Making a Cord-Wrapped Tactical Knife - Simple Knife for Beginning Knife Makers

hey Walter Sorrells back with more tips for the knife maker today a paracord wrap utility knife or hunting knife or tactical knife you know whatever's going to impress your friends the most call it that now I'm calling a Saturday project meaning that if everything goes well you can start it around you know 8 or 9 in the morning take a break to watch a little football cut the grass have lunch whatever and then finish up the blade by early evening now that's pretty cool but something else that's even cooler I've been trying to focus on beginning knife makers lately so we're going to show how to make one extremely simple knife but we're going to use two methods pro methods on one hand and beginner methods on the other sort of a choose your poison type thing so here's the cool thing if you do everything right both methods will make an equally good knife let me say that again you can use very simple tools low-tech stuff labor intensive methods to make a knife that'll result in a blade that's absolutely as good as ones that the pros make theirs just takes a lot less time alright let's launch into it [Music] the knife we're making will be a cord wrapped blade meaning that its handle is made by wrapping the blade with paracord super simple no complicated or expensive materials no super steel will no fossilized Mastodon ivory handle scales no six al4 be titanium the point I'm hoping to make in this video is that you don't have to have complicated or expensive tools or rare and obscure materials to make a good knife will you save time if you have professional tools absolutely but you don't have to sacrifice quality if you haven't mortgaged your house to buy tools so let's launch into it first steel all steel guys is not created equal these two pieces look the same but they're not the same this steel is mild steel low-carbon suitable for welding but not for a tool that needs to hold an edge this on the other hand is 1095 a simple high carbon steel that makes an excellent knife you can buy 1095 online from knife making supply stores like Texas knife makers supply K&G chants USA knife makers there are a whole bunch of them as well as steel suppliers like admiral steel and new jersey steel baron google it buy it ship it it's at your door in three days one inch wide one-eighth of an inch thick that's the stock you want this blade will be about nine and a half inches long or around 25 centimeters mark it off and cut it with a garden-variety hacksaw the pros will cut it with an abrasive chop saw or a bandsaw saving about 30 seconds of work is that a big deal not really [Applause] see done okay here's one of the biggest annoyances in knife making steel comes from the mill covered with something called mill scale an oxide formed when hot steel meets air it's extremely hard stuff harder than steel itself which means that you want to clean it off before doing anything else otherwise it'll dull your tools now if you're a pro you can use a belt grinder or a surface grinder and abrasive tumbler there any number of tool intensive approaches but if you're a beginner you probably won't have that giant expensive surface grinder hiding in the back of your shop fine go raid your kitchen for vinegar and a Tupperware pan okay I said you could start at 9 o'clock in the morning on Saturday well actually you needed to do this part ahead of time pour in the vinegar let it sit overnight or maybe even for a couple days then use a five-dollar welders brush to get rid of all this scale it takes a little elbow grease but it's no big deal me I'm grinding the scale off on my belt grinder now removing the scale is not exactly the same as flattening the steel depending on what level of finish you're aiming for you may want to go ahead and flatten the steel too if you remove the scale through grinding you've also flattened it more or less if not you can use sandpaper just tape 80 grit 120 grit sandpaper or something fairly coarse to a piece of glass now in this case I'm using a machinists block but the principle is exactly the same now apply elbow grease and just sand away back and forth back and forth until you've removed all the dimples or tool marks in the steel nice and flat you should be able to do this in about 20 minutes or so I've drawn the general shape of the blade let me talk about this design this is not necessarily the ideal shape for a blade I'm just trying to make something very simple that we can execute on a one-inch wide piece of steel if I were making a more subtle and sophisticated blade I'd probably have some finger grooves in a guard and maybe a toy and some other refinements but subtle and sophisticated this blade is not we're just aiming for dead simple now we're gonna drill a hole right here you can do this with a hand drill or even an old-fashioned brace and bit punch it first so your drill won't walk the hole off-center then go to it or you can do it like I do stick it in your sweet little Curt bites and drill it out on the mill the result will be fine either way 3/8 of an inch hole but that size is not critical you could go half an inch 10 millimeters whatever it's your knife make it however you want the probes will now go to their belt grinder and grind out that shape or if they're in the more production oriented world maybe they've already cut it out on a water jet or a CNC mill or blanked it out with a giant press but B or not you can do this whole thing with a standard double cut bastard file cost ten bucks or so at the hardware store grinding it on a belt grinder will take four or five minutes doing it with a file okay I'm not gonna lie to you it'll take a while and you'll get tired and cranky and possibly throw your file at your dog but you start early you can still have this part done by 10 o'clock in the morning swear to god you'll be amazed how much steel a bastard file can remove it's really put your back into it okay now we have the general shape [Music] next we get to the fun part the part that changes this from a chunk of steel into something that looks like a real knife this step is called beveling because we're creating a slope or bevel on the blade first I'm gonna score a reference mark down the edge so that I'll know where the center of the blade is supposed to be this will allow me to grind my bevels nice and even from one end to the other and from side to side of the blade that's important not only because it looks better but because it's less likely to warp during heat-treating I can use this nifty little adjustable tool that I made myself or what about this put a screw down on your little piece of glass that you use for sanding earlier and scrub it back and forth like this simple the result is the same nice even guidelines now I'm gonna use a bastard file again honestly this will be hard work filing filing filing filing filing to create a bevel that sweeps down from the spine to the edge now you can make it a shorter saber grind or a longer flat grind that runs all the way to the spine your call do it however you want you can also give it a little refinement if you want cutting in a nice soft plunge line with a round file now I could do all this work right here on camera and show you that it's possible but trust me I've filed plenty of knives entirely to shape decades ago when I started out I made quite a few knives this way it's hard work been there done that but it is doable believe me see my machete video just as an example now an alternative filing method this is called draw filing it's slower but it allows for a slightly more accurate family angle I don't want to rub this in but while you're filing 5 pounds off your waistline I'm using my Bader b3 belt grinder to grind into bevels your time maybe an hour to mine closer to 10 minutes but the result is not significantly better using one method over the other remember the guys who made swords for the Vikings the Merovingian kings the emperors of japan the Sultan's of Egypt those guys did it all the files and scrapers crappier files than the one you buy at Home Depot by the way and the results are sitting there in museums to this day outstanding examples of human ingenuity and craftsmanship and beauty so don't think it can't be done in your garage next I'm going to file a small indentation into each side of the blade will see the point of this later I'm using a little round hobby file but a quarter inch chainsaw file would actually be even better or we can go the pro route and mill it out doesn't have to be too deep maybe a little over a sixteenth of an inch so now you've got a knife shaped object it's still not quite a knife the step that makes that final transformation is what's known as heat treating [Music] soft metal becomes hardened steel in an instant now I've been showing multiple methods but in this case I'm only showing one why well honestly because setting up a charcoal fire in my backyard was a pain in the ass but trust me if you buy traditional hardwood charcoal attach a piece of black iron pipe to your wife's blow dryer and then blow air into a charcoal fire you can produce temperatures in excess of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit enough to burn a hole straight through your charcoal grill and that's far more heat than you need for this project I've demonstrated how to heat treat with charcoal in other videos but the basic idea is pretty simple you just pile it up and blow some air into it and it'll get hot enough to do what you need to do so what do you need to do here's what we're aiming for you're gonna use a heat source like I say it could be a lot of things it could be an acetylene torch a propane torch charcoal I could just talked about coal any number of other ways of producing a hot fire to heat your blade up to about 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit once it's been fully heated you're gonna plunge it into oil that simple in this case I'll use my propane Forge when steel reaches roughly fourteen hundred and twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit it stops attracting magnets so I'm using a little magnet on a stick to test the magnetic qualities of the steel when I feel that my magnet no longer sticks to the blade I know that I'm close to my final temperature which is going to be as I said around fifteen hundred degrees so that's just a little bit beyond that non-magnetic point I'll heat it just a little more paying attention to make sure that I have a nice even red color to my steel I don't want hot spots the tip especially can get overheated if you aren't careful then I'll quench it in this bucket of peanut oil of course there are specialized quenching oils but almost any oil will do from motor oil to transmission fluid to various vegetable oils personally I like peanut oil because it's non-toxic and because it has a relatively high flash point once I've quenched the blade it should now be converted from perlite and ferrite to martensite that's metallurgy speak for saying it's hard just to make sure I test it with a file if the file skates over the steel it's properly converted if it sort of bites into the steel then you did something wrong it hasn't hardened now due to the fact that 1095 is on the margin of hardened ability in oil you may end up with a differentially hardened blade meaning that it's hard on the edge and softer on the spine that's okay there are actually some benefits to that if you use 1084 on the other hand it'll probably convert all the way I won't get into the metallurgy of why that's the case anyway as soon as the blade is cool enough to touch well temper it meaning we'll soften it up a little if you don't temper the blade after hardening it'll shatter like glass when you smack it on something so I'm putting it into my heat treating oven at 450 Fahrenheit you don't have to have a professional heat treating oven though you can just put it in the oven of your kitchen and it will work just fine we'll leave it there for an hour take it out and let it sit until it's nice and cool then I'll put it back in for another hour at 450 degrees again if you're really hustled you could have the blade tempering by early afternoon so while the blades sitting there you can take a break eat lunch maybe cut the grass better yet switch on the idiot box and watch Clemson's stomp the snot out of some weak-ass ACC team or maybe you're an SEC fan I hear Alabama has a football team - all right here's the blade after tempering all that's left is to clean this black crud off the outside wrap the handle and sharpen it now black crud is no match for sandpaper do the same thing you did before and clean it all off using the sandpaper on glass trick you also need to clean up the bevels this area called the plunge line sometimes takes a little extra effort wrap some sandpaper around a popsicle stick and you can get that all cleaned up if you want to you can run the sandpaper on up to say 600 grit or you can finish up with scotch brite in either case this will give you a nice satin finish I've done variants of this in a variety of other videos so you can check it out in more detail elsewhere if you want of course you can also take the pro route and tumble it or grind it or use a sand blaster I'm going with the blaster using 60 grit aluminum oxide blast medium if I wanted I could follow that up with bead blasting for a more matte finish in this case I'm not going to bother though so whether you did it by hand or with the Machine you should now have a nice clean blade ready for the cord wrap process [Music] okay there are over 8 billion YouTube videos about how to paracord wrap a handle so feel free to choose another method you can wrap it all in one direction and then loop it and whatever whatever or you can crisscross or you can pull the guts out of your paracord and do a fake samurai wrap like I say million ways of doing this but what we're gonna do here is what's generally referred to as the Strider knife approach will start with gutted paracord meaning we pull out the core then we wrap it like so super simple trained monkey trained monkey heat the end kind of goo it together and now we have an under wrap now comes the more complex part first a preliminary word this is easier if you secure the blade nice and tightly and it's still easier if you can secure it and then flip it back and forth without taking it in and out of your vise so you can do this by making a little fixture that fits in your vise this will take extra time and extra effort which will not fit in the space between the end of the Clemson game and the time you want to start drinking beer so I'll show that in another video hence you'll get the simplistic version here but it still works ok remember those little divots you filed on the blade here's why you did it you don't want the cord wrap sliding up onto the blade slicing the wrap and possibly your fingers so you'll put the first loop into those two little indentations and pull it taut it should stay there until Kingdom Come so this wrapping approach is really pretty conceptually simple the only difficulties with it are keeping the wrap nice and even as it runs down the blade and keeping it taut as you go anyway here's how it works you make a loop on one side then you slip the other piece of paracord through and pull it taut so basically you just have two loops then you want to take it out of the vise flip it over back in the vise and then repeat this exactly the same way again on the other side so you just go flipping back and forth back and forth all the way down the knife key thing you want to repeat it exactly the same way every time if you don't you won't really have a pattern it'll just be this big mess so just make sure that you make those loops exactly the same way each time even though it'll work fine your cousin Kenny will make fun of you and tell you how crappy it looks and we can't have that Kenny cannot be allowed to make fun of you under any circumstances because Kenny is you know Kenny so we keep everything nice and tight nice and perfect back and forth back and forth with the loop exactly in the middle of the blade we're using a welders clamp to hold on to it that helps you keep that tautness all the way down once you get to the end loop the paracord several times through the hole until you can't jam it through anymore then you make a simple knot like this the only tricky thing here is that you don't want to pull that knot too tightly right from the get-go you want to carefully snug it up as tightly as possible to the knife if you don't that wrap will come loose then another not out here and you've got a lanyard sharpen up the blade and you're done you can do this on an Arkansas stone or a diamond stone which will take you well into beer-drinking hour or you can use a belt grinder like the pros do and then just tune up the edge on a stone or some sort of hone either way you sharpen it until you can shave hair off your arm or better yet off cousin Kenny's arm and there you are ready for shtf day or the zombie apocalypse or the Michigan State game whichever one comes first final note bear in mind this is a steel that rusts over time so you need to keep it oiled in a perfect world you might want to give this knife a finish before wrapping it seracote dira coat mali resin something like that again we couldn't get that all done on a Saturday afternoon though so that's for another video by the way I'll be doing some videos on coatings for steel soon so stay tuned [Music] thanks for watching hope you enjoyed this video if you liked it here a couple of other videos that you might be interested in also like me on Facebook at Walter Charles blades and check out my website Walter Sorrells blades comm where you'll find examples of my work along with instructional videos showing all aspects of Japanese sword making including forging and polishing how to make her moans and how to make fittings scabbards and handles for Japanese swords [Music]

Channel: Walter Sorrells

Views: 1,132,754

Rating: 4.882174 out of 5

Keywords: cord wrap, knife, knife making, prepper, survival knife, survivalist, prepper knife, tactical knife, how to make knives, blade, sword, blade smith, blade smithing, beginning, hobby, beginner, Walter Sorrells, knife maker, paracord, wrap, paracord handle, knife handle, simple knife, cheap knife, how to make a knife, bushcraft, bushcraft knife, Knives, How-to (Website Category)

Id: sLcP6PTMLN8

Length: 22min 56sec (1376 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 24 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/jsertic]

I haven't seen any of Walter Sorrels videos on here, so here you go.

I really like his narration, explanations and how he breaks down the process.

His recent videos are more targeted towards beginner knife makers and those thinking about taking the first step (like me :-), but he created some amazing knives and swords in older videos.