Making a Hidden Tang File Knife with Antler Handle

[Music] hey guys welcome back to the other craftsmanship my name is Dustin today we're going to be making a hidden Tang file knife and we're gonna be using antler as the handle material we're gonna have some stacked leather as well and a lot brass for the bolster so when I am deciding what to do with files to make knives start out with my files and I kneel them in a fire I have all that process in my knife making video so check that one out I'll put a link in the description below for that video which goes to the whole process of annealing but once I've been yield the the files in the fire then I can decide what I want to do if I want to cut off parts of it to make a full tang knife like this one or I can cut it in two parts in half so I can use a smaller blade and use the end of the file to make a hidden tang and then I have what's left over usually is enough to make kind of a smaller carving knife so that way I get two knives out of the file so today I'm going to be using one of the small pieces to do a hidden Tang knife again we'll be using the antler and so I'll be stacking that with leather and I just recently got some new bolster material from chance knifes a knife supply online so let's open this up and check it out first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna take off the material of the file the file markings on the sander so you can see here now this will work this Tang will be hidden inside of the antler with the brass in between and the leather so that should work out really nice parsers are kind of clean this material off that way we have a clean surface to start with and then we can lay out the bevel and start working on with that [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] I've taken off most of the file marks sometimes I like to leave a little bit I think it's just kind of interesting to show the history of the blade it starts out as a file the next thing we're going to do is we're going to mark the center of the cutting edge so the easiest way to do that it's just darken the whole edge with a marker just enough show us the line and you always want to turn your knife over and mark from the opposite side it's that way you usually end up with two lines that are pretty close together but that way you know that right between those two lines will be dead center so those are pretty close see him a little bit but that gives us our center line and that's what we'll bring our bevels to just picked up a new belt grinder some 1 by 30 inch grinder from Harbor Freight so what I did when I got this the first thing I did was I customized that the plate here so you can see I trimmed the back off so it's at an angle so that way I could tip the whole plate back and that way I have my right angle and I you know brought my angle gauge down test I think it's set to about 12 and a half degrees right now so on both sides it gives like a good a good bevel edge I have a piece of angle iron here so what I'll do is I'll clamp this to the angle iron and then this keeps it at a 90 degree angle straight up from the edge and then I can run my run the knife back and forth and it puts a really even bevel on this so you can see here I've made a small mark on the on the bevel edge so that's where I marked all so I know where to start my plunge lines on both sides so that they are even [Applause] so ass I'm going I'm just applying pressure in different areas so you can see my bevels a little short on the tip and a little thick here so I'll apply more pressure to the tip and a little less pressure to this the belly part here and it's still even pressure across the the main part of the blade [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] that's so awesome it really makes knife making faster I mean I can get such a clean bevel you know you see I'm trying to keep these two lines the top and the bottom parallel so just like a little bit of pressure it takes a little bit of time to use too but you really get to the feel of working the blade across across the grinding belt so it found just starting at the same spot working across and and then changing up pressure I can really create a really beautiful bevel pretty quickly so it makes it fun so I we're gonna switch over the other side and start working on that bevel and then we'll kind of flip-flop back and forth until we get down to a pretty close edge before we do the retreating [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so you can see now where I but just at the table you can see where the grinder is fighting into the bevel so I'm gonna try to work that edge all the way back to my initial bevel edge by the time I get back there I should it I should reach the center line on this bevel side so I'll keep working that edge back [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] all right so CI bevels back pretty even off the work alone these a little bit more but I don't want to go too close I don't take it too far down now because I don't take the chance of warping the blade and we the heat treat so we're gonna stop the Forge I get this in and get a heat treated so we can get in the tempering oven and start putting together into the final steps [Applause] [Music] get the blade into the Forge now I'm going to put it in four to normalising cycles where I bring it up to non-magnetic I'll test it with my magnet to make sure it's non-magnetic right now you can see it's magnetic once it gets up to its 1,500 degrees it would be non-magnetic and and then I'll let it cool down air-cool get it back in to a second normalizing cycle bring it up to hit up to temperature let it cool down the last time I'll take it out I'll dunk it in vegetable oil [Music] all right so we've reached non-magnetic so take it out let it sit and let it cool down air cool down [Applause] [Music] [Music] as I school down so back into the Fords for second [Music] is the last time in the forge let it heat it all the way back up to non-magnetic we'll pull it out and we'll dunk it in the vegetable oil realize that I'm thought at first was just cleaning off black I may be cleaning just off black but it feels like it might be biting a little bit on the tip so I don't think it hardened as much as I wanted to they will do get it back into the heat probably because we're doing it in vegetable oil and I just don't think it's cooling down quick enough so I'm gonna take it heat it back up and then we'll dunk it in the water and then we'll test again all right just Keating really nicely now much better than before so I think we have now successfully he treated the knife it's nice and hard so ready go I'll put it in the oven all right so now give it two hours and take it out give it a second round be good to go we're out of the oven now just finished up our two cycles of tempering it was in the oven at 400 degrees for two hours each time and so now we're going to move to the grinder and take off the forge scale I can see underneath of the the forge scale color that the blade is tempered to a straw color either a dark yellow or a light orange as are you looking for when you're doing tempering make sure that the color of your metals around that straw color that's a good tempering color so take it to the grinder and clean it up a little bit and move on from there [Laughter] [Laughter] [Laughter] [Laughter] [Laughter] [Laughter] all right so I just finished up with the eighty grit belt and I'm gonna switch to a 120 grit belt that will bring the edge of my blade down to pretty much my final finish I like there to be a little bit of just the finest amount of tool marks in the blade and this will look really nice with the 120 grit belt [Laughter] [Laughter] and so I'm coming up on the edge you see both edges are coming together from trying to bring that line almost solely to the edge on I leave it a hair thinness for me and then I will I'll sharpen back down by hand but I'm coming up to the eggs slowly [Applause] [Applause] brought the edge down to almost complete grind it's just a hair thickness on the edge now so the next thing we're gonna do I'm going to cut the choil use the file round file to cut the toy out of here [Music] I want to make sure that these edges again are nice and flat one of my bolster is going to come down [Music] [Laughter] got a couple cut a couple grooves in here with the grinder just give this the Tang a little bit extra hold when I use the epoxy and put it into the handle [Applause] next step we are gonna do is determine the the size of the piece of brass for the bolster I want the bolster to be just a little bit bigger than the top where it meets the knife so I might bring it out of just smear just going to taper down so I'm thinking about maybe a sixteenth of an inch on both sides and then the thickness needs to be it's going to be smaller than the bone and because I'm going to taper the bone handle down as well but I still wanted to be good size thickness has to be able to go that's going to go out about a quarter of an inch past on both sides of a nice [Music] [Music] all right so it's written fitting pretty good there's a little bit of a gap but I think it'll be okay [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so at this point we're pretty close to the final size I'm gonna leave it with just a little bit big that way when we when we fit it and glue it all together I'll still sand down I want to be able to sand this down onto the rest of the handle material as well so this is going to come down even more once we clamp it all together and glue it [Applause] so we're gonna use a piece of brass from a symbol got this from a buddy of mine Matt he traded me symbol for some artwork so I like to use this nice and thin so it'll act as an accent so we can have that brass bolster we'll have a piece of leather in between and then we'll have another piece of brass another piece of leather and then antler so I'm gonna mark off and cut a piece small piece of brass to use and then we'll shape it down [Music] it'll all fit together really nicely a nice thing once I boil up the lather it'll darken up as well so I have the dark of the metal and the bright brass in the darkness of the leather will be nice transition between the two a little bit of a contrast so always good to drive fit test everything multiple times before you glue up so I just have now drill out the antler and get it all together [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so we've just finished up cutting all the pieces we're ready to put it everything together so I'm gonna use a five-minute epoxy two-part epoxy it's a part resin in part activator so I mix those two together and it gives me I would say about a three minute working time the five minute epoxy starts to set up pretty quickly so once you start that once you start mixing and start rolling got to make sure you get everything glued together really quickly [Music] [Music] [Music] all right we are all glued up I got a lot of good squeeze out all the way around so I know that I have glue and filling all the gaps I've cleaned up the knife at a little bit of boxing on that so I clean that up and there's a little bit of epoxy on the brass so I'll clean that up just using my fingernails and scrape that off it's mostly off though so we're gonna let this sit overnight and dry and then we'll come back and shave the handle all right guys so we glued up the handle overnight it's all glued all dried up nice and secure so we're going to move to the bandsaw trim off the excess and then we'll move over to the sander and work on shaping it down to a nice handle size [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] man that looks sharp literally no it's nice so just toss this up a little bit more on the buffing wheel and then we roll it up and that leather will pop out a little really nice now looks nice alright so I'm gonna work on just bring in the final edge it's pretty close so I'm gonna bring the final edge down to my grinder and then we'll oil it and then do the final sharpening [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] this is boiled linseed oil which I use for all of my axe handles and shovels and most of my knives as well it's just a good kind of universal oil it works the best obviously with wood it's not going to make too much of an effect on this antler but it will penetrate into the leather preserve the leather too alright guys so we're all finished now and just finished an oiling up the handle looking really nice the brass bolsters on the leather so tested out I definitely sharpen it it is exceedingly sharp now so it's definitely going to be a good a good carving knife I'm a little undecided right now I'm not sure if I want to cut off the handle or if I want to leave it the same length right now you can kind of see I've got about maybe 2 inches or so on the end so we'll see put some comments in the in the comments below and see what you think let me know if you think I should cut it or if I should leave it long I kind of like it this way but I'm not hundred percent sure so comment if I get a lot of consensus that they think maybe it should cut off doing short little video cut it off and do a tag end of this video so gotta leave me a comment and if you liked the video give me a thumbs up and subscribe if you haven't yet and keep in touch and we'll we'll make some more stuff so I hope you guys like this video and we'll see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: The Art of Craftsmanship

Views: 630,127

Rating: 4.8685832 out of 5

Keywords: knife making, hidden tang, hidden tang knife, antler handle, file knife, how to make a knife, leather handle, brass and leather, making a hidden tang knife, knife grinding, bevel grinding, how to grind, how to grind a knife bevel, high carbon steel, knife shop

Id: Y0Miki8jnck

Length: 40min 36sec (2436 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 24 2017