Making a Kukri from a Brush Axe

[Music] hey guys welcome back to the art of craftsmanship my name is dustin and today in the shop we're going to be taking this old brush axe and turning it into a kukri now i like brush axes but they don't have the same kind of draw as the normal axe does there's something about it that i'm still drawn to because it does have that axe handle it's got that blade on the end but it's not really the same as an axe it doesn't i don't feel the same way about it so this has kind of been sitting over in the corner for a while and devin came up with the idea why don't we take this blade that's already kind of curved and has the sharp edge on the inside and turn this into a kukri which i think is an awesome idea so i've kind of traced over this blade a couple times drawn some templates and come up with a design that i think will work pretty well but before we get into that we need to remove it from the handle and cut off everything that's not part of the blade [Music] oh [Music] [Music] that was way easier than a normal axe head from a handle now just go ahead and cut this part off [Music] [Music] so so [Music] [Music] the first thing i did here was i just traced around my blade i actually did it twice to be able to give me two different versions of drawing the same thing now you can see here that i've kind of come up with a pretty nice design which i'm happy with the blade was the main thing i had to get it to feel right to feel even to have a nice long gentle curve and then figure out where my how high up my tip could go this is my first kind of iteration of the handle just kind of thinking about how i wanted the shape to be i did some things with just a slight uh curve in the middle for like a palm swell and then i moved over to more of a coke bottle i had this idea to maybe do it like a coke bottle that's a little bit more similar to like a bushcraft knife so i also added the harpoon clip which i just think is a cool aspect and we'll be able to do kind of a secondary bevel on that back edge my second drawing of the handle is here a little bit straighter down from the ricasso area to the middle and then we'll work on these curves now i'm not exactly happy with these curves i just did these freehand so i'm going to pull my french curves over we'll draw these a few more times before we trace this and transfer it onto the blade [Music] so my next step is cutting out the profile here now i'm going to be using maybe an angle grinder and the porta band and the grinder as well to do all my final shaping and i'm not worried about at all about overheating this because i'm going to do a full heat treat cycle on this afterward now if you didn't want to heat treat this and you want to keep it as it was just make sure all of your shaping and cutting you keep it cool just don't let it get too hot and then you know you keep your temper i'm not exactly sure what the hardness of this is and what it's already pre you know kind of hardened and tempered at so i'll be doing my full heat treat cycle after i trim it all down [Music] so [Music] [Applause] so that's cool feels great this is awesome good design it's a little funky like it's not perfectly straight but i'm going to have to make the some changes to this anyway grind some stuff there's a little bit of a weld bead in here with a crack so i think i'll probably grind one side off thin it out straighten it out but this is exciting it feels awesome got a ton of weight to it right now i want to kind of tell you about what i'm thinking right now what i'm what i'm working on now this material that i cut out of was already a blade so it already had a portion of the bevels already ground so i have a thin spot i've got thick spots it wasn't perfectly straight the the bevel's not right in the middle so i need to make some compensation for that i kind of have to go back and forth and decide how i want to do this what i'll probably do is mark my center line all the way around based off of a flat surface but that's not exactly right because both sides aren't flat the bevel's off kind of doing a bunch of finessing going back and forth and i'll be grinding both sides trying to get it flat to try to get it down to about a quarter of an inch right now it's a little bit over 3 8 so it's really heavy and chunky but i think i can do that i think i can kind of do all that back and forth on the grinder so hopefully you're able to follow along with all that what i just said and if not you can rewind a little bit and listen to it again [Music] so [Music] so well this is coming along well i'm really happy with it i removed a ton of material probably an eighth of an inch all the way across the entire spine thank goodness for the revolution 2 by 72 grinder with the 11 inch platinum i was really able to get a lot a long flat area shout out to brian house housework check him out uh the revolution grinder is awesome and that platen is awesome really happy that i had all that space to be able to grind this flat so i really was focusing on the handles making sure the handles are nice and flat the the whole front of the blade doesn't have to necessarily be exactly flat because there's going to be so much grinding on it so now i'm going to work on setting in my choil and then we'll start grinding out our bevels this this is kind of my version of the original choil that would have been on the original kukris i'm not exactly sure why the choil was shaped the way it was this kind of double choil with a little point in the middle but i kind of like this version of it so if you guys know about that choi if you know why it was that way if there's a reason that it was that way or if it was just an aesthetic thing let me know in the comments i'd like to know about it i'm using a quarter inch drill bit now to mark my center line both down the bevel in the front and the secondary bevel on the back then i'm going to use my calipers to mark off the depth of my bevel on both again the main bevel and the secondary bevel well got everything marked and ready to go nothing left to do now but do all my initial grinds with some freehand grinding [Music] for newer knife makers out there or if you're getting started you're having trouble keeping your bevel in the center which i did all the time when i was kind of first learning a good trick is to set your bevel set your center line early on so that way you're just using about 45 degree angle or so to mark off grind that bevel set that center line and then you can come back and grind between the edge and the top of your bevel kind of flatten that out it's a really good way to make sure that you have that center line of your blade right down the middle and i learned that trick from andreas kalani [Music] [Music] i got all my initial bevels grounded i was just about to go over and start doing my heat treat but always remember mark enjoy your holes and your handle before you do your heat treat [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] dagger [Music] i was hoping that this back side of this blade would have been soft enough i know when i was cutting it was kind of soft but i think here it's just it's just too hard for those drill bits so i'm gonna heat up the blade a little bit with a torch get it past hard get it back to kind of a general anneal so i should be able to drill those holes a little better [Music] so [Music] i'm going to use the nicer cobalt drill bit now to drill a bunch of eighth inch holes through the handle and that'll just relieve some material there and also add some more space through the handle where the glue can hold on when i glue the handle in [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Laughter] this is going to be the first of my three normalizing cycles so i'm going to heat it up to a nice cherry red and take it out and let it cool down in the air and i'll do that two more times i'm gonna go back in for my fourth time i'll bring it up to that cherry red keep it there for a bit check it for non-magnetic and then i'll do my quench so just gonna set this right here and this will heat up our oil i'm going back in now for the final quench heat let's turn this up get a nice cherry red and then i'll go in for the quench so well nice and straight that's good let me go see if it actually hardened [Music] she's definitely hard all the way up and down the blade real hard you can hear the difference low high that's the difference the end of the handle is still soft blade is real hard all right i'm going to take this upstairs throw it in the oven for the tempering cycle two hours at 400 degrees twice letting it cool down in between and we'll come back tomorrow and keep on working on it well the temper went really well everything stayed nice and straight so i'm going to clean up all the forge scale first and then we'll do our finish grinding [Music] so [Music] so so well that was really stressful just uh going back and forth trying to get the bevels even on both sides trying to get them lined up there's a little bit of a wave in them but it's pretty good right now yeah man grinding that inner curve like that is not like grinding a regular bevel so it took some doing but i got there ready to move on to some higher grit belts now and that should be a little bit easy going all right [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right guys well i am really happy with how these bevels are turning out they're not perfect but for what this is a knife from a brush axe they're turning out really nice i'm happy with that the next thing i need to do is i need to address this kind of crack this weld bead now this is here because when this original collar was attached to this there was weld that held this on and i was hoping that i'd be able to kind of grind past this at some point throughout the process but it's still here so i'm actually going to do some decorative file work on this edge now to try to hide this a little bit [Music] the pattern i'm doing is these kind of four hour glasses now if you watched our very first knife video you'll notice that i did this pattern in that video it's something that i've been interested in it's kind of four hour glasses symmetrical on both sides just i kind of like the idea of the of time and the four which kind of to me represents a lot of things four directions the you know main four elements things like that that's what i'm doing on this one i think it'll work pretty well i do have to kind of figure out the spacing because i want it to fit into a certain space to hide this crack so that's what i'm playing with right now i finished using the round file to do the round parts now i'll use a triangle file to do all the straight lines between each hourglass well that's looking pretty good i'm gonna have to take this over and clean this up a little bit on the scotch brite pad just by using the scribe to mark my lines and scratch the surface a little bit because this is well bead so it's pretty soft but i also did have a couple little mistakes where i scratched it so we'll clean that up well i'm ready to put on my handle scales um unfortunately i have some really nice handle scales that are stabilized that were sent over from jesse allison from mountain prevail you guys know about jesse go check out his channel it's awesome i'll put a link in the description below but he wanted to kind of support us he wanted to help he sent over some wood that we're going to be using on the journey knives in the future but he also sent a couple extra stabilized pieces of what i think is walnut and this is really beautiful i wanted to put a nice dark handle on this knife and i didn't don't really want to do any liners for this one i just want to be straight wood so this is the perfect option for that now i'm not going to talk about all the steps of how exactly i'm doing the handles we'll show you that process but if you want to see and a little get a little bit more information about how i do all the handle processing and all the steps that go into you know putting on a handle you can go back almost all of my knife making videos have those processes and those steps so you can go check those out but we're going to kind of bust through this we'll go straight through and then right before we get into the actual glue up we'll meet back up with you [Music] so so [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] cool [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so that took me probably about an hour 15 hour and a half or so to prep the handles cut them sand them cut all the pins and the lanyard tube and prep the handles and the and the scale so it's all ready to go now i'm going to use two-part epoxy it's a 45-minute work time and about a 7-10 hour set time [Music] we're looking good have everything glued up really well a nice amount of squeeze out all the way around i'm happy with that i cleaned up the front edge on both sides with some acetone so go ahead and let this set up overnight we'll come back tomorrow and finish it up [Music] [Music] [Music] not bad a little bit of squeeze out but i always get a little bit squeeze out what are you going to do we'll deal with that later for now i'm excited to be in the home stretch of this knife i'm going to clean up the flats on both sides of the handle and i'll clean up the profile around the tang and we'll start shaping the handle [Music] so i'm going to mark out my general lines on here for my coke bottle shape do some general shaping with marking lines we'll go back and keep on grinding oh [Laughter] i worked through the grits on the belt sander to remove the majority of the wood and pretty much started with around 60 grit went to 120 and then i used an older 120 that was a little softer just to kind of remove the bulk of the material and get it shaped to basically where i want it now i'm going to go back to about 60 grit and clean up all the tool marks off of the surface of the wood and also work around the outside edge of the metal and then i'll move up through 120 220 maybe up to 400 maybe to 600 but we'll do that before we polish the handle 400 that'll probably be enough oh well that feels so nice so nice oh yeah feels great i'm not going to be using regular oil on this handle because it's stabilized so i'm going to clean it up with some acetone first then we'll take it over to the buffing wheel and buff it to nice and shiny [Music] [Music] so so so i'm starting out with a 120 grit belt on the 1x30 grinder to develop that micro bevel and i switched over to an old 120 grit belt and just to be able to use that it's probably closer to 220 or 300 grit and that kind of polishes it up and gives me that nice micro bevel and that nice wire edge and i'll use my stropping belt to finish it all off and polish the edge oh she's sharp now this is looking really nice it is shiny and smooth clean and sharp let's head outside and find some stuff to cut up [Music] so [Music] so [Music] all right guys well i am super pleased with the way this turned out and to be able to take something like the brush axe which i probably would have never used and turn it into the kukri which i'll definitely use and i'm really excited about using it works really well i'm pumped so it was fun we got to go outside and cut some stuff like the water bottles and the celery but really the test was to be able to take it out into the brush a little bit chop some limbs and really cut through something that was pretty big about an inch and a half or two inches you know and this thing went right through it really sharp and it's still really sharp which i'm super pleased about because i didn't know with being a brush ax i didn't really know how hard the steel was but it feels like it uh sharpened up and hardened up really well for what it is i'm pumped i'm really excited i think it turned out really good make sure you guys don't forget to like and subscribe if you want to support us go check us out on patreon and you can check out our new podcast the other craftsmanship podcast on the makery network thank you all so much for watching and we'll see in the next video [Music] you

Channel: The Art of Craftsmanship

Views: 136,123

Keywords: kukri, khukhri, making a knife, knife making, knife maker, brush axe, brush axe mod, axe modification, knife sharpening, how to make a kukri, making a kukri, modding an axe, bushcraft knife, bushcraft axe, knife shop, knife heat treating, heat treating a knife

Id: n7f3YRFTXV8

Length: 45min 59sec (2759 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 21 2021