Making a Kydex Knife Sheath

hey YouTube Jeremy here was simple little life in today's video I'm going to show you how to make a sheet Kydex knife sheath so two knives we're going to take a look at today this actually a set of knives I made for gentlemen kind of matching knives this one is designed to be a smaller boot knife and he is a law enforcement officer so this is going to be the back up to his sidearm and then he wanted a matching blade but when he's going to use more for camping so I made a larger one this one's out of 3/16 tool steel quite heavy let's take the video I'm just going to take you along while we make a sheath for the big one I will be making both chiefs today but just it's a lot it'll be a lot more clear if we're only following one knife she's being made to make my sheets I do use a Kydex press and if you click this link up here I'll take you to a video where I showed you a super simple way that I made my press and then I usually I just use a toaster oven also I'll be using a Kydex an eyelet flaring tool you can buy them and Hammer them in but I ended up getting this tiny little having called an arbor press but it's a little mini press I got this from a knife maker USA or USA knife maker I'll put a link below where I purchase all my high tech stuff the fasteners everything so let's get started so one thing that I do when I'm making a Kydex sheath is i watch you wrap this whole blade with painters tape the reason for that is that the retention ana Kydex sheath is done with the way that the the thermoplastic the Kydex wraps around different features of the handle portion none of the grip of the knife happens at the blade so I like to put a layer of tape on there almost like a thin spacer so that the Kydex isn't too tight around the blade itself just in case you get little pieces of dirt or something in the sheath it's going to give it a little bit less chance of it scratching every time you put it in and out which is the one drawback of a Kydex sheath in my opinion this is one the first things I do I'll start off with a very precisely cut out piece of masking tape and I'll get that on there sometimes I'll do two layers just to let it's a nice little spacer so that when the Kydex presses it you pull it out of the Kydex press and then you can take the tape off and you've got a little bit of clearance in there and I'm actually going to do two layers on this one all right so now we've got our blade nicely taped up go ahead and find our piece of Kydex and Kydex comes with a shinier side and more of a matte side I typically like to use the matte side it's just a personal preference thing though use whichever side you prefer what I do is simply lay out roughly where I want my Kydex to be make sure you have plenty of room there and then just measure how much on each side I have so let's roughly say we got about an inch and a half there that might be too much try not to waste Kydex but the same time you don't want to end up with a piece that's unusable so about an inch and a half on either side so we'll take this to four and a half inches and we're going to cut this down so mark out half four and a half give yourselves nice line to cut on what will cut those two up we're cutting out my kayaks in the flat state I just use these Fiskars like sharp shears you can use tin snips whatever you really want this stuff cuts quite easily and these cuts don't need to be all that straight because these are just going to be large sizes and then after we mold them we will trim them down from here quite significantly so really the only reason to make a nice straight cut is select your piece of stock that you leave is square for the next time you go to make something it just has a point of reference this Kydex is 66th ow so you can buy all different thicknesses on 93,000 common size the sixty thousand fairly common you get lots of different sizes and colors I find this a pretty good general general size for the sheath I'm going to be making a little bracket that I'm going to put my belt clip on and that I will actually use a thicker Kydex but for this part of it I use a 66 now again a lot of it is personal preference and up here we have our kite express again there's that link up also put in the description where you can see exactly where how I built this press there it is some Kydex pacific foam and then some big fix 30 pieces of maple and a couple of hinges all this stuff is stuff that either got for free or like these hinges I saved off of some stuff that's being thrown the garbage where I used to work except for the foam I have used a camp sleeping pad for the foam and it did work the one thing with this stuff is it as you press a piece with this it does kind of hold its shape and the phone gets a little bit deformed but I actually find with this once you just let it rest for a few days it pretty much comes right back to a nice flat piece so you'll probably notice when we're done pressing this sheath there'll be a big divot in it and they'll be kind of look like it's almost destroyed this foam but I'm actually really quite surprised that after a few days it will come right back to a relatively nice flat state and then to heat up the Kydex there's a lot of different ways you can do it I just use a toaster oven set it to 250 degrees and it'll only take a couple of minutes in there and usually it's like 2 to 3 minutes at 250 degrees obviously depends on the thickness of the Kydex as well as vitamin it just depends sometimes it's a little different than others but keep an eye on it's not something you want to put it in there let it warm up and then go do another task put it in there and just stand in front of it and keep checking on it also you don't want to be reaching in here and grabbing that hot Kydex because well first of all it can be hard to hold on to you second of all you can quite easily burn yourself on those grills those rails no need for that so some type of a glove so really quickly while the oven is heating up good idea just to kind of set out your sheets make sure your piece actually going to fit in your press make sure you know how you're going to press so my plan is this I'll get both of these in the toaster oven I'm going to clean these really well before I heat them up because when they're hot you don't want to be handling a much you want them going right into your press and you wanna make sure you get any little timeyou specks of dirt or dust being in a one room knife shop sometimes it's hard to contain my messes so I keep my kinetics wrap up but at the same time I just want check for any grind user chunks of metal you'd hate to press that against your blade and go test fit it a few times but nasty scratches in your blade so always a good idea so I'll just make sure it's going to work here I kind of do a dry run before you're wasting your cooling time make sure you got both sides sort it out just let the oven finish warming up and we'll pop it in there and when it comes out we'll be were to put this back in I usually put a shiny side down because that's the side that will be inside so if there were ever chance of getting any marks and like the grill or something they would be on the bottom there and that pretty much takes out my whole oven there's barely enough room for that door to close but does close so we're going to sit here and wait and when I come back I'll show you roughly the feeling that you want the texture that you're looking for and and once that's done we will put in the press and clamp our knife to only be in a minute 43 seconds it's already starting to soften up quite a bit you can see a lot of people say they'd like to leave it till they start to see a curl on its own and that actually seems to work fairly well so we're going to give it maybe another minute or two but as you can see this is a very quick process the heating up of the Kydex you don't want to just sit there and come back it can get heated up to the point where all the texture will just kind of run and get glassy and slimy obviously you'll just start melting and completely liquefy if you leave it in there too long but yeah that's pretty good malleable put in there a little bit more this time I'm not gonna open it up and show you again because it's pretty much ready to go right now just want to make sure it's really nice and soft and but from the time that I grabbed it out of here and put it into the press I want that as short of a time as possible so we are really going to hustle and book it so I'm going to switch strictly to this camera from now on I think our Kydex is ready I'm going to whip it out of the oven again I'm going to set the glossy side up on this one so this law the gloss will be into the inside and I'll put the matte side up on the top one that way we'll have the matte finish on the outside of the sheath so quickly grab both Kydex up there there they're good to go clown all right so it's been about 20 minutes should be cool now and there you have it so you've got a really nice impression there so I've got the halves of our sheath we're going to trimming this sheath to about here so that this first finger coil is actually sticking out of the sheath just to aid in removing the knife but as you can see that worked quite well next step will be to drill our holes get rid of popper eyelets and then trim it up also for this one I'm going to make a little stand off that I'm going to use to put the belt clip on just so that the screws aren't rubbing into the you know I'm going to show you that right now so this is a little jig that I made and this is just a quarter inch aluminum by four inch and I just cut different sizes basically it's just like a die a ninety three thought I'll heavy stuff I heat a piece of that up set it in there squish it together and then put this in the bench vise and let it cool and what that does is it makes a little Kydex standoff that allows my screws to go into this without having to worry about the screws going through this part so there's nothing that'll be contacting the blade or the handle scratching it up um there's other ways you can do it but this just the way that I like to do it so let's go ahead and we'll cut our piece of thick Kydex and get this pressed now to hold the sheath on to the belt I'm actually going to use this tech lock lots of different options you can use a lot of the ones I do or these plastic clips which work great there's these metal clips which I'll be putting on to the boot knife so that this could be tucked into the side of a boot smaller tech locks and these large ones trip the camera will pick this up but you see there's quite a difference between this stem Kydex and this thick thick stuff so let's trim a piece of this up now we're just going to cut this one here on the bandsaw got a big old chunk out of here stick this press on there put a vise now as that cools this little die we made is going to maintain that shape for us so that will give us our standoff and there we have our little standoff piece amount right there so it clears the blade and then we can mount our tech lock onto that and there'll be room there for the screws so that the screws won't be touching the blade at all I'm thinking something just like that I think that's going to be really good although this is going to get a right-hand carry so it needs to be like that so keep that point up since we have our rough pattern or not rough pattern but pattern scribbled out where we're going to put the eyelets these are little eyelets we'll be using I'm going to ahead and drill these out and usually don't use a drill press for this I prefer using a small hand drill first of all it's not hard to drill through this material one other thing I will note is this a different type of a bit I don't even know it's it's an odd one this one came with my Kydex kit so I think they modify these bits to cut through Kydex it's nice because got a very very sharp tip there and it punctures a really hard hole so your bit doesn't wander it all regular bits do work as well but just thought I would point this out and while I'm drilling I'll usually pop in some eyelets just to make sure everything's located correctly this is my cute little press bit of a joke I understand that but all it really is is there's a bottom die it's kind of got that recess machined in there and then you put the preformed flange into that die like that there's also got that same little recess you can't see it but saan the inside of that well you cannot see it there and so this will kind of help locate it this little pin here on this little chingus it also locates it within the die so you're not going to mess up your die and then as you press it down on this part that does not have the preformed flange it basically rides up in there and gets flared over then we'll take it over the grinder and shape it up you okay so cut that shape though to tell the truth I really don't like making sheaths I only do it because well I have to now we will go ahead and drill this that we had marked put our clip on and I don't finish Paul chiming up until this is all done because as you see I'm gonna have to cut all the material off of this stanchion this little riser that we made but we'll get all that cut off and mount the clip then we can test it on the belt make sure it functions correctly and if it does we'll go ahead and I usually take a buffing wall sandpaper and a buffing wheel to the edges to get them nice and shiny give it more of a factory look but although I can clean this up a little more make it look a little nicer than it does but it's a very very functional sheath so nothing wrong with that it does its job it's not a art piece by any stretch um not like the knives I mean I like my knives to be really but I enjoy making knives I care more about making knives than I do making sheaths I do these simply as a necessity but oh headaches sheath making is something that's quite simple to get into and if you're looking for you know people enjoy getting involved with different tactical projects and make different things so Kydex is a great place to start very inexpensive to get into you don't need a lot of fancy tools and the projects will go much quicker than say building an actual life when you're getting into it so let's go ahead and finish this thing up okay there we have it it's a fairly uh really hefty sheath let's go ahead and see how it fits all right so I'm calling this one done one thing I added I didn't have the camera running but I added a little finger notch there I just took my Dremel or my Fordham rotary tool and a groundout just a little finger notch there because I didn't want to take this sheath down any further this is where all my retention happens right here and here and I got a nice fit there massage it a little bit round this back side with the just with a heat gun and with that finger notch removed I can actually grab the finger choil and it comes out great and now I'm properly holding the knife as soon as I draw the knife so that's pretty handy and there's our tech lock on there close up again of that little finger relief kind of looks neat too but highly highly functional it turned out pretty good quite happy with that and the knife yep it works good as well the same thing on this little knife I just have to do the clip on this knife yet but I put that same little relief groove in there and also especially this being a boot knife that's being a backup knife to uh to his firearm really nice to be able to just have a really nice quick deployment I haven't taken the tape off this plate yet but nice lock on there it's not going to go anywhere and it's out and ready to go so hold on quite happy with these blades I know the gentleman that ordered these is going to be really excited to get them he's waited a good long while for these but they're heading out and ready to roll just gotta put an edge on them and I think tomorrow I'll be shooting a video I'd shot one before but I wasn't happy with it on how to sharpen a knife the way that I've sharpened my knives and it's ridiculous how sharp they get so hope enjoyed the video if you do please consider subscribing to the channel give a thumbs up leave a comment share it and also we have a little contest going on once I reach 20,000 subscribers I'm going to giveaway knife this is the knife ever covered in oil right now so that it doesn't rust video you can check that link up here on how to make this knife with just basic hand tools and this thing was entirely made by hand and as part of that and part of this giveaway when I get twenty thousand subscribers on this channel I am going to give this knife away and that'll be the first part of the prize the second brother prize is going to be a package of steel so it's going to include a piece of oh one tool steel some g10 and some pin material so that you can have materials to build your own knife and anyways thanks for watching guys I hope you enjoyed the video Cheers

Channel: Simple Little Life

Views: 279,942

Keywords: kydex, diy, diy kydex, kydex knife sheath, knifemaking, knifemaker, homesteadknives, knife making, knife sheath making, knife maker, knife sheath, kydex sheath, making a kydex sheath, making a kydex knife sheath, diy kydex knife sheath, how to make a kydex knife sheath, thermoplastic, simple little life, homestead knives

Id: krlPUIQyohE

Length: 22min 21sec (1341 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 12 2016