Making a small EDC knife - Simple Little Life

hey guys jeremy here with simple life today in this video what we're going to do is we're going to build a knife now this is the template of the knife we're going to build this is called the edc companion we're going to do this kind of together here i'll be beside you the whole way i'll explain every step as i'm doing it so hopefully you can kind of learn something the steel we're going to use to make the knife today is cpm 154 it'll be 1 8 of an inch thick and i think the stock that i'm going to cut it out of is one and a half inch thick bar stock or wide bar stock one quick thing to note about cpm 154 is it is one of these stainless steels that has a tendency to work harden meaning that if i try cutting it out with my portable bandsaw usually i find i get an eighth of an inch or quarter of an inch into it and then kaboom that steel hardens cuts the teeth off the saw blade and you're done but do remember there are some stainless steels that cut out just fine nitro v abl those are two steels that i have no issues cutting with my portable bandsaw uh we need to mark out the template onto the steel and i'm gonna use some spray out dye some layout dye this is a knife i make quite a few of so i have myself a little template just mild steel put it in this little jig here this is a toggle clamp lock it down and use a transfer punch these are handy tools i'll put a link in the description if you're interested they have all the different sizes that match very common sizes of drill bits and transferring holes use a transfer punch makes sense so i find the one that fits and smack it well that's cool beans looks great to me and i'm actually going to do two of these because why not okay let's head outside and cut those out [Music] [Music] [Applause] all right guys we got these things rough cut out with the angle grinder and now we're going to jump on the belt grinder what i like to do is use a a fairly worn out 36 or 60 grit ceramic belt uh just to kind of bring these lines in right to the lines that we scribed out kind of get this profiling done we'll work on the flat platen on my one grinder then we'll jump into the small contact wheel when we're done that and kind of clean this part up most of the work i would say 95 or 96 of the work maybe 96.5 is done on the flat platen for this knife [Music] anyways [Music] so [Music] so [Music] all right guys we've got this thing all cleaned up on the grinder nice profile on both of these blades well what i'm going to do now is drill the holes for the pins and on this one the one that the customer had ordered he's going to get a white fiberglass pins it's going to have black g10 handles and so we'll drill those holes we've got those laid out already from our template uh if i didn't have a template what i would typically do is kind of draw on here you can see i kind of put a line roughly where i want my handle to come to and try to evenly space those we're gonna have three pins in here and i'm also gonna drill a couple of extra holes that'll be about one eighth of an inch in diameter uh that we can have a little passage so the epoxy can run through the handle to both sides of the scales just to give it a better bond also lighten it up a little bit you can remove extra material uh the main reason though is the advantage you get when you can have that little passageways the epoxy goes from one side of the handle scale to the other then one thing i actually just realized i forgot to do is um take this to the belt grinder you see we've got our directional lines here this way all these lines are running this way from where we had like profiled it on the grinder what i want to do is actually take it to the grinder and with the belt running this way i'm going to come like this just to kind of clean everything up smooth everything out i like to do that before heat treat it's not a big deal but i just kind of like the look of it better so i'm going to do that real quick we are going to be hitting all these edges post heat treat as well obviously when we shape the handle scale so this will be cleaning it all up to a much higher grit but i just don't like working with the lines this way i like to have everything going like this personal preference thing i think all right now we've got these two ready to go we're gonna make some stainless steel envelopes for it the steel that i use the stainless steel wrap it's a 309 tool wrap the reason we're going to do that is because the temperatures that we're going up to are very high 1950 fahrenheit actually my kiln's about there and um at those temperatures if we were to just put this into the kiln there's a lot of oxygen in the kiln it would actually start burning the carbon out of the steel decarburizing so what we'll do is we'll make a small envelope we'll fold the corners over and we hammer it all nice and tight so it's air tight so ultimately as it's in there and it starts to heat up it'll burn what little oxygen is in that envelope and there'll be no more to burn after that i also put a little bit of baby powder on the blades i find that protects them from possibly welding themselves to the foil when i do the plate quench uh cpm154 is not too bad for it but steel's like nitro v i've actually had like really solid welds where the envelope welded itself to this to the blade steel there's my kiln and obviously that's not something we want so we'll make our little pouches we'll put these in there and then we're gonna put both of these in and then we're gonna do a plate quench once they're in there for about 20 minutes soaking and i usually put them in like i've got my kiln at 19.50 now when i put these in there the temperature is going to drop first we're going to lose some heat from the kiln second of all these are cool so they're going to cool the kiln down probably goes to about 1800 degrees 1700 degrees and it'll take a while to come back up again we'll let them soak for about 15 minutes at 19.50 and then we'll throw them in a plate quench this knife is in the bottom there one more crimp and the pliers that i'm using those are just called sheet metal mechanic pliers you can pick them up at big box stores and stuff like that [Music] just like that we are ready for the kiln kind of center it nicely in there now we have a foil pouch you may have seen people put paper inside their pouches and that's true some people do that my experience though is that it causes the pouches just to bubble up right away they get real puffy and i don't get any better results so i don't put anything in there having said that some people put something combustible in there like a piece of paper a little stick or some wood or something like that i just personally don't like to do it first one goes in and we'll put the second one in all right we'll just bake those cookies off once they're done they're soaked we're going to take them out one at a time i'm going to give them a plate quench so we're going to stick them in between these aluminum plates these are 1 inch thick aluminum plates i've got them in a woodworkers bench vise we'll put them in here clamp it down real tight and then we're going to go blow compressed air in there and that'll bring this thing it'll cool down in about less than a minute and this is a good way to quench stainless steels when you've got them wrapped in foil so once that happens i'm going to be hustling so i don't have time to talk so i figured i'd just explain it right now but that step is coming right now [Music] nice thing to see with the stainless steel is that you don't have spots like that that's where some mild decarburization has occurred uh obviously it doesn't really matter in there because we don't care about carbon content of the handle but the whole blade portion it looks really good and it should be really nice and hard yes that file is not biting into there at all so the next step is actually going to be liquid nitrogen i get asked a lot about the liquid nitrogen and why do you put them in the blades the big reason is that for stainless steels they really benefit with a cryogenic treatment liquid nitrogen being considered a deep cryo and something like dry ice with acetone that would be considered like a shallow cryo it's also crowd treatment but it just really helps maximize the performance of these stainless steels without getting super duper technical it's just better for them now typically high carbon steels like 10 series steels one tool steel stuff like that they don't need they don't require cryogenic treatment however they do also benefit from it in that it significantly increases wear resistance i found some studies online that showed that 01 tool steel with a cryogenic treatment with liquid nitrogen can actually increase its wear resistance by up to 400 400 is quite an increase and for that reason i pretty much do a cryogenic treatment on all the knives that i make especially if i've got the dewar filled with liquid nitrogen so what i'm going to do is i've got to take these two blades plus i'm waiting for one more larger knife that's going to come out of the heat treat once those are done we're going to dip them in the liquid nitrogen and leave them in there overnight [Music] now when i pull it out of liquid nitrogen tomorrow morning and i thought this thing out i'm actually going to put a time lapse on it for you and it's really cool to see all these little structures form as this thing starts to thaw up and you see all the ice build up on it and you watch it melt away you know when it's in the shop you kind of see it hang in there and it's like oh cool it's frosty now but when you watch it and fast forward it's kind of interesting [Music] i got the kiln just fired up here so we are ready to go one thing little tip that i always do is i always make sure it comes up to my tempering temperature before i put the knives in because one time i had the mistake but i thought it was on the tempering program but i was actually on the heat treat program so i put the knife in there and voila i basically ruined all the work i had done on the heat treat so i take this off put these in by the end of the day we'll be ready to start grinding them [Music] there so again that'll be two temper cycles 400 degrees uh i actually water dunk in between now i don't exactly know why i've heard people say you actually get a benefit from water dunking uh right out of your first temper cycle out of the second temper cycle i just let it air cool but as soon as these are done we get that done i'll be back at you we'll get ready to grind this sucker and before i do my grinding i want to give myself a line to grind to actually two lines to grind to oh what i like to do is have two lines that are about 10 to 15 thousandths of an inch apart the reason for that is if i were to have one line dead center and if i had some issues with the top grind lined up here sometimes you can't really address those without affecting where your edges you want to make sure your edge is centered on the blade so if i grind to about ten thousandth of an inch i'll take it off the jig i'll kind of evaluate what my top grind line is doing and i can finesse it by hand a little bit there you know i've got a little bit more room to play if i want to you know kind of grow this plunge line this way a little bit i can do it by hand and i can kind of keep the pressure off of the edge area and i just think that's a better way for me personally another way to do it is you take the material thickness that you have and a drill bit that's the same size put it down on the flattest hardest surface you can find like a granite surface plate even a really good hard piece of wood could work and you basically just kind of scratch the tip along and generally that will give you two lines you scratch one side flip it over scratch the other side and make sure you hold the bit from twisting and rotating that will usually give you two lines that are about ten thousandths of an inch apart just kind of the way that drill bits are designed that works really well too so we'll head over and i'll show exactly the tool that i use for doing this and then we'll get to grinding all right so what i'll do take a big old sharpie and i just kind of mark out on there and then this is the jig and this is adjustable i can move this scribe up and down and essentially i'll just set this flat on here hold it like this mark out my line flip it over mark out the other line so now you can see i've actually got two lines there and they're about i would say like 10 to 15 000 of an inch apart a lot of folks ask how do i know how to set this up uh generally i just do trial and error on the back here we're going to be grinding this away anyways when we bring our handle scales to the tang so usually i'll throw a little sharpie on there and then i'll do my tests and if i have to move it in and out a little bit then i can do that but it's a pretty good little system and now we are ready to grind now since this is a slightly smaller knife we're going to be starting out with a 60 grit belt sometimes i'll go like to a 36 but for something small like this this should be just fine we will set our jig like that get our little screw ready i always like to make sure i'm pressing down on my jig and the blade as i tighten it up that way we have a repeatable place to get to and we grind all right so one thing i noticed uh the jig that i previously was using wasn't giving me the right grind uh we were pretty much to that line there about halfway through the cutting edge again with that 10 to 15 thou clearance and i'm not getting enough grind on this side of the blade i like the bevel to come up a little higher so i'm going to switch up to this jig i'm not entirely sure why the other one was giving me issues but this one here just an angler the bolt and then for reference i've got this little pin right here and then i just slip this right into there to one of those holes locating holes and we'll clamp it on and we'll go in at it like this and that way we can get a little bit higher bevel i don't like to have a full flat grind on here but i like the bevel to come up at least to halfway so quick adjustment on the fly gotta be flexible sometimes there that's a little bit more what i was looking for [Music] so one thing i find really helps with grinding is to keep it very consistent the whole way along you'll notice i'm always starting here and working towards the tip i've seen some people if they get some weird stuff going on they'll try and concentrate on one area i like to take slower passes and kind of do start finish and as i'm growing the bevel i want to focus on keeping it consistent fairly nice and even obviously it's good practice for when you're getting to the finishing stages but then it also just kind of builds that habit and and that muscle memory in working in a consistent manner all right even with that angle iron jig i found it wasn't working that great so i made a whole brand new jig with the proper angle um what i want to do now is i've taken these bevels up to 120 grit on ceramic and it's not a bad finish pretty clean but i'm just going to use these trisect belts and get in there and just put a much nicer satin on there i'll show you the difference between the two this does very light cutting i'm really not doing much stock removal i'm just kind of refining the grain of the grind a grind [Music] crank [Music] [Music] oh here we have the 120 here we have the tris act so we still have grain structure in there but it is much more refined i like that and then after we're done with this i'm actually going to take a little bit of the scotch brite belt and actually i'll squirt it with some wd-40 and then do a final kind of go over and that way we'll still keep the grain i love the grind lines in a blade but this will just really polish it up make it real silky smooth and you know there's a lot of different ways you could go from here you can take this to continue up the trisack and then go to a cork belt if you want to get a almost a mirror finish personally i'm not a fan of the mirror finish but i really like this just a nice satiny uh grind line finish okay so here's a quick look at this is the scotch brite with a wd-40 see it kind of just softens it kind of makes a little bit creamy and this is just the tri zac so it's a lot shinier a lot crispier but this is creamier i like this one [Music] all right one thing i almost forgot we're going to put a spanish notch in here and what a spanish notch is it's just a little tiny grind out we're using a quarter inch small contact wheel little tiny notch right there that gives a stop to the actual cutting edge i find that can be really beneficial when you're sharpening uh because this little transition part here you know this plunge line we call it uh that could be an awkward spot to sharpen because you're going from thin to thick metal so a little tiny notch there really helps the sharping process and i personally like the look of them there we go spanish notch and again the blade stops right there really nice and even really handy for sharpening and uh yeah it's got the bevels all shiny creamy and uh next thing we're gonna do is cut out our scale material for this i'm using a g10 uh g10 if you're new to knife making it's kind of almost like a it's like a fiberglass resin composite or something i i don't know um it's pretty intense stuff though warning that if you try cutting this on a wooden band saw you will very quickly dull your blades i just realized that i've always been using my metal cutting bandsaw and i've recently picked up a nice little wood bandsaw and i thought oh this would be great i saw sparks i actually saw sparks coming as i was cutting these up so two of these knives i'm making at the moment one is gonna get a red g10 with brass pins and the other is going to get black g10 with white fiberglass pins these are the fiberglass pins i get these from maker material supply an ebay store i have no affiliation with them whatsoever but i get asked a lot where do you get the pins from so maker material supply i have found their service to be fantastic again i'm not affiliated or sponsored with them in any way shape or form but uh good customer service good company i'm willing to say hey go there get some stuff mind you i'm gonna make sure i place an order before this video comes out because often i'll recommend something and i'll go order it like a week later and they'll be sold out so i'm not gonna shoot myself in the foot let me get my order in and then i'll tell you all about it and this is obviously a very boring process um i kind of just lay it out like this lay it out like this take a square and then we'll clamp it together we're gonna use the can't twist clamps can't twist clamps these things are fantastic and then we'll put both layers of the g10 on top or the bottom i guess clamp this and then we're going to use these holes one two three as the guides to drill through and we'll be doing both sets of handle scales like both sides at the same time really accurate really fast i find if you get a decent set of cant twist clamps on there lock her down super tight boom boom boom nothing moves super accurate all right we got it drilled out now what i'm going to do i'm just going to trace the outline around here and i'll figure out roughly where i want this to come something like that thing i always think about here is keeping these scales in the matching orientation so like that so what i would do is i'll put on this one ri which is right inside and this is left inside or to hold the knife like this left right inside inside that way i can line them up i'm going to do now cut this arch in right here and see if i like it in relationship to where the plunge line is and the grind line and if i like it then i'll put these together put a pins in there and then match them up yeah yeah i just finished so here we're just kind of grinding in that transition and then i put the two together hold them with a pin cut these suckers out now there is a part of the process that i completely forgot to film and that is after i get everything profiled i want to make sure i take care of the end of the handle this section right here uh what i did is i set the work rest on my grinder to 45 degrees and grind that in and then i also take that and bring it up to 800 grit hit it on the buffer and get that completely finished before glue up okay so what we're gonna do now we're gonna put our stencil on so what i like to do is i use a little vinyl cutter and i cut out my logo and this is clear vinyl the nice thing with the clear vinyl is it allows you to really accurately locate it on the blade and then i like to do this ahead of time so that i can get this the relationship you know with the logo the blade everything kind of lined up in advance so that i'm not you know guessing or you know trying to get in real nice and tight here with the brush after the handle is glued on also in case i have any issues with accidentally etching or marking some other part of the blade obviously i'd rather find that out now so i could do the cleanup any that would be required so this is the way i like to do it i like that that looks real good and then i'm using a an electro etcher specifically the personalizer plus basically it's a dc ac dc etcher uh the negative lead is the carbon brush and then the positive is the clamp to tape off all the extra areas so there we have it nice deep etch there that's really deep actually i like it and uh we got the mark on there so we are ready to mix up some epoxy and glue on these scales and then for the glue up i use a two-part epoxy i use defcon there's lots of good brands out there i made sure i cleaned everything really well with lacquer thinner first and then obviously you want to do a dry fit up i forgot to film that but i always dry fit up all my scales the pins you don't want to be wrestling with that stuff with the epoxy on the cure and again the five minute epoxy so i have a very quick working time but generally i will let this cure up overnight and then the last step take the tape off and then take all that squeeze out off while the epoxy is still wet using lacquer thinner making sure it's super clean this step is critical all right folks welcome back we have got these knives dry overnight and i think they came out pretty darn good uh what we're gonna do today the first thing i'm gonna do is i'm going to cut these pins off with the saw the portable bandsaw and then we're going to grind everything flat and true now one of the reasons i want to cut these a couple things here so these fiberglass pins if you ever want to use these you need to be careful because they get really hot really quickly and they kind of melt and they turn black so when you're doing your finish sanding on these you don't want to be using a high speed on your belt grinder you want to kind of go nice and easy otherwise you're getting some really gross looking stuff and you're going to have to go in deeper and deeper than maybe you'd wanted to so by cutting the outsides flush i can avoid heating this top to start with and then i'll just be doing a little touches on the belt grinder to bring this flush second thing brass pins they pose a similar issue brass heats up really really quickly so again by cutting these off as close to flush as i can being very careful when i um touch use the belt grinder i'm not worried about discoloring the brass but so much discoloring possibly the g10 around the brass if it gets too hot and the epoxy and then also losing the epoxy if you heat up epoxy too hot it loses its effectiveness it changes its characteristics you don't want to do that so this part of the job when we're kind of trimming everything up we want to be careful we want to take our time and we want to think about heat a lot when we're doing this stuff one advantage to having stainless steel blades and synthetic scales if things are getting hot we can actually dip this entire thing in the water obviously kind of want to make sure we're not going to put scratches on our finished blades and uh speaking of that i'm going to give one little wipe down probably not showing up very well but there's a little tiny residue from wiping it down earlier i want to get that cleaned up and then i'm going to wrap these blades in uh painters tape i don't think i'm going to need to dunk these in the water as i'm grinding them i'm just going to alternate between one and the other it's kind of the advantage of making two knives at once so you can kind of control your heat when you're doing up your finishing stages so let's get these taped up and we'll get on to finishing up the handles [Music] all right so thinking about laying out uh different grind lines i take a very very simple approach to it and that when i'm working on a knife there's certain planes that i like to keep as flat as possible until the very end so the sides of the scales i mean in theory right now these should be very very accurately parallel with each other and i try to concentrate on keeping them that way so that times like this say if i want to lay out some lines and i've already laid these out you can see those pencil marks there if i've been working hard at keeping these flat and not removing extra material up until this point i can use that as a reference point and i can simply set it down usually i use my granite surface plate but even a really flat piece of wood and something as simple as taking a pencil right lay it down here and keep it flat on the table and you've got some very accurate lines laid out now what if that line doesn't end up where you want well think very simply a ruler i could shim it up this would put the line a little bit closer to the outside of the handle or i could shim my pencil stick my pencil up there and do that and then just move the knife around it so when you think about you know through the processes until you're ready to shape and sculpt the handle i like to keep these handles as flat as possible even throw the profiling and stuff like that that way we can give ourselves lines to mark to even for a little line right in here i had room i could just come in here and it sneaks almost all the way uh underneath there so i have a nice line a nice pencil mark that i can use when i'm grinding in that little thumb relief so just a really really basic super simple way to keep things consistent and you know there's a certain part of knife making where i like it to be very technical i mean i want good edge geometry i want good handles i want people to be able to measure the handles but then there's the other part of it that you know free flow like sculpting by hand and i love that part of it too and i think that's what kind of makes it look smooth i i think you can do a better job just finessing it kind of artistically than you can like very technically laying things out but i find if i get these very basic layouts done that really helps me bring everything to those lines with consistency and then from there i can feather and fine tune it and you know it's not absolutely flawless but we've got a really good sharp line to go to and as we kind of finesse it and and work it by hand uh it keeps that nice organic natural feel to it while looking very uh symmetrical even consistent and i find that has made a huge difference in the overall build quality of my knives so now we've got these lines marked out we're going to go with the slack belt platen the rotary platen and we're going to grind in this roughly 45 then we're going to put on the small contact wheel bring this at a roughly 45 bring that in and then we're going to use the j-flex scalloped belts which are these guys right here and you see these scallops what that allows you to do is it allows the belt to flex into corners without biting and then the j-cloth that has to do with the density the heaviness of the cloth so this is a very very flexible backer that this abrasives on these here are 220 and to tell you the truth i use these for three months for one of them like i mean i don't swap these out very much but then again when i'm at this point with a 220 i'm just kind of blending everything together i'll do my main hogging off with an 80 grit aluminum oxide belt and you know get all that done but then this is just mostly kind of just to blend it refine those scratches a bit and then from there we will go ahead and we'll do uh you know some really fine hand polishing and when i run these belts typically excuse me when i run these belts typically i will run them between two uh the wheels without the platen in there so you know i got a distance about this much and they still have some flex and i can get in there and kind of make it curve around these inner portions and stuff like that these things work really well so let's get it done and another step of the process that i forgot to get a decent camera angle uh what i'm doing here is i've got a five inch contact wheel and i'm putting in a little thumb relief so you can kind of see how i'm holding the knife to the contact wheel and i'm coming in at a slight angle i wish i'd put my camera overhead uh so you could get a better picture of this but i figured jump in here real quick post-production voiceover and kind of explain all right guys we've got all the profiling and the shaping of the handle done off the belt grinder went over it with some hand sandpaper it went up to 800 grit and now i'm just going to jump on the buffing wheel and the wheel that i like to use it's a yellow wheel and it's actually sewn so it's fairly rigid it's kind of been sewn all the way you know at different diameters different radiuses it goes out and the nice thing about that is that when i use that in combination with black rouge i can actually remove material uh so when things are kind of matte and they're dry and there's like powder all over them everything looks nice right and then you polish it up and then kapow all your mistakes they really jump out at you and you can actually see really well what's going on and i find often if i'm like kind of grinding here i'm like oh shoot this line comes a little bit too much this way or a little too much that way i can go in there with that buffing wheel and actually remove material with some heavy pressure at the same time when i just keep it light it does a good job of just smoothing out the surface polishing everything up so it's kind of like a one-stop shop rather than you know just a softer buffing mop and some other type of rouge where it's just going to polish and if i find some inconsistencies i gotta go back here gotta start hand sanding again or go to the machine i can actually kind of take care of all that work on once with that buffer so let's go ahead we will polish this thing up and then we will go ahead and put an edge on it we'll sharpen it up i'm not sure what sharping system we're gonna use yet but there's lots of great options out there and uh this thing will be ready for a big reveal and we'll see how well it cuts all right we are ready to take the tape off clean up that residue pretty happy with how these turned out uh the one thing i have to do now is make sheaths for them and then sharpen them up the way that i'm going to sharpen these knives is with the ts prof k03 now i have a link a little playlist i'll put that in the description box below of knife sharpening i've tested out quite a few different types of knife sharpeners on this system going over some pros and some cons so if you're interested in that stuff that'll be in a playlist down below uh what i'll do often is that this edge right here what we had left this cutting edge too pre-sharpening is about 20 thousandths of an inch and that's usually what i like to leave edc type blades i mean really this isn't necessarily supposed to be like a fine meat slicer or something like that this is a knife you carry in your pocket you can use it for all types of things and i like to make sure i've got some protection some thickness to the edge there so you know if you're not cutting ideal things that gets a little bit of abuse that edge is going to hold up so with it being a little bit thick and with a system like the ts prov i could end up spending a long time manually sharpening it what i'm going to do instead is jump onto my belt grinder i've got 120 grit ceramic and i'm just going to barely rough in the initial grinds just to get rid of most of that material and then we'll refine that cutting edge from there with the ts profit what i like to do when i'm using any type of a clamp sharpening system is put a little bit of tape onto the blade where you're going to clamp it just to protect it and then also i kind of did a lousy job here but you can see the sharpie that i've kind of put on the edge there just so that it kind of lets me know if whatever angle i start at is either too sharp or not sharp enough or whatever so uh in this ts prof right now i've got the single clamp in you can also have these individuals that you could actually put farther out to sharpen up larger knives but as easy as this is you just put this in here and then this one here is like a jacking screw i'm going to tighten that up and we're ready to go start with the extra coarse and first thing i like to do with this system is set up my stops or right here so they don't go too far see right there i'm actually past where i would sharpen and this would actually scratch the bevel so i'll loosen this off slide it up a bit push all the way up make sure yes i'm not going to go past the edge of the knife and same thing here make sure i'm not going to come down too far at any one point we'll adjust this one as well and and we'll see roughly where we are grinding on so right now we are quite see those about 16 degrees we're about i think we'll go 20 degrees on this place feeling for that burr when people say pulling a burr uh what they're often referring to is that right on the very edge if you drag your finger up and it's a lot easier the coarser the grit you're at but you can kind of feel it hang it kind of like right now when i'm sharpening this side i'm making a burger that goes down this way so it kind of hangs and you can kind of feel it so especially the core stones that's when you know you're at your apex and you're actually folding the metal over one side and the other side and then essentially each step from here in between is going to be less time because we have pulled that burr and essentially we're just refining that edge and so that burst kind of folded over and it's toothy with really coarse stones i apologize for the heater it's kind of loud but um as we go to a finer stone those teeth become finer and finer and finer and the burr is actually way more difficult to feel but you can kind of see it and you can start to feel it up to about at least for me 600 um 600 grit but that's basically what we're doing we're just kind of folding it over once we're there then we'll go to a better grit and we're kind of folding over a real coarse grit and then we'll do the next one and it'll be a little finer grit and then a finer grit and obviously switching both sides you want to do one side then do the whole other side of the blade then go to your next grit and do both sides of the blade but that's kind of what we're doing here and it's just a matter of time sorry i guess i should have the camera on the action again here you see i really like this spanish notch gives a definite stop to where we need to sharpen to [Music] all right now that we've got all the abrading done i'm gonna hit it with a leather strop i'm not trying to get like a mirror polish i'm just trying to really take care of the burr it's gonna look pretty nice like it's definitely gonna have a nice secondary bevel but we're not getting too carried away again as an edc blade this thing's gonna get used okay is it sharp i believe it is [Music] so so it's a decent test i like to use phone book paper obviously phone books are getting harder to find nowadays but newspaper works well also you see that so it's it's it looks mirrored i know it looks mirrored on this camera at least from what i can see from my screen it's not what i would consider a mirror polish just a really nicely honed edge and uh does it cut that's a nice cutter happy enough that well there you go guys i hope you enjoyed this video hopefully you learned something that's ultimately the goal of these videos is to teach you uh the one thing i didn't show was making the sheath for this knife and i've got this sheath right here as well i did a vertical carry sheath for this knife here i filmed those and those are actually going to be in a separate video you can check that video right here if you haven't subscribed you can click this right here subscribe to the channel i would greatly appreciate it if you liked the video give it a thumbs up and as always i thank you so much for watching cheers you

Channel: Simple Little Life

Views: 75,995

Rating: 4.9443946 out of 5

Keywords: knife, edc, knifemaking, edc knife, forged in fire, how to make a knife, knife maker, knives, steel, simple little life, knifemaker, custom knife, walter sorrells, alec steele, blade, belt grinder, bladesmithing, knife making, every day carry

Id: c6zQtw2G2_M

Length: 41min 52sec (2512 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 23 2021