Making A Knife From Oilfield Sucker Rod | Knife Making

today we're gonna take this rod and we're gonna make this knife alrighty guys so I definitely learned a ton in making this knife and I want to pass those learnings on to you I am sure that if you looked closely on that picture that just splashed up on your screen you may have already been able to see some of the flaws in this knife and I will make sure to outline those flaws so that you can see my mistakes and not make them yourself now for some of you who don't know sukkah rods are used in a rod pump in the oil and gas industry and they are a connection between the surface unit and the pump down hole living in West Texas I have an ample supply of used trash rods so we want to utilize some of these rods on this knife so with that background information I really hope that you guys enjoyed this bill so during the intro you guys saw me himor out this 3/4 of an inch thick in 97 rod to around 8 inches in a quarter of an inch thick utilizing an old hatchet I will hot cut the flat portion away from the rod now for you subscribers out there you know that I generally do stock removal knives but I'm looking to get more into forging just to change things up a bit so expect some more forging projects down the road at this point I am making sure the steel is as flat as possible and then I will be annealing this steel overnight to do that I heat it up into Forge and then let it cool with the Forge overnight what this does is it removes stresses from the steel and it also allows the steel to be soft so I can drill it and grind it easily the next day when I go to retrieve this piece of steel from the forge it does have a significant amount of scale now this scale is very hard and it will tear up my belts so the goal here is to utilize an angle grinder with a 60 grit flat disc on it to knock off the bulk of the scale you can also see during this shot that I have a significant amount of hammer marks from my inexperience with the hammer and forging to remedy this situation I will be utilizing my DIY surface grinding attachment to make the surface as hammer mark free as possible and also as uniform as possible in this case I will be utilizing a slightly worn 60 grit belt and I was able to get this piece flat in uniform in short order and this is what that looked like alrighty guys so after doing some online research it seems as if sucker rod is not hardened Abul to the point of making a knife and I talked to some of the guys on blade forms it sounds like you can get this up to about a fifty rockwell hardness which is not quite adequate for a knife however in order to incorporate this sucker out into a knife I'm going to try a SAN my my first samurai to achieve our semi we will be utilizing a piece of ten eighty four as our core and then sandwich it in between two pieces of the flattened rod now I ride my blades in my bandsaw into the end and you can see that here where this one broke now these blades are actually pretty good in comparison to the other blades I have bought for this machine however if you do ride them to the end they will eventually break so make sure to be wearing your appropriate PPE now that we have all three of these pieces cut to the appropriate size we will clean them off and place them in the vise to be welded now when I was pulling my welding helmet down from the shelf I noticed that the front face shield is in dire need of replacement luckily this helmet came with a lot of these shields and I've just never took any time to replace them so I did today and it made a pretty big difference to be able to see what's going on I'm utilizing my Hobart welding machine here in a flux core setup I normally weld with this machine in a MIG setup but I ran out of gas so I decided to get flux core ago and it seemed to work okay there was a bunch of splatter with the flux core but it did get all three pieces welded together now I'll mention again that my forging skills are not the best however I have forged at least five Damascus billets to this point so I know just enough to be dangerous on this billet I did put some borax on the sides to minimize the chance of oxidation getting in between the layers I also put a little borax on the face of the ballot so that I can use it as a temp gauge to see when I'm close to welding temperatures and it seemed to work fairly well I start off by setting my welds with very light hammer blows and very brief hammer blows before putting it back into forge after I feel like I have one solid piece I start drawing out this billet to its final length now during this process I realized that I didn't have enough steel for the knife that I was shooting for so I actually have to do a little bit of shaping here opposed to just building a rectangular billet basically this means that you all will be able to see my full inadequacies as a blade Smith I am going to attempt to get the profile of this knife or this billet into a more knife shape and for the purposes of this project it actually didn't go too bad I was able to get a rough knife shape here with a little bit of curvature for a handle and a little bit of curvature for a tip after I got it close to what I thought was adequate I went ahead and made sure it was fairly flat brought it back up to temperature and left it in the Forge overnight to anneal the next day just like with our initial flat piece of rod we had a significant amount of scale on our billet so I went to the angle grinder to clean this off however at this time I figured I'd utilize one of my other grinding tools this cordless Dewalt angle grinder and I must say every time I use it I realized that cords are not cool and this is way better the only downside of this machine is that it will burn through these batteries extremely fast so if you're working on small pieces it's not a big deal but if you're doing a lot of amyl grinding it probably isn't a good solution for you with the bulk of the scale being knocked off we can transition to the surface grinding attachment to get the majority of the hammer marks out and then profile the billet I then trace it out on a piece of paper along with some guidelines these guidelines will allow me to scale it in my copy I import the file into nano CAD and then I will scale it down to match the lines that I draw in nano CAD so in this case I drew a three inch line and then I lined up a three inch mark on my scaled picture once I have the picture scaled in nano cad this will allow me to draw along the outside of our trace I'm utilizing the line and arc feature in nano cad to do this this will give me a representation of our billet in nano cad so that i can fit my design within this template it took a little bit of time but after I got it done I was able to see quickly that my original design would not fit on this billet however with some slight modifications in the width of this knife I was able to get everything to fit in a package that I think turned out pretty good after I have the knife drawn I will print this out and we won't cut it out of the billet in real life I have utilized this scaling method by taking a picture and importing it in the Nano CAD a few times now and every time I have it has worked out great after we have the design printed out I cut it out with an exacto knife and then use a spray on adhesive to attach it to our billet we then will rough cut out our shape with the band saw and then profile it on the 2 by 72 belt grinder and this reminds me if anyone has any good recommendations for a work rest for a 2 by 72 belt grinder please go ahead and mention that in a comment section below I am in the market sort of speak for at least a design of one I may end up building it myself but if there is a really good cost efficient option I may buy one the work rest on my machine is probably the part of my grinder that I dislike the most what you see me doing here is marking off where my jimping will start and then putting a file guide on the knife to guide at my checkering file to create this chipping now I got this file after watching one of Jeremy's videos from simple little life and I've been very happy with it so far the only thing that I don't about this file is that it seems to leave one shallow line towards the handle of my jimping and you can kind of see it here in this mil shot now so far it hasn't been an issue because I end up taking away a little bit of material from my spine when finishing the handle and it ends up being flush at the end but I wish it wasn't there at all because sometimes I have to grind the spine a little bit longer and I would like to get rid of that one shallow jimping groove on the handle holes I'll be drilling at two number 12 holes for our fasteners and then some quarter-inch holes to lighten up the handle of the knife now normally I utilize Corby fasteners and drill a number thirteen hole and I have a lot of experience with Corby fasteners I feel like I have them figured out fairly well but in this case I want to try out a new fastener I'm not exactly sure with the name of them are but you will see them later on and it actually comes back to bite me on this knife at least trying out something new I realized that I had the opportunity to test out what this is going to look like with this cut off piece from the end of our billet so I heat treated it and then file test it to make sure that it would harden and it did cleaned up the finish and then etch did and the goal here was to be able to see the transition between the sucker rod and the 1084 after 15 minutes in the etch I was able to easily see the transition between the two steals so this was a promising moment I knew that I would be able to see a pretty cool line when I h my finish and my knife I also went ahead and broke this piece to see what the grain structure looks like and it did look fairly tight as I would expect for 1080 so now that we have the blade profiled drilled we have the sharpening notch milled in and we have our jimping on the spine we can go ahead and heat treat this blade I did two normalising cycles which is bringing the blade up to somewhere in a neighborhood of 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit and then letting it cool to room temperature twice this will remove stresses from your blade I do this by putting a wire through on the holes and hanging it off my power rack until the blade cools I figured I'd utilize this quench plate angle iron vise method that I picked up from Alex outdoors to minimize the chance of warping in my blade I quenched a blade in parks 50 and then traversed my shop to get it clamped up in the jig I kept the blade in the oil for about five seconds before moving over to the jig now my jigs were not perfectly square with each other and I think that was part of my problem because I did pick up a very very slight warp in the tip of my blade so I clamped the blade up just flat in this case and put it in for my first tempering cycle for two hours I try not to work out any of the warps in the first tempering cycles and some blade is very brittle at this stage in the next tempering cycle I put two washers down to keep the blade relatively straight along its flat and then I bend the tip towards the left there so that I can bend against my warp and after my second tempering cycle my blade came out straight I then put the blade on to the surface grinding attachment for the third time in this case and got the surfaces to a 400 grit cork belt I started off with a 120 grit belt moved on to a two hundred and eighty grit Gator belt and then lastly finished with a 400 grit cork belt now that the flats of our knife are brought up to an acceptable finish I will put some marking fluid on the edge and scribe our center line this center line will be the target I start off with a worn 60 grit ceramic belt to knock off the edge at a pretty aggressive angle after that I move on to a fresher newer belt so that I can start working the bevel towards the spine if you start off with a new belt right off the bat you end up tearing up a lot of the abrasives on that nice fresh belt so this is what a 60 grit ceramic belt finish will look like on your knife I'm utilizing the 60 grit ceramic shredder belt from combat abrasives in this case after I get the 60 grit finish I'll move up to a 120 grit j-flex finish is at this point that I will hang belt off of the side of the platen slightly and get a nice radius to plunge since I'm trying out some new things in this knife I stopped at 120 grit finish because I wanted to see what that finish would look like edged I did also notice that I have a slight surface imperfection towards the tip of this knife as you just saw I don't think this goes very deep but it is there and I didn't like it after getting my makers mark on the blade I put it in to the acid after about five minutes I take it out and clean it off with some steel wool and then put it back in the acid two more times this is the finish I was able to achieve with about 15 minutes of itching time in a fifty-fifty solution of ferric chloride and water I'm going to be utilizing some wood on this knife from Pop's knife supply I'm not sure which of those two it was but it ended up looking pretty good so I'm not to figure out what kind of wood this is it's one of those two that I just popped up on the screen I will say that it was a bear to grind and if I didn't have a nice fresh belt it would have taken forever so I marked off the angle on the front of my scales and grind them in with a semi fresh 120 grit j-flex belt I then send the finish on the front of the scales up to a thousand grit with Rhino wet sandpaper after I have the front of the knives sanded up I put the stop on my mill to drill into the scales with a counterbore 3/16 of an inch deep this is how that turned out I will once again mention that I love that counter bore from Pop's knife supply so I do my normal Corby math here which is the total width of all three pieces - 316 times - to get the inside the inside with that I'll need to modify the core B's - however in this case I'm using this new fastener here so I attack it the same way I would normally attack a Corby fastener I need to bring this point four to down to about a quarter of an inch what I did know and what you will see later is that the void on these fasteners are much larger on the female ends of those heads so you'll see what I'm talking about a little later so I'll get everything nice and cleaned up lay down some tape on my scale and measure out two equal parts of G flex epoxy I then put epoxy into the holes where the fastener heads will sit now these fasteners were also a little tighter than the corby fasteners normally are in the counterbore that I drilled so it took a little finagling to get them in there that I wasn't expecting and I didn't check like I should have but that's fine they did end up fitting I got the whole thing together and I cleaned off the front of the scales where I had a little bit of squeezed out now we'll mention that I should have gone back about ten or fifteen minutes later and make sure that no more had squeezed out because in this case a little bit more did squeezed out from the front of my scales and I normally really don't like it when that happens so I should have cleaned that off but I didn't this is where I noticed the folly of my ways and there is a large visible void when I cut off the heads of each one of these fasteners so to illustrate exactly what happened here so it won't happen to you I'll make a detailed drawing of what happened this pink thing is our blade and then these purple sides are our scales we counterbored into the scale 3/16 of an inch and then the head of the bolt sits out further than that now this void of the female section also sits out further than 3/16 of an inch so when we cut the head off we had this big nasty void to contend with as you can imagine I was very disappointed with this outcome back in my early days when I was learning how to utilize corby fasteners this had happened to me once or twice and I quickly realized that I need to do more math when putting Corby's onto a knife and measure the void of the corby fasteners so with that in mind whenever you were utilizing new fasteners like these make sure you measure the depth of the void I'm sure these fasteners will work just great on thicker handle scales but four quarter inch scales I think the voids are probably too large I decided to continue on with this knife and finish it out because the handle fasteners have been voids in the front of them is more of a cosmetic issue than a function issue this knife will still be completely functional just slightly ugly when it comes to the fasteners it is for that reason that this knife is now my knife so as you've been able to see we are getting this handle shaped out on the belt grinder this is as far as I took it with the belts and then we will finish it out with hand sanding I normally start off with a 320 grit sandpaper work up to a 600 grit after that and finally a 1000 grit paper this process actually doesn't take that long considering it I'm coming off of the belt sander and a 220 grit finish I make sure to clean the debris from the inside of these fasteners and then hit the spine with the scotch brite belt to make sure all of the satin scratches are going in the same direction then pull out the win water-cooled sharpening system and put my edge onto this knife with a 220 grit wheel then strop the edge and I have a razor sharp little knife thank you guys for watching this video I hope you all really enjoyed this build and if you did go ahead and hit that like and subscribe button down below with that I'll catch you all on the flipside [Music]

Channel: Red Beard Ops

Views: 97,909

Keywords: red beard ops, knifemaker, knifemaking, san mai, oilfield, sucker rod, rod pump, Knife Making, how to make a knife, how to make a san mai, forged in fire san mai, forged in fire, alec steele, simple little life, walter sorrells, blacksmithing, blade smith, bladesmithing for beginners, beginner bladesmith, make a knife, oilfield sucker rod, oilfield rods, sucker rod pump, pump jack, pumping unit, west texas oilfield, oilfield knife, san mai forging, san mai knife, weld, etch

Id: 90DyQUq_trM

Length: 19min 42sec (1182 seconds)

Published: Fri May 01 2020