Making a Puukko File Knife

[Music] alright guys welcome back to the other craftsmanship my name is Dustin and today we are filming our tenth video we just wanna say thank you guys so much so far we were just about a year out of fate making our first video and we're just short of three thousand subscribers so we really you know really appreciate that if you are watching and you haven't subscribed yet go ahead you know you'll see more videos of this type of thing or making stuff in the shop you know we're really excited excited to be here and excited for you guys to watching we are doing our best to make videos that are produced fully you know a little bit longer just we want them to look nice and feel nice and have that kind of complete feel in the video so you know as opposed to kind of breaking it up in a different part so we really like shooting it that way and we hope that you enjoy it that way drop us some comments you know tell us what you think about those type of videos we always do want to hear your opinion on how the channel is going and if you you know what we can do to make it more accessible for you so today in the shop for our tenth video we're gonna be working on a pouco style carving knife my father-in-law asked me to make him a carving knife for his birthday which is in a couple months so I got some birch bark from up at his property in Vermont I'm gonna do a birch bark stacked portion of the handle with brass and wood and and another thing I'm gonna do today which is kind of interesting and fun new to me is a little bit of forging on blade so I have absolutely no forging experience I have you know made lots of knives over the years but it's all been stock removal and using my Forge for heat treating so today we're actually gonna heat it up we're gonna bang a little bit on it and do some forging to kind of get that forged texture and also to draw out to a little bit more of a taper at end of the blade so that way we can get like a nice sharp point on the end of the blade for carving don't take anything I'm doing today as you know a real how-to video on blacksmithing it's just me having fun showing you what I'm gonna do and hopefully we get something that works really well and looks really cool out of it that's kind of the whole that whole end goal the things I'm making this channel something that works well and the craftsmanship is good and it looks really nice at the end so so with that being said let's go ahead and we're gonna light up the forge I'll show you you talked a little bit about my Forge and kind of show you guys what I have here so I made this for heat treating knives not necessarily for really heating up to forge temperature but you can see what I've done I just have a couple of refractory bricks that I'd used just as kind of stores in the front shudders that just helps to keep the heat inside and what I did here is I just use a small bucket this this refractory here is a one to one mix plaster of Paris and sand and I just kind of used a form to be able to make this cavity it's a four inch cavity plus a pipe on the side and just pour the concrete and around that so this gives access into the side with the heat it just kind of does like a swirling kind of cyclone Forge inside there and that really does heat up enough to to kind of heat up small pieces of steel for the four which will work really well I am gonna be building a bigger Forge soon because I'm going to be doing some bigger knives so stay tuned to that video will definitely shoot something for you guys on that bigger Forge what I'm gonna use today is this piece which is actually from a file you can see I've just cut it off and shaped it giving me kind of that general shape of a blade that I want to start with you can see I also pull pieces like this from a larger parts like sometimes I can make two knives out of one file so it works pretty well if I have enough like a nice long file it'll be enough left over after I have cut off the blade and then I have some left over for a smaller kind of carving knife so that's we're gonna be using it today this one is pretty thick so that's why I want to kind of add some of that forged material and also want to taper it down some so it's a little thinner in the tip I'll probably be able to get another quarter of an inch or maybe up to half an inch out ago you can say you can see I'm just really just working on trying to work a little bit just out to the tip to thin this out and draw the point out a little bit more I'm trying also not to work too much on the edges because that'll start to shape it'll start shaping the blade and deforming it if I actually put a taper on it'll bring the blade back or forth and that's what I would actually do if I was working on forging out the bevels as well but I'm really just trying to work on drawing the tip out and thing thinning it out as I go and thinking you see that starting to get a little thinner keeping this straight [Music] [Music] [Music] so you can see here that I've kind of maintained the same shape I had but just drew out the points um so this this blank here was the same size the same length as this one and you can see when I put them next to each other you can see how much I've gained a quarter of inch maybe three-eighths of an inch maybe a little bit more but I've kept the sign the shape of the blade which is what I wanted so this is pretty close you see it still has a drop point it still swoops up from the belly but I've gained a little bit more length and I've tapered in thickness down to the tip looks good [Music] next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna work on profiling the outer edge of this this blade shape I'm just cleaning that up and then also clean up the forge scale on the sides as well and kind of get it down to you know get it to the point where then we can start putting the bevels on it [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] alright guys so looks like I'm to the point now where my bevels are pretty close the left may be about 1/32 of an inch across most of the width of that edge and just making sure my bubbles come up without evenly on both sides but the tip is even and that the plunge lines are even I just added a couple notches into and the Tang it'll just help to give more grip inside the handle when I fill it with epoxy and put it in it'll have nice and plenty of notches to hold on to add extra support inside just taper the Tang all the way up add the notches in and I were rated move on so there are lots of kind of jigs you can make or buy that will keep your filing nice and even and straight and they work well but you can also just do it by eye it depends on how many knives you make and how often you're doing it and really if it's worth your you know money to get something that will make your time a little bit easier so you're making more knives when investing the things that make that knife process a little quicker and easier so I'm all finished now doing the ricasso making sure it's nice and even it's that way the bolster fits up on so now we're gonna move in to the hardening process first thing we want to do is we're gonna do normalizing so what normalizing does is it brings the structure of the steel to a fine grain and so what you do is we'll put the knife into the forge we'll heat it up to non-magnetic to that critical temperature and then we'll pull it out and we'll let it cool down to air cool again then we will put it back into the forge heat it back up to a little bit higher we'll let it sit a little bit longer a little bit higher the second time pull it out second time let it cool down and then we'll get it back into the Forge for a third time bring it back up to that critical temperature maybe just a little lower and we'll pull it out the last time we will let it cool down and that will make sure that we have some nice even grain that'll be ready for our final heat treat we'll put it in the last time heat it up to nine non-magnetic we'll try to keep it at that state for a minute or so if we can it'll pull it out and do the quench it looks like we got it nice and straight didn't doesn't look like a warped any she's good [Music] so we're gonna go ahead and do our tempering cycles now that'll bring the hardness down a little bit we're gonna look for a dark straw color so we're gonna do two cycles 400 degrees in the oven for two hours two times all right so we're now out of the oven and I'll tempered up the blades a nice even dark straw color all the way across where I ground off so I'd be able to see the color so that just is the the color you're aiming for your temper so that'll be a good hardness so we're gonna go ahead and move to the grinder again and do the finish grind on the blade [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] just finished up with the 120 grit belt and this one uh as it smoothes down its and it goes put a little bit closer probably like to 200 so I like the finish as it gives it its a little bit of a just kind of a matte it's a shiny finish but not super high-gloss it's a nice kind of durable finish and so what I'm gonna do now is I'll I'm gonna take off the guard on the top of the grinder and I'm gonna work against the the kind of the loose part of the belt where it's not against the back of the platen and what I'll do is I'll work with the bevel down and so I'll actually be able to put a little bit of a convex grind on the very edge of the blade so instead of putting a secondary bevel that's flat I'm gonna put a full convex grind so it'll go from the flat of the blade to kind of a rounded tip instead of a perfectly flat tip which will then just make that edge a little bit stronger so you can see that now the you can see this wire edge the little white line runs all the way from the tip back I'm gonna put a coil here a little notch out of it so I'm not concerned about it not coming all the way back to the to the plunge line but you can follow it all the way you get a that little wire edge so then what I'll do is I'll take that to the leather strop basically that's a little wire edge you rock back and forth until it comes off and then you have your nice sharp edge so we'll go ahead and do that and then we'll prepare to move on to putting the handle on [Music] all right so our next step is we're gonna start preparing our birch bark this is all birch bark that I collected from Vermont near where my in-laws live for my father-in-law since this is gonna be a birthday present for him so what you need to do when you're working with birch bark you need to cut it into smaller pieces that you can stack but also there's some preparation you need to do you have to clean off these the surface if to clean off so that way it's prepared for glue up so I'll show you how to do that now [Music] so after a few few tries I've really found that just using a knife and scraping the birch bark is the most effective way I gave it a shot on the wire wheel and it worked okay but it was a little too aggressive and I wanted to kind of catch on the bark and also just with the bark kind of being rounded it was hard to get inside so this although it's not the fastest way is really working pretty well so I have a quarter inch leather punch that I'm going to use so I'm gonna punch the pieces of birch with that and then I'll just overlap it about half way and it'll give me just enough to fit the whole tang in [Music] so next thing we're gonna do is cut down a piece of brass this quarter inch brass I'm going to use this for the bolster [Music] picked a piece of black walnut for the handle so this is already down to the right size this is probably about an inch and a quarter by an inch and a quarter square so I'll just cut off a piece of it to use I think this will look really nice contrasting with the lightness of the birch bark and brass bolster draw an X across your wood from corner to corner and you'll find your exact center [Music] the next part we're gonna do is we're gonna burn the Tang into the wooden handle so you see I have the knife clamped here and the vise I'll heat it up with the torch and then I have the hole that I drilled in my tang I mean in my handle wood so with when this is heated up I'll just push it on and burn the hole which will fit exactly into the wooden part of the handle [Music] there we go so you can see now it's a perfect sized hole burnt in perfectly so it fits exactly around the tank [Music] [Applause] this is 300 grit I'm going to start at and then I have a piece of 600 that I'll finish off on [Music] two things I need to do before I glue everything up one is I need to degrease all of my pieces all of my metal pieces so the brass bolster and the knife I'll use mineral spirits and clean them up so they'll have any grease on them and then I'm also going to be gluing this up with 30 minute epoxy and because I have so many pieces of birch bark I'm going to use a cup where normally I would just do a little bit on the surface I'm going to use this cup I'll cut it in half and that way I have enough room to pour myself and mix up the right amount of glue right off the bat and so I'll have to keep going back and mixing it when I filed the hole in this bolster down I left it where I could slide it onto the tang almost to the end but to the point where I knew that I'd be able to hammer it all the rest the way so I'm going to go ahead and do that now and then it'll fit really tight on that tang all the way up to the blade [Music] I'll make sure I code everything really well with epoxy you can always clean up the squeeze out later rather than having holes in my final glue up we're gonna do we're gonna take pieces of birch bark we're gonna alternate so start with one piece the green going one direction the next piece the green go in the opposite direction that just create some more the the pattern will be locked in and they'll be a stronger overall handle [Music] so I have about the amount of birchbark that I want about 3/4 of an inch again this last bit I'm just gonna get reading a little bit inside the hole as well make sure I have some down in there that'll fill up any gaps also on the end everything nice and tight and then and clamp this in so I have a clamp set up grab a block of wood [Music] I'm gonna let this sit overnight and cure completely I want to go at least 24 hours any time you're doing anything with epoxy so I'll let this sit overnight and then we'll come back and work on it tomorrow and start shaping the handle alright guys so thanks for staying with us on this project it's the next evening and we've let the handle and the glue set up all night long it's been a full 24 hours so we're gonna go ahead and pull it out of the clamp we're gonna cut off all the kind of extraneous bits on the bandsaw trim it down with some more bandsaw work move to the grinder shape it and then we'll do some final hand work on it before we finish up the plate [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] last thing to do is always the fun part at the end we're gonna go ahead and dip this handle and the boiled linseed oil and get it nice and oiled up [Music] oh man there's nothing like boiling up a handle just look so beautiful is gorgeous this walnut' going into the birch bark the dark to light and then to the the brass just looks so nice alright guys man this night turned out really well I'm super excited about it it was a really fun project got to combine some stuff I got to do some blacksmithing on the blade which I've never done before it was my first time and also a birch bark stacked handle that was the first time as well I'm really excited to be able to do that that birch bark came from the property I made my father-in-law's house and because this is a gift for him it's just a really cool element to have some you know part of the the nature up near where he lives up in Vermont so really enjoyed making this video really happy you guys for watching these videos this is our 10th video and we have more coming out in the next few months we have some free time we're really gonna do some more videos try to get them out for you so go ahead and hit that thumbs up and give us a subscribe so you can follow along make sure you see when those videos are coming out and we'll see you guys in the next one [Music] you

Channel: The Art of Craftsmanship

Views: 182,868

Rating: 4.8940177 out of 5

Keywords: knife making, file knife making, diy knife, carving knife, stacked birch bark, brass bolster, puukko knife, puukko file knife, hidden tang knife, forged knife, hand forged, the art of crafstmanship, shop knife, in the shop, knifemaker, convex edge, grinder jig

Id: bMC7mGoRoxw

Length: 34min 6sec (2046 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 09 2018