it's good a decent review of this sharpening system it works pretty good and you can sharpen blades fairly fast and I'm sharpening these blades from a zero edge to an edge so we're taking it from anywhere but you know between five and ten thousandths of an inch down to a zero edge so anyway so this took about almost two hours 1.8 hours 27 minutes a knife to get these hair shave and sharp you can see I use that 220 grit stone and then used a grading stone to get it down to about a thousand grit stone and then I move on to a strop to knock that burr off here you go these are the finished knives here the three of them that were were finished up they ended up getting coupled with do Metis leather industries sheaths we've been doing some partnerships there he's making leather shoes for my knives and the whole package is beautiful together he does amazing leather work way better than than I'm capable of doing at this point so I like being able to offer my customers a nice finished product so about that test knife so we have this extra knife here that I messed up the grinding on so I figured - well go ahead and start testing it so I did a little edge rolling test there and it performed well and then I just started hammering it through this piece of steel it's not very thick but the edge held up very good going through this and then I used a knife to baton against some nails it didn't have any super issues with this it did have maybe ever-so-slightly in one spot a small roll probably right at the impact of that first nail and then I did a little flex test because these are fun to do and I think it did okay wasn't perfect but uh you know good enough hopefully no one's prying I'm gonna have to like this so all in all it took around 5.4 hours per knife of actual labor not including tempering and not including the glue set time so I'm hoping that by getting a little insight into my batch making process it gives y'all some ideas that you can utilize in your own shop back home if it did please hit that like button below and also go ahead and subscribe to the channel so that you will be informed of new content when it's posted on this channel with all of that I'll catch y'all on the flipside

Channel: Red Beard Ops

Views: 72,967

Keywords: how long does it take to make a knife, how much time does it take to make a knife, jkeetonknives, how to make a knife, how to work in batches, batch work, making a test knife, making a knife, beginner knife making, how to make your first knife, best knife making tools, knife making tools, knife grinding jig, how to make a knife handle, how to make your first custom knife, how to make a custom knife, custom knife making, what tools do i need to make a knife, diy knife making

Id: 9DQoyN9gz08

Length: 18min 59sec (1139 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 08 2019