Make A Knife With Cheap & Basic Amazon Tools | Knife Making

hey guys welcome back to the shop today we're going to be going on a journey together we're gonna be making a knife with cheap amazon tools many of these tools you may already own so the point of doing this is twofold first of all I want to show that you can make a high quality knife that's probably better than the knives you can buy at the store with cheap tools in a little bit of time second of all I want to show that you can get into knife making in a fairly low cost so for those of you who are on the fence about making your first knife hopefully this low cost to entry will help get you over the edge we're gonna be making a design that is very simple but also one of my more popular designs from my friends and family who buy some knives from me from time to time I call this my skinner design and I'll put it in a PDF in the description below so that you can print it out the materials for this knife can be purchased on Amazon I'm talking about the steel the scales the pins all of those items will be able to be purchased off Amazon and I'll show you where for each of these items that I show I'll give you multiple options so that you can choose which price point you want to get in the game many of these items can get the job done in varying speeds but some of them are more expensive than others so I'll give you the cheapest option first especially if this is your first knife I highly recommend 1084 steel it is by far the easiest steel to heat treat at home and the most forgiving to get the template of the blade onto the steel you can use the sharpie and trace method like I am using here with a scribe or you can print it out cut it out and then glue it onto the steel the first cheap Amazon tool that we will be utilizing today is a four and a half inch angle grinder it was purchased for around $30 at the time of this video and it's a very versatile piece of equipment I have an angle grinder in my shop and I use it all the time for strange projects it works exceptionally well for cutting steel quickly and all so for hogging off some material with those flat discs alright so before we start cutting things let's talk a little bit about personal protective equipment first of all we're going to talk about our hearing you can get yourself some cheap earplugs or a more expensive set of muffs both of these options will suffice for what we're doing you can also utilize your shooting muffs for the range in the shop just protect your hearing a last thing you want is to be going deaf because you're making knives second of all we're gonna talk about some breathing protection some lung protection this is probably one of the more important ones so make sure that you protect yourself when we're grinding there's gonna be a lot of particulates in the air micarta and g10 specifically are very terrible to breathe in so either get yourself some cheap disposable respirators if this is the only project you're going to do if you're gonna be doing more projects in the future maybe you'll spring for something a little nicer like this 3m respirator note that these first two respirator options only work if you are clean-shaven if you have a beard you can utilize something like the respirator it does not require a seal so also side notes if you're going to be growing a beard note that you will gain about 10% and strength and your awesomeness will also go up so in that case you're going to need to use the respirator not one of the direct face shield versions on your eyes you'd make sure that you use a good set of clear safety glasses you only get one set of eyes and you want them protected so as you just saw we were able to get this blank cut out with the angle grinder one of the reasons why I chose that specific angle grinder package on Amazon was that it came with a flap disc and couple cutoff wheels and a couple of grinding wheels so you didn't have to buy those in addition after you have the rough profile of the blade cut out with the angle grinder you can utilize a single cut bastard file to get all the services nice and flat that specific path file is from Stanley and here I'm taking a piece of sandpaper wrapped around the file to get all the large file marks off the blade laying the file down flat and putting a piece of sandpaper on top of it allows me to straighten up the tip of the blade and then the spine of the blade so this goes on for a bit here we go around and around just making sure that all of the services are nice and flat and a profile is just a way that we want it the second major tool here other than the file is the Black & Decker 3/8 inch Drive drill corded so this drill is extremely economical and we're going to be using it for multiple operations in this build during the profiling of this knife we need to get into the radius of the finger choil so find something round on your shop that can fit into the drill and then wrap some sandpaper around it so that you can get into radiuses on the knife's design this is how the profile the knife turned out so we're going to be marking off where we want to drill our holes I'm using a sharpie to mark off the area where we'll put the holes and then using a cheap pair of digital calipers to mark the center of the handle and then using an auto center punch or a hand Center punch with every one you have go ahead and center punch your holes and then drill some holes with a quarter inch drill bit I'm also going to drill some holes throughout the center of this handle to act not only as weight-reduction but also for an avenue for epoxy to meet both scales together then with a larger drill bit or a countersink we then knock off the edges of those holes well then take a sharpie and Mark off one side the blade or if you have DICOM layout fluid you can use that as well the next lines we're putting on there are going to be utilized for our targets when we are filing in our bevels then by utilizing an eighth of an inch drill bit which is the same thickness of our stock we will mark the center line so that we have a target to bring our edge to all right so we have our blade profiled out nice and smooth we have our center line marked and we have some bevel guidelines marked as well that we will target grinding our bevels up to towards the spine I mean filing our bevels not grinding there you have some options when it comes to putting the bevels on your knife in this case you could utilize the angle grinder if you have a really steady hand and you could try that I've seen people do it I don't feel confident in getting nice clean bevels with the angle grinder so we're gonna be using the file and I think this file is manufactured by Stan Lee it's a bastard file and I got it off of Amazon probably two years ago and it's still going strong so one method you could clamp the knife down and freehand with the file and you'll get pretty good results with that are good enough to have a serviceable knife but I found that difficult or time-consuming to get very flat even bevels with that method it may be worth your time to build a filing jig a gentleman name go custom knives I think I'm pronouncing it right I'll put a picture up on the screen right now but he has a video on making one of these which is a filing jig and this thing works really good you can make one of these with the cheap drill that you purchase for this project and then you can get your big box store to do the cutting for you so you can make one of these filing jigs pretty cheap that's what we're going to be using here one note on the method we'll start off with a chainsaw file to get the plunge lines as even as we can and slightly radiused and then we'll move on to the bastard file to get the bevels nice and flat on there so you'll see what I'm talking about in a second but our method is going to be with a file so when I got back in the knife making a few years ago one of the first things I built was this filing jig and it got me through at least 10 or 15 knives probably more actually and it's a very ingenious design so I highly recommend y'all going and checking out ghost Channel there he has a bunch of cool content you can see here I added another scribed line which is perpendicular to our original line I put that there to give me a target for my plunges we're going to be putting our plunges into this knife with a 5/32 of an inch chainsaw file I've had this file that I bought off of Amazon for about three years now and it's still going strong but we're gonna start off at a very aggressive angle probably around 45 degrees and file down to our edge target and then we will change our angle so that we work our little file up towards the spine of the knife now I went a little far there up to that line I would have liked to have stopped around an eighth of an inch to maybe 3/16 of an inch away from our bevel scrot scribe line because that leaves a gouge that we'll have to get out later so you don't have to work it all the way up to the spine of the knife stay a little far away from your guidelines there so this is what they look like fairly symmetrical this is one reason why I like utilizing this method because you can get some symmetrical plunges with it so what I was showing there was a file cleaner during this process some big pieces of steel will get caught up in your file and it can gouge your work so make sure that you clean your file off regularly and you will actually feel it so when it starts getting a little gritty you can take your file off use that file cleaner and get the grits out be very careful towards the plunge here I use that stop nut to stop me from destroying the radius that we just but the goal here is to bring the steel down all the way to our Center edge scribe line you can utilize a sharpie in this process to figure out where you are filing away from so the next step after you get down at an aggressive angle to your center edge line is to steep in that angle so that you're filing closer towards the spine you can see here that as I put a sharpie on it you knock down the peak every time you move closer towards the spine of the knife so you'll knock the peak down then you'll work the sharpie off all the way to your edge reapply sharpie change your angle towards the spine and then do it again as I get a little closer to my finished proportions I will go ahead and put some sand paper on the file to knock down some of those large file marks this is a piece of 220 grit sand paper and then at this point I'll take the time to also try to clean up that plunge line a little bit and also try to clean up that plunge radius a little bit with the edge of the file so this is what one side looks like I won't bore you all with the other side but it's pretty much the exact same process well that took a little longer than I remembered it's been a while since I filed out a blade so really makes me appreciate my two by seventy-two belt sander or any belt sander you have but to buy a 42 or one by thirty would be way faster than that but we have the blade filed out we're gonna go ahead and go on to the heat treat now I want to note that I'll be using Parkes 50 but if this is your first time and you're only going to do a couple blades you can use canola oil from the store and that'll work just fine I'm going to be using a torch that I bought off Amazon this does bring up the price of entry a little bit this torch if you don't want to buy a torch there are plenty of online services that will heat treat your knife for you all you have to do is mail it to them they'll heat treat it and you mail it back so you have some options there I'm going to be you doing an edge quench with a torch normally use my Forge but we're assuming you don't have one of those so let's get going [Applause] all righty so as you just saw the edge of this blade will skate a file which means that we have a hard edge I want to note that on our quench it was not the most efficient setup if you're gonna use a small torch like that you really need to have a small fire brick Forge and you can buy two small soft fire bricks and make a makeshift Forge out of them which will increase the efficiency of a small torch like that a lot you can also get your hands on an oxy-acetylene torch or spend the time to build a forge all three of those options are better than what we did and we really pushed that torch to the edge of its limit however it does seem like it got the edge hot enough to make it pretty hard hard enough that it skates a file and for the purposes of this video that is sufficient the next part the process is tempering and what tempering does is it takes a little bit of the hardness out of the edge that you just quenched that edge as it stands would break easily when bent and we want a knife to be tough and flexible so in order to do that we're going to be tempering this knife at 405 degrees Fahrenheit for two two-hour cycles I normally like tempering at 400 to 450 degrees for 1084 and on this knife since we feel like the quench was not optimum we're gonna go with the lower end of that spectrum to leave as much hardness in the blade as we can so now that we're done with the tempering process we are going to put our final finish on the blade when it comes to finishing the blade you have a lot of options you can stun wash the blade you could put a satin finish on it with 600 grit paper you could bring it all the way up to a mirror polish if you wanted to in your masochist or you can do something like we're gonna do we're gonna put a hand sanded finish to about 320 grit and then we're going to try out a mustard patina so this would be a good time for you to throw in your headphones and listen to your favorite podcast because you're gonna be here for a couple to a few hours to get this blade I'll sand the I normally go back to the filing jig right after the heat treat to clean up the bevels and the plunge lines because I find it's easier to do in that contraption and then we'll move on to the general hand sanding lengthwise of the blade I now have dedicated sanding blocks and sanding sticks but a file will do a great job for this project I wanted the mention while you're watching this sanding footage that all the items used in this video will be in the description below via Amazon affiliate links so the channel will get a kickback if you utilize these links and it's the revenue based on these links that keeps this channel alive and coming to you with new content so if you want to support us that's how you do it you'll notice that I'm utilizing a fluid when hand sanding this blade that fluid is Windex or at least a knockoff of Windex I find that I get much better sandpaper life when using Windex and it helps the sandpaper from getting clogged up it keeps it from getting clogged up so if you want to learn more about hand sanding knives the og in this space is Nick wheeler he has an excellent video on how to hand sand knives and the knives that he finishes are works of art so make sure you go and check out his content so we got one side finished up you can see I lightly oiled it with wd-40 and then threw down some masking tape so as not to mess up that finish while it is resting on the wood and I am finishing the other side so we got both sides up to a 320 grit finish so we're going to be flattening the handle scales and if you don't have anything else a piece of glass is pretty darn flat so you can lay down a piece of sandpaper on top of your piece of glass and use that to flatten your handle scales they will likely not come flat as you can see there you can also use a piece of granite a granite countertop cut off a sink cut out anything like that I know a lot of these granite supply shops will actually give you sink cut outs for free once you get both sides done you want to put them together and make sure that you do not see any light in between the two pieces this will give you a good indication that you have both pieces flat we're then going to be cutting out our pin stock about an inch long here out of a quarter of an inch brass pin will then chuck up these 1-inch pins in our drill and then use a piece of sandpaper to knock down the burr off of the edges of these pins and then we'll move on to drilling the handle scales we'll start off with one side and we'll use the knife as a drill guide to get both holes drilled and then while keeping the pin connecting that scale to the knife we'll flip it over so that the new fresh scale is on the bottom and then drill through the hole that we've just made in the scale the knife and then into the new scale after we have that first hole drilled we'll put a pin in it and then take the pin out of the other hole and drill all the way through so now we have a matched set of scales that the pins will go through both scales and the knife cleanly they may not be perfectly straight and square however we do know during our glue up that they will go through all three pieces and that's what we're shooting for here like we said earlier we're going to be attempting a mustard patina we clean the blade off and then apply some mustard to the blade with a q-tip make sure the mustard you were utilizing has vinegar in it and is the vinegar that will do the etching in general less is more with the mustard let it edge for around 24 hours and that is what I have found to work the best all right so now that the mustard is working on the knife we'll let it sit and we're gonna move on to the handle we want to bring down the scales a little bit so that we have less work to do when the whole life has been epoxy together now we have a few options here I'm going to try the flap disc on the angle grinder I have a feeling that it's gonna be moving too fast and it's gonna burn this micarta micarta is known for burning if you're grinding too hot or too fast so if you have wood that may not be as much of an issue you can probably get away with a 60 grit a flap disc or an angle grinder if you had wood but I'm going to try it on this real fast if that doesn't work you can always resort to hand files or you can get yourself a jigsaw or something like that to rough cut this thing out or use a handsaw to rough cut this thing out so you have a bunch of options there I have a jigsaw and I think that's gonna be my second attempt if the if the angle grinder doesn't work out I did buy that jigsaw off of Amazon it's a 5 amp from Black & Decker it's like 30 bucks but we're gonna try the angle grinder first and see how that works so as you just saw we resorted it to a combination of the two the angle grinder and the jigsaw the jigsaw for getting off the large pieces and then the angle grinder for getting close to our lines in reality you could have utilized just the angle grinder but it would have taken you a long time in frustration I found that using the jigsaw sped up this process greatly and then angle grinder can get you closer to those lines be careful with the angle grinder is powerful and it's easy to mess up with I then knocked off the bulk of the material on the front of our handle scales at about a 45 degree angle I like angling the front of the scales I think that gives it a much better look once we get the bulk of the material knocked off with an angle grinder we'll take a standing stick and some sandpaper and straighten up those lines so that both sides of the scales are symmetrical to each other you're then going to want to work up the grits on the front the handle scales to whatever final grit you plan on putting on the handle you will not be able to come back and do this after the glue up so make sure that the front of your handle scales are finished at this stage after this we're going to check out how our mustard patina is going it's not going the way that I would like it to and I will explain why I think this is happening later on in the video already so onto the glue up don't overthink the glue up just use any two-part epoxy you can really get your hands on I know a lot of people use the gorilla glue and a couple other ones you can buy from the store but if you're going on a mess there's G flex and BSI mid cure if you're going to be ordering belts from combat abrasive there's rogue epoxy I've used all three of those and they've all three worked well so just use what you got and if you don't have anything you can order one of those three so the mustard patina is not going quite how he planned it's not really coming in that dark and I think I know why that's happening we had an edge quench on this knife so the entire blade is not hardened the the spine is definitely way softer and it's not taken as dark of an edge as towards the edge of the blade and on top of that as y'all noted earlier our quench probably wasn't optimum so the level of hardness is probably a little lower than what I'm normally working with so I think that's why the etch isn't taking as well I actually have another test blade that I'm itching with the mustard patina and it seems to be taking the edge way better and I use my normal heat ring process so I think that's what's going on the blade just isn't as hard all the way up but it's definitely harder towards the edge where the acid in the vinegar is doing a better job of itching it so at least we know we have a decently hard edge here to play with and we'll just move on to the next step and leave this blade a little nasty looking so if you're going to be doing an edge quench like that you may want to avoid the mustard patina and just leave it a satin finish or do some other type of finish on to finishing off our handle we're using the four and a half inch angle grinder with the 60 grit flap disc again just to knock off the bulk of the micarta trying to get the micarta flush with the steel also we're going to be taking down our pin stock here so that it's flush now when it comes to sanding in the pin stock be very careful not to overheat the pins if you overheat the pins it can negatively affect the occasion of the adhesive so we are still bringing down the micarta to the steel after we get that micarta brought down to the steel we're gonna use the angle grinder to bevel all the edges and knock off the bulk of the material here with the angle grinder be very careful when you're using this tool at this stage you can do some damage to all the hard work you've put into this knife thus far once we get the bulk of the material knocked off with the angle grinder will resort to hand sanding the rest of the knife I took a piece of 220 grit paper wrapped around the sanding stick and followed up behind that angle grinder to knock off the large scratches that it leaves and get everything at least up to a 220 grit finish and then slowly start rounding over all these sharp edges your drill with sandpaper wrapped around the tube or a doll will really come in handy here when getting into that finger choil and then you can utilize some sandpaper in this shoeshine technique to get all the corners nice and rounded over the last part this build is going to be sharpening your knife and you have a ton of options when it comes to picking a sharpening system if you want to utilize the tools that you already have which is a file in sandpaper you can rig up and makeshift sharpening stone with both of those items and get an edge on your blade if you want to buy an item you have a plethora of options including sharpening stones the work sharp systems the wicked edge the edge Pro there are a ton of options out there today we're gonna be utilizing my win water stone sharpener and I'm gonna be using a different method on this machine today because this is a test knife and I'm not afraid of messing it up I'm gonna be utilizing a freehand grind instead of using a jig with this machine I normally like having the stone turning towards me I find it creates a smaller burr and I like the results I get with it in that orientation however when freehand grinding it is a recipe for getting wet so if you're going to be using a freehand grinding technique with a tormek style sharpener make sure the stone is moving away from you so you get soaked okay let's talk about how this knife turned out I think it actually finished up pretty good here I put a little bit of oil on it and then waxed it more so out of habit than anything that's what I normally do when I finish a knife but I'm gonna destroy this knife in a few minutes so I don't know why I did it but after that I've took a piece of paper and made sure that we had a good edge coming off the sharpening system which we did it cut the paper just fine it also shaved hair off my arm easily I then started cutting some cardboard with it I wanted to see how the edge held up overall it held up decently I did notice towards the end that the cutting efficiency probably wasn't as good as it should have been but even after in a cardboard cutting I took a piece of paper and was able to cut it just fine so I didn't shave as well afterwards so it did take a little bit of heat there when we were cutting the cardboard not physical he just the edge dulled a little bit while we're cutting cardboard this is the first test it failed miserably this is a tip roll over test so you stabbed piece of plywood and then bend the knife over and the tip should stay straight and the plywood should come up you know the wood should come up and the the tip should stay straight in this case the tip bends over I don't have a good picture of that but the tip was bent trust me and then we went over to device and did some bending here you can see that the majority of the blade is soft the only hard part in this blade if any would be the edge and it bent right over one thing I want to note when doing this testing is that the handle construction was pretty darn good I actually started busting it up with a hammer and the micarta would break and not come off so that's a good sign for the adhesion of the adhesive we used and also for the pins and all that jazz so that handle held together very well overall I'm pleased with how it turned out especially for the sake of this project being a simple build with simple tools I hope that this project kind of shows you that it doesn't take a lot to get into the game as far as a high quality product which was our first bullet point I think that we got something close to that if you have a small fire brick for your little burner I think it would do a way better job at getting an efficient Eitri on this blade and then we could have met that first criteria of a high-quality knife this one I think would perform just fine just not up to the standards that I'm used to putting out knives so if you're going to be doing this on your own make sure you have a more efficient heat treat than what we did in this video if you guys enjoyed this video and you want to see more videos like it go ahead and hit that like and subscribe button and I'll catch you all on the flipside [Music]

Channel: Red Beard Ops

Views: 442,419

Rating: 4.9163179 out of 5

Keywords: red beard ops, knifemaker, knifemaking, how to make a knife with basic tools, how to make a knife with cheap tools, how to make a knife, amazon tools, tools on amazon, how to make a knife with simple tools, testing cheap amazon tools, best tools on amazon, knife making, diy knife making, diy knife making tools, outdoors55, simple little life, alec steele, alex steele, forged in fire, already own, knife, make a knife with tools you probably already own, common tools, basic tools

Id: cxRWIvanzls

Length: 29min 44sec (1784 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 03 2020