Making a knife with a 1 X 30 belt sander?

hey guys jeremy here with simple life i get asked this question all the time and i can't answer because i have no experience a lot of people ask me is whether or not a 1 by 30 is a good option when you're starting knife making now when i started knife making i started out with the file guide method you know you got the bar and the file i'll put a link in the description to a video that kind of shows that process from there i went to a 2x72 but it was a homemade 2x72 and again i've got a video where i kind of walk through my homemade 2x72 i'll put that in the description as well from there i ended up getting a professional ones i've got a kmg and then the mack daddy of them all the black fox one but is it worth it is it a good intermediate step if you're just curious about knife making if you kind of sort of want to dabble into it but don't want to lay out a whole bunch of cash is a 1 by 30 good option since princess auto sponsoring this video they've sent me some gift cards so i'm gonna head into the city uh hopefully they have them in stock i checked a few weeks ago and they didn't have any of these one by thirties in stock which is good i mean that means people are doing things right people are buying and making which i think is fantastic another note if you are a canadian and you want to start dabbling in knife making uh princess otto is actually starting to stock knife making specific products they actually sell g10 handle material they're starting to sell forges they've got anvils they've got different levels some really high-end anvils and even like refractory lining cement stuff like that they have quite a few products that are specific to knife making which i am so pumped about i mean really if you live in canada you know what princess otto is you probably have one close to you and now you can just go there and pick up your knife making stuff i'm hoping this is a trend and they keep adding more and more and more fingers crossed than that i don't know for sure i'm not involved with the corporate and stuff but uh they do have handle materials and stuff like that anyways let's head in hopefully i can get one of these uh 1 by 30s and then we're going to set up and build just a small little edc knife [Music] all right so i'm outside of my local princess auto all right we got one oh i got some 60 grit 120 grit got corby bolts now i might have to get me some of those all right we got it and some accoutrements [Applause] all right i'm really really interested to see how this works now the one thing right off the bat one advantage of these is they're not super heavy you know so if you've just got like a basement shop or something like that definitely see the advantages of something small like this looks like i have to do some assembly another work rest this is a tiny tiny little thingamadober i did not expect it to be so small but i guess what was i expecting a little dust collection port that's cool cool quick release levers oh yes so to set the angle there's a little set screw right here and it rests there so essentially you'd kind of get it squared up and then lock it and you can fine tune it let's just just see where it's at ah it's not quite square oh no actually it is so this little bit here is the platen and i've got these two screws in here of course every uh every grinder is going to be a little bit different but i think they're all probably fairly similar i just want to bring this out so it's so we don't have any uh slack in the belt see the belt's not touching i'm gonna bring this out like this and then tighten it up and since we have it we may go put this rest on not that i plan on using the disc but you never know if this thing works you've actually got a lot of versatility packed into a tiny little machine here okay you guys ready interesting so far looks promising okay we need to design a knife [Music] super simple [Music] yeah we're gonna keep this one real easy real clean [Music] i think that should be good i'm just gonna make a photocopy of it so that i have another copy to reference all right [Music] and that'll fit right nice on our piece of oh one this is 1 8 of an inch thick i'm just going to uh take some spray adhesive spray this on and we'll cut this out our bandsaw i've wiped this down with some lacquer thinner stick it on like that now i've got this thing glued on i'm going to cut it out with my portable bandsaw obviously if you were beginning you might not have one of those but you could always use an angle grinder even this being o1 tool steel it comes in an annealed state you could cut this out with a hacksaw if you wanted to [Music] i'm just gonna set it up over here sort of in the the grinding area of my little shop so this thing came with a 100 grit belt i'm just going to leave that on for now and let's just see how this works all right so my initial thoughts i'm actually really impressed i i can't believe how well this thing took off the material uh this belt is a 100 grit belt that's what it came with and did a great job profiling also you notice this little cover right here that does a great job at preventing the sparks from coming back at my face i'll show you how effective it is real quick [Applause] that actually works really good but what i'm going to do is take this thing off it just pops off like this and that way i can just finish cleaning this up and then also this part here our platen only comes up to here so essentially you've got a little bit of a flat belt if you'd ever wanted to do like a convex grind or something like that you could work this you've got this little area to work on i'll tell you the tooth i'm actually really surprised [Music] all right so what we're going to do now i'm going to take this template off we're just going to kind of measure out where we want the holes to be there we go now you notice we haven't really done too much in this area right here but we're going to wait until we glue the scales on there's no sense getting this surface perfect because we're going to bring the scales down to it once we glue them on so let's uh figure out roughly where we want our holes to be and then we'll uh get the holes drilled i'm gonna figure i'm gonna want one right here one right there that looks good i'm just eyeballing it right now so that's where we're gonna have our pins and then i'll drill a couple holes in here so we have a through way for the epoxy to bond both sides of the scales so again we're gonna use these corby rivets this was probably like the big shocker of the day to me i had no clue that princess otto sold these and again i'm hoping that's kind of like a tendency towards servicing knife makers if you've never seen corbies what they are we've got two parts and there's a female thread and then a male thread and you'll whoops you'll drill your hole out for the female diameter the hole through the tang and then the hole in your scale is going to be this outer diameter and you tighten them down and once you tighten them and after the epoxy set then you grind down to that slot so you need to make sure that slot is sticking above the actual handle scale and then we'll grind that down and it'll look like a solid brass pin these are 0.219 so i need to drill these holes at 0.219 and this micarta is uh quarter inch it's a black and green linen it looks like should be kind of neat have some interesting layers in it when we shape the handle [Music] so i didn't actually have the camera going but i just drilled these two holes out to the appropriate size which was 732 and they've got a nice fit in there once i uh countersink all these holes get rid of the burrs these should pop in real nice i just did this whole thing with the camera pointed here and i didn't have the camera going i'm a little out of practice at making youtube videos so this is my marking tool [Music] all right so now we've got our center line marked out let's talk grinding jigs what i'm going to be using is this grinding jig i make a lot of these up i really like them it's just a solid block of steel and then i can machine i can use an angle of ice in my milling machine put whatever angle i want this one i believe is seven degrees and um i've got different size of holes tapped depending on the hole the pin diameter i'm using but essentially for this what i'll do is i'll just put it in here we'll put our bolt in and that'll clamp it down so we can grind that side flip it over to the exact same thing short of that you can always use something like this and this is just a piece of angle iron i've drilled and tapped a three-eighths hole and you can just use this i've got a little lock nut on here so this basically is just a jacking bolt and you can kind of tweak it up and down till you get the angle you want now the one thing with this particular one is that this is big we've got a fairly small work surface on that one by 30. weight i'm a little bit concerned about even with this i'm not sure if this is going to happen like so much weight that's gonna actually move the table we'll find out i guess we'll kind of notice it when we're grinding but i'm gonna try this one and uh this is it we're gonna grind pre-heat treat i wanna do as little finishing after heat treat as i can and this is a hundred grit belt we'll probably switch out to 120 post heat treat and see if we can just kind of clean up all the bevels and stuff like that but again seeing how this one by 30 actually works as an entry level to get into knife making let's find out [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] so we've got our bevels roughed out it actually went surprisingly well i've got a little clean up on this side to do you can see that top grind line there is not perfectly even this side which is always my strong side i'm super happy with that awful one by 30. i am absolutely impressed i'm surprised actually so we've got our kiln heating but what i want to do right now is get the scales prepared basically just kind of eyeball what i want you always want to make sure that you're clamping the sides together there's a little bit of a surface imperfection you can see it there i want that to be the inside so i want to make sure that basically that's how it would go so that's how we drill it now when we set this up in the drill press we're just gonna put a one two three block on either end and now we can drill right through drill right through all right so one thing i've decided to do while we're waiting for the kiln to heat up is i'm going to add a sharpening choil so all this is is just a little cut out right in here that gives a definite stop to the cutting edge and i find for sharpening it's it just makes a lot easier a lot cleaner and so to do that it's really simple obviously before heat treat is when you want to do this all right so you see the sharpening coil there all right guys i kind of feel like i'm getting a little bit lost in the weeds here the purpose of this video wasn't necessarily to do a step-by-step knife build but rather explore the concept the idea of whether or not a 1x30 is a good start to knife making so far i do believe it is i'm i'm really really impressed to tell you the truth but what i've gone ahead and done is i've heat treated the knife and if you want more nitty gritty detailed build videos i've got a lot of those on my channel you can check those out but for the sake of this one i just want to see what kind of a knife i can make with a 1x30 i'm going to clean up these flats hand sand these by hand my little sanding block we're going to put this back in the grinding jig i'm going to finish grind my bevels and i'm probably going to swap out to 120 grit belt so we can get a nice slightly better uh grit pattern um i don't want to have to handstand these bevels i'm not not a fan of hand sanding and then also what i did last night is i kind of even these scales up we counter board this for the corby bolts and then we did a radius and we also used that disc and put in a 45 on here now i originally said that i don't know if i'll ever use that disc but i was just wow i was shaping these and i was like this thing is so handy you know when you think about the fact that not only can we grind bevels but we've also got an ideal tool for putting these nice 45s on there that little sucker man there's a certain sense where i wish i had gone to this when i'd started knife making but we're not done yet let's finish this thing up see how it turns out [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] all right you guys ready let's uh peel this off oh boy hopefully the lacquer thinner will clean this up a bit i think i think we might be all right and here we have it folks uh i'm actually really really surprised at how this thing turned out if you'd have told me that i could do this this decent of a job on a one by thirty i would i would not have believed you i definitely been like i don't think so that did not come off of a 1 by 30. now i can still spend a little more time cleaning this up i haven't gotten super carried away with this you can see i forgot some of the heat treatment there some of that skill i forgot to sand that off as well as inside the choil there you need to send that i could get a little more carried away polishing these brass bolts on the buffing wheel and you can see man this this my car i'm actually really impressed it seems to be very consistent and very predictable and i kind of like how subtle it is right i mean it's it's not popping uh just a nice hunter green under the black and with the with the brass pins i think it looks pretty good and here are the 1 by 30 bevels those are 120 grit literally the 120 grit belts are the last things to have touched them so they're not perfectly smooth but the finish i think is acceptable so in wrapping this whole thing up i feel like i can confidently say that if you want to get into knife making a 1 by 30 is most certainly a great place to start you know i think back to when i was getting into it and i built my 2 by 72 i did i did a good job on that grinder it was robust it tracked well but my grinds were garbage they were nothing like this even though that grinder was better the grinder wasn't better had to learn so these things are skills that take time i've ground hundreds of knives and the fact that okay i can just come up to this buy one of this basic simple 1x30s and grind this that lets me know that it is possible and it is a great place to start the skills that you would develop on a 1 by 30 are directly transferable to a 2x72 and vice versa that's why i was able to just pick this thing up and do some half decent work with it there you have it guys bevels on a 1 by 30 and this entire knife was done on a 1x30 drill press obviously and a buffing wheel but really you don't need incredibly expensive materials comment i get all the time people are always telling me oh must be nice if you had 50 000 of equipment and it makes me laugh every time so from now on when i get those comments i'll just copy the link to this video and then they can watch that and say hey anyways guys that's going to wrap it up for this video i want to say thank you so much to princess otto for sponsoring this video for making this happen i hope you found inspiration hopefully encourages you to get out there go to princess auto buy one of these while they're still in stock and then just start making stuff it is so satisfying you can develop you can work your way along and start making great knives oh so much fun thank you so much for watching i truly do appreciate it cheers [Music] you

Channel: Simple Little Life

Views: 289,717

Keywords: knife making, 1x30, belt grinder, simple little life, homesteadknives, princess auto, knives, knifemaking, bladesmithing, do it yourself, harbor freight, 1x30 belt grinder, 1x30 belt sander, how to make a knife, sander, grinder, belt

Id: MDdBpMaG2TE

Length: 20min 40sec (1240 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 30 2020