MAKING A CHEF'S KNIFE!!! PART 1

ladies and gentlemen welcome back to the workshop it is fantastic to have you here for another episode another episode of learning another episode of adventure now you'll remember about a year and a bit of so ago I made this particular chef's knife right here with some damascus stars in it i'm from out here it looks pretty cool but from the technicalities of a chef's knife and the standards that are set out there in the world today this thing is a piece of junk there is so much I can improve upon there's not a continuous distal taper down the spine in fact it's thinner here than it is here the whole thing has a warp in it which is rather nasty look how terribly that integral bolster transition lines up and look how out of Center it is it has been far too long since I touched a chef's knife I want to do a huge amount better and so that is what I am here to do today now first things first first things oh sweet Damascus it's been too long ten eighty fifteen and twenty a little bit of angle I'm will get more clean and we are gonna stack them up but we're gonna do something different with the pattern I'm gonna get on to that in just a second [Music] [Applause] [Music] so while that's heating up let me give you a little bit of a rundown of the pattern plan first things first this pattern has nothing to do with me there is no credit dude to be thrown my way none none whatsoever rather directed to Morocco Mao Massey fire arts and he says he had inspiration from Owen would design and Peter Burke knives let me paint a Damascus picture for you anyway Damascus is difficult to make in the sense that it takes a lot of steps to be able to make interesting mosaic patterns and I like the interesting mosaic patterns they're exciting but they are time inefficient you lose a lot of material due to wastage and it takes forever to make them because you've got to do so many welds Wow the concepts that we are taking from Morocco is as follows we take the billet that we have now we have it stacked up we have thicker lines in the middle thinner lines towards the edges we're going to weld that down into a square like this it'll look like so then we're going to tip it on its diagonals how we're gonna Forge it in this orientation to re square it which will give us this cool wavy it's like diagonal going happen like so we'll Forge it down into a rectangle then have one long bar of this cool pattern you take slices off this bar and you go this way that way this way that way this way that way this way that way bring this repeating chevron pattern and then you hammer down and weld it in this bar I think we'll do a little better to show you and then I will to draw it so in the photo we go because it is time for my favorite time of the day it is a welding time [Applause] [Applause] [Music] so now we have one bar it is about I am gonna say but a half inch thick by about an inch and a half inch and 3/4 wide rather long you can see a little bit of the pattern distort there one of the key things for succeeding with this pattern is gonna be making sure that everything is square completely free of scale when we go into the world because it's gonna be you know it's gonna be it's complex a little all welds there we've got to get a lot to happen and the cleaner it is and then more square it is the easier that's gonna be but this is obviously too long to fit in my mill so well I got about 27 inches of good material now I'll call it 28 inches of good material and so here's what I'm gonna do I'm gonna cut up 3/8 inch long pieces then we'll work to flatten square up clean up all three of those then we'll cut those into the individual pieces that'll make up the stack alright so we've got to make one two three four cuts here we go this alternate your heart out one two three four there we go one two and three righty-ho out with the grimms map and found a set of calibers typically with this being different sizes at one end to the other about a full millimeter probably gonna have to take off a total of at least one a half mil off each side these phases are a little more consistent 12.4 0.3 so it's probably gonna be 1 mil off each face so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put this in the mill under the same parallel when it's got the forge scale I'm gonna set my knee to 0 on the dial when we touch off on the scale we're gonna take one full pass then at one point five millimeters this is gonna get turned over and then on the same parallel we're gonna take with our dial at 3 millimeters another pass that'll get us consistency across all of them so long as I don't change the dial on the knee so here we go touch it off set my dial to zero I'm gonna go down one and a half I'm gonna take a pass frankly that's probably too deep I'm gonna take out this copper I'm gonna put in two parallels small ones I'm gonna set it back in now on its side and I want to make sure it's square to the back jaw I'm now gonna touch off without touching the dial there we go that touch off reads two point four four and we want it to read one point four four when we take a pass like that I'm pretty sure I'm taking off way more material than I need to in fact I'm gonna completely change up these measurements on the next one the principal is gonna be the same but I'm gonna take half off what I took off on this here we go we've got these pieces milled up nice and square and true two of them the same size one of them is a lot smaller I'm a little test etch to have a look at the pattern that we're working with then into some bicarbonate of soda to neutralize it and if I catch that in the light there we go that patterns flowing on the bias very nicely now I'm gonna set up a stop slide that in now we're gonna start chopping [Music] okay it's been a while since I've said anything well all the pieces of course are cut they've all been cleaned and I've also tested them to make sure that I got them to flip around in the right orientation and then now I've been trying to work out how it is that I'm gonna fixture these pieces while it is that we tack weld them together this is gonna go on the backside there but my plan is to do it in small segments because you put pressure in this direction here and then everything falls apart you put pressure this way then everything falls apart it's basically a night match trying to hold on to this stuff so that I can weld it not easy well let's see if I can hook this in here and do anything okay stayed pretty tight there now let's close it up again a little squeeze or any okay progress slightly all of the seams every single seam is gonna be welded on this there's not gonna be a single joint that doesn't have TIG weld and that way we can ensure that we make the most use of these nicely milled surfaces and get a nice weld bond [Music] with all these seams welded up it's now time to mill off these corners here so that all we have is a flat surface to hammer on I think this is about the weirdest shape I will have ever put in my milling machine but here we go weird thing to be machining [Music] now this is where Morocco's genius comes out even more because following his tutorial I now know it's a pretty smart idea to cut right across here take that material and plop it right in there line her up that'll do nicely you're a Titan but here we go I do hope it'll make it through the weld beads when you weld like that you're putting this super hot little bit right in this C bus seat right in a big block of metal but it's just acting as I keep sink it sucks all the heat out of there and so it can mean that the world is a pretty hard which could be a problem because the teeth this this is the problem that then occurs you hear that nothing's cutting right to the chop saw oh I don't like chop saws they're loud they make a huge amount of dust and you waste a full eight inches cut oh well you don't always get to do it the way you wanna do it here we go there we go save this little piece here that's just how it's gonna slip together back to the tip well done so there we go ready for the world that took a lot of prep work I'm excited I'm pretty confident I think this is gonna go well even though I'm being a little I'm taking a risk here in maracas tutorial he welds on two sheets of steel either side that he uses to help support it as its Forge welding I know exactly what I'll call myself if I make a mistake and this doesn't work and that's the reason but I guess I'm just feeling stupid enough today to try it without I don't think it needs I think it's gonna stick fine I think it'll work just a treat like this it's go time time to heat it up and we're going straight into the hammer to world first thing I do I drop it that is gonna cool down I haven't seen the pattern yet but the next step is gonna be milling off that entire top surface to get rid of all the TIG weld then looking at it and seeing if it is solid if it is ready to start forging out the knife thank you guys for checking out this video make sure you guys go check out maracas instagram page my massive fire arts thank you guys again for following along please do make sure you grab yourself a steel bowie t-shirt they're available now that alex do shop calm and they are rather awesome like I say I'm looking forward to seeing you on the next episode bye bye

Channel: Alec Steele

Views: 4,166,046

Rating: 4.7074976 out of 5

Keywords: alec steele, alex steele, steel, alec, damascus, blacksmith, make, forge, anvil, mill, lathe, weld, tig, mig, engineering, blacksmithing, blade, bladesmithing, knife, knifemaking, sword, handmade, diy, craft, woodworking, forged in fire, axe, fabrication, art

Id: Qab84QKGzQs

Length: 12min 49sec (769 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 19 2018