Making a Damascus San-Mai Kukri

[ __ ] ball we I broke my Forge [Music] hey guys Jesse here today I'm going to be building a Damascus San Mai kukri now sunmai means three layers and Damascus on my means three layers two of which are Damascus I'm gonna be starting off with around 30 layers of alternating 1084 and 15 and 20. here I'm welding my first bullet together I wrote a bead on each of the corners and then two more beads on each of the faces to prevent those end pieces from bowing out I also weld the handle to the Billet so that I can actually hold it all right they already spilled um good weed ball we we do not ball oh even harder baby now the reason that I was pouring crunch oil into this bigger tank is because after you put quench oil on the outside of the Billet and throw it in the Forge that oil burns off and becomes a soot layer and that ends up protecting the weld [Music] thank you can see here I really take my time drawing out the Billet I always prefer to spend more time forging to decrease the chance of failure now that I have the bar drawn out to around two feet long I take it over to the Vise and I angle grind off all of that forward scale I do not want this hard forward scale to be ripping up a new belt those new belts cost like 10 or 12 dollars now to give my Damascus sunlight a little bit more character I cut the Billet into six separate pieces this will obviously multiply my layer count by six giving me 180 layers and when I sandwich I'll have 361 total layers this is one of the reasons I really like time lapsing footage like this because this is this has to be one of the most satisfying things you can watch in the shop after I have all six pieces cut I take them over to the Belt grinder and I grind all of the faces clean except for the sides because you're not going to be for dwelling the sides together and I do all of this with the help of a welding magnet because it reaches really high temperatures when grinding like this thank you some of you may not know this but my shop is in Arizona when I was filming this video the weather repeatedly hit 103 to 105 degrees that meant the inside of my shop was around 130 degrees Purge I don't know how I did it but I managed to crack that entire ceramic tile in half it's impressive I know wow you are what the French call now that I have this 180 layer Billet drawn out it's time to cut it in half and sandwich three layers of 1084 in between those three layers are going to end up Forge welding together and becoming One Singular layer so my original calculation of 361 layers is still right I'm not doing any flips one of the challenges of sunmai is that that core steel has to stay in the center if I wasn't doing Damascus on my and I was doing like a mild Steel clads on my and my mild steel got into that edge that's an unusable knife now this does not look like a finished knife and the reason I'm taking it to the grinder now is to check that those Forge welds are indeed perfect if my forged welds weren't good I'd be able to see because I'd be revealing clean steel and a crack or delamination would show up as black streak this step could actually be the make or break in a Damascus Billet if I catch a delamination now I actually can take it to the forge and fix it [Music] [Music] at the end of the day it's night ignoring that debacle one of the questions that I've always had before making my own Damascus is how hot should I make my Forge obviously that answer will be different for everybody but for me I use 15 psi on both burners and it's worked really really well I've never had any problems now before I had a press I would always be super mad when I saw a YouTuber forging a tip on a knife with power tools I thought that it was cheating but now that I have a press might as well use it I started off with a lot of Steel and at this point I realized that I had way too much steel so I decided to cut off about one third of the entire Billet yeah buddy now that I have a Billet that's actually the correct size I take it over to the press and begin isolating the material from my tank the cool thing about a press is uh I can do this now I have an entirely different machine with a different purpose now the reason I have this Frankenstein of dies set up is because I want to push that Tang to be in line with the spine when you have two of the exact same dies on the top and bottom it tends to go in the center if I left the Billet as is and Forge the blade from it the pattern would be it'd be pretty cool but I decided to grind some shark teeth so that I can get some depth to that pattern it'll sort of look like a really nice hummon once I have all of those shark teeth ground into the blade I heat it up take it to the press and make the entire surface flat at this point I realize again that I have too much material for the blade and too little material for the Tang so I take it back to the press and I give myself more Tang [Applause] [Music] now that I have the material for the blade adequately blocked out I take it to the press and began thinning down that waist foreign process of beveling and smooshing material into the position it needs to be [Music] so solid damn bro beveling has to be one of my favorite steps in the knife baking process because you can sort of just wail on the blade and not have to worry about accuracy too much obviously it matters to a certain extent but when you're working on a blade this big and you have nine hammers to choose from you can go hem and there are very few side effects [Applause] [Music] [Music] now that the blade is completely forged out I turn on the Kiln and I get ready to do some really nice normalizing Cycles I'm gonna be doing three Cycles the first cycle is going to be 16.50 second is going to be 1500 and the third cycle is going to be 13.50 as the blade cools you'll be able to see one of the phenomenon called ricolescence you'll be able to see it in the sort of waves of red that you see going across the blade brick lessons happens at every normalization temperature but it's super hard to see at the lower ones because it doesn't glow as much I always like to give myself some marking lines of the profile that I'm going to grind later you don't have to do this but I think it gives me a little bit more precision I've said this on Instagram before but I believe grinding blade profiles is very similar to drawing faces and if you've drawn a face before you know that one small mistake can turn that face into a completely different person I think the same thing applies for blades if you move one of the lines up a millimeter it looks like a completely different blade another thing that tends to reveal itself as you profile is how straight you made your forging because that edge steel may not be the same straightness as your core Steel now that I'm done the profiling I lay it over my sketch and it's it's very similar after I'd run profiling I be in the long process of rough grinding the blade if I were to quench it as is it would probably be fine but then I'd have to grind through around 3 8 of an inch of hardened material I don't have the time for that I may be a college student In Summer with no internship but I still don't have the time for that [Music] rough grinding is one of those steps where there's no hard cut off the only thing that changes as you grind thinner is the chance that you warp in the Quench and for different Steels that's very different so if I was a pocket knife maker using s30v I have no idea how they not grind but for a blade like this made out of 1084 and 15 and 20. I went for about a little bit less than an eighth of an inch [Laughter] grinding this is so much harder than a chef's knife because it's so wide and it's so long you have to like hold it up and push with your thumbs and do it in a way so you're going to even grind and you have to make sure the edge is centered the whole way you have to make sure that globally it's it's straight enough which it's it's oh it's okay um now that the blade is rough ground I throw it into the Heat Treating oven 1500 degrees and I wait for it to reach temperature foreign the reason that you see me shaking the blade up and down is because I need to break that Vapor jacket there's a set time in which this blade needs to cool down to around 7 800 Degrees and if I don't shake it up and down there's a chance it cools too slowly the reason I'm subjecting you guys to that high-pitched sound of the file on the blade is because if that file bites into the blade I'm guaranteed that the blade is softer than around 61 to 62 HRC which is way too soft for a blade out of punch foreign I love my heat treating oven but the one downside to having all of that insulation is that it takes forever to cool down it takes like two three hours after quench for it to cool down to 300 degrees so I got one of these cheap microwave ovens to do a flash temper you can already see the Topography of the Damascus from when I ground in all those little swedges [Music] not that the blade has been completely tempered at 425 degrees for two two hour Cycles I begin the very long process of final grinding unlike rough grinding final grinding definitely has a set endpoint if you grind your Edge too thin on a big blade like this it will be completely unfunctional [Music] after a little bit of final grinding I decide it's time to tackle the warp that I got out of heat tree it wasn't a really big warp but I really want it out of there the way I do that is by heating the spine and putting it in my three-point bending jig a lot of people really like the shim temper but the shim Timber takes a lot of time and I am in an inpatient Little Rascals I wish I had some blue daikum every single time you see me using Sharpie on this knife is so that I can describe lines like I mentioned before I wish I had blue daikum which is like a really professional marking fluid I don't have that so I use permanent marker it works pretty well so I don't really have to get any blue daikum what [Music] of the things that I didn't finalize in the profile grinding was the bolster transition lines the reason I didn't do that earlier is because I didn't know what they were going to be the thing about these lines is that they can really change to be whatever you want whatever you want and I saw Kyle over do it later so I'm gonna do it later you've probably seen the sticker but the grinder that I'm using is a Beaumont Metalworks km GTX grinder it is the best grinder that I've ever used and I've used a couple Grinders on it I'm using a blue VSM actor Ox belt and that is just a match made in heaven the belts cut fast they last long and I have variable speed so it I can literally do anything with them proposal I have to hand sand this much width that is like why'd I do this myself I don't know oh my God it barely fits yes we've hit the course deal nice nice of course deal is pretty centered too all right I'll take it [Music] the little tool you see me using here is called file guide it is two carbide surfaces on a stainless steel mounting plate whatever you want to call it it helps me get perfect plunge lines I know that a lot of people like to use the waterfall platen but I don't have a waterfall pattern and I also know there's a really harsh learning curve foreign the final grinding process I'm going to be making very minute changes to the profile by very very minute I mean probably like a tenth of a millimeter in some cases as the blade gets closer and closer to its final thickness I begin moving up the Grits right here is an 80 grit and after 80 grit I'm going to go to 120 220 400 and then maybe a trisect thank you another thing that I do because I don't have a waterfall platen is clean up the plunge lines with a file you might be wondering how come the file could cut the blade if you've already quenched and tempered it well it could file can actually cut whenever it's just it'll remove material much much slower when the blade is question tempered now that my plunge lines are pretty much perfect I take the back side of it to the grinder and clean up that bolster area I'm actually pretty amazed on how short of a time it took for me to final grind this blade I think it only took like four or five hours and that's how long it usually takes me to find a ground of chef's knife so for a blade that's like five times the mass that's that's pretty good [Music] now that the blade has been completely Final Ground it is time for hand sanding I have an interesting relationship with hand sanding Part of Me loves it part of me hates it but usually the part of me that hates it hates it more than the part of me that loves it foreign it's actually going faster than I thought if you're a little confused about why I have to handstand it's because when I have all of the scratches going along the length of the blade The Edge later on is much much better foreign this is after a 150 grit I still have so many more grits that's about a third oh I got too much after I move up to the second grit I start doing diagonal scratches so this is a technique that allows me to see when I've completely ground through my 150 grit scratches because once all I see is diagonal scratches I I know I only have 400 grit scratches this liquid that you see me spraying on the blade here is literally just done soap and water it's it's so basic that I don't even know the mixture that I use one of the great things about hand sanding is that I don't have to be looking at the blade 100 of the time I can have a video playing on my iPad in the background and I can be paying attention to both once I'm done doing 400 grit on both sides it's time for 600 grit and because 600 grit is the third grit that I'm doing I can go back to parallel scratches after I get one side to a finished 600 grit I like to spray it with some fluid film so that when I flip it over it doesn't rust once both sides are at a dirty 600 grit finish I wrap the entire blade in blue shop cloth and some green masking tape all right now Begins the arguably longer process of fitting a guard to my blade the first thing that I do for this is that I ensure that I have perfectly flat guard transition faces or whatever you want to call it I do that by using the file guide and a file after those faces are perfectly clean I take the Tang over to the grinder and I grind it to a shallower level than my ricasso this will make it so that if my guard slot isn't perfectly fit up it'll still look like a perfect fit perfectly symmetrically inset on both sides all right do I want this to be centered or do I want it to be here when I was grinding my tank thinner I had it measured out so that it would be exactly a quarter of an inch thick that way I can use a quarter inch drill bit and drill a bunch of holes next to each other Comfort on Drilling one of the things that I always see people do wrong is using the wrong drill bit speed make sure to search up the correct drill speed for the material and your drill bit size look at that here I'm just using a round file to connect all of the three holes scared I might impel myself with this oh [Music] I think we may have got it boys that's a little stuffy though is that good it's pretty good there's a tiny tiny Gap but God damn this is a big chunky block of wood oh maybe these two all right we're going with this one of the better Parts about working with wood is that you don't need any marking fluid you can just use the wood itself once I have the three holes drilled into the wooden block I just use sideward pressure on the drill bit to connect the holes next I use a homemade roach and a file to make the hole perfectly fit the tank so I'm going to heat it up burning the tang and in the process soften it please nice foreign now that my handle pieces fit pretty much perfectly I grind the front of the block of wood so that there's zero air gaps [Music] well I'm a home stretch the next step is to drill a quarter inch hole into the softened tang and inlay some copper the reason that I'm inlaying the copper into the seal is because later I'm going to be drilling a hole through the finished handle and I don't want some hard steel to be in the way and make my job super super difficult the next step of the process is to profile the guard I drew in my sketch in escard but now that I look at the design of the blade I don't really think an escar is going to fit it too well I'm just going to be doing a simple flat guard with a leaf shape thank you [Music] the next step of the process is to shape the wooden handle the first thing I like to do when I shape my handles is to profile the block I already made sure that the slot was Square so any line that I draw on either side will be perfectly perpendicular all right I decided when I was grinding the handle that I wanted that little Central nub to just not exist I think it looks a little bit better this way and it'll be a little more elegant when you see the final blade it is now time for me to etch my Maker's Mark I use stencils that I designed and sent to IMG a personalizer plus and some magic juice as I've used this etching machine more and more to etch my Maker's Mark I've developed better and better formulas the one you see me using here is two out of five power for a minute and 30 seconds I found that it comes out pretty well very very deep and not too much washout is okay after I etched the mark on both sides it's time to bring up the blade to 1500 grit finish and get it ready for action I feel like most night makers have their own redneck way of how they dip their blades into their Fair chloride I found that putting a little duct tape on the end and wrapping some wire around it is my best bet this is the ferric right my formula for etching by Damascus is two minute Cycles in the ferric and then I sand off all the oxides and then I do that twice you can see it when I sand off the oxides with 2500 grit sandpaper that dark Edge becomes super super bright that's not what I want the final blade to look like so after this ferric chloride etch I do a coffee etch foreign one of the things that I've realized when making knives all these years is that there's hardly ever a 100 correct way to do things there's never a perfect coffee mixture perfect ferric mixture you just find whatever works best for you and I found that it doesn't actually matter what my mixture of coffee is after the blade sits in the coffee for around three hours I take it out and I take some sunshine cloth and I buff off all of that yellow brownish residue I'm so smart after the blade is pretty much finished it's time for me to hand sand all my fittings in this case I really only have one fitting but you know how it goes it is now time for glue up I like to put a really really thick blue shop cloth in front of my tip so that I can actually clamp on it and not ruin the etch on that very tip the epoxy I'm using for this blade is 24 hour West system epoxy no the epoxy is tripping oh well that's what acetone is for after waiting 24 hours it's time for me to drill the hole for a small stainless pin the 24-hour West system epoxy is definitely strong enough so that I don't even need a PIN but I like to have it as a fail safe and it just looks pretty cool the very last step before I can say this blade is finished is hand sanding the handle this step is so so important if you have a lousy hand sanded handle finish and a perfectly hand sanded blade something is going to be up it's just it's just not going to be that good after I'm done hand sanding the handle I darken my guard the little blue bottle there is some Perma Blue from Birchwood Casey it works on a lot of things it doesn't work on stainless steel obviously because it's it's stainless but I had to discover that the hard way now that the build is coming to a close if you made it this far I think you might as well hit that subscribe button I really really love big numbers and if you press subscribe that adds one to a pretty small number [Music] foreign [Music] is finished it's time to put an edge on it and see what this thing can do

Channel: Jesse Hu

Views: 561,854

Keywords: forging a knife, forging a sword, damascus steel knife, forging damascus steel, making a kukri, forged in fire, jesse hu, jhublades kukri, blacksmithing projects, making damascus, large knife, blacksmith shop, san-mai, handmade knives, handforging, hand forged knives, blacksmith art, full build, knifemaking, swordmaking

Id: 6vGaH9EN-3Q

Length: 35min 27sec (2127 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 25 2023