Making an Elegant Sheath (Beautiful and Simple)

in this video i'm going to show you how i make a simple and elegant sheath for an integral knife the first thing we do in a sheath build is cut out our leather pieces i'm using some pre-dyed black cow leather i love the pre-dyed leather because the dye goes all the way through it and it's nice and even it's about a sixteenth of an inch thick or maybe a little bit over the front of the sheath will get covered in shark skin once the leather has been cut out i take it over to the broadback grinder with a 120 grit belt and clean up the edges of the leather it's hard to perfectly follow the lines on my leather when i cut it out with a razor knife so the grinder really allows me to clean up and fine tune the edges i've been using my old grinder for so many years that i totally forgot my brand new broad bet grinder has an amazing feature and it tilts over horizontal and makes it so i don't have to sit there sideways while i'm grinding on parts and i can actually look right down at what i'm doing if i just remember to flip the grinder over once i flipped the grinder over to horizontal it made cleaning up those edges much easier this will be a pouch style sheath and i want the sheath to be able to bend a little easier in the center so i use a skive to shave away thin strips of leather just to thin it out a little bit and make it easier to bend later on [Music] i really like using the skiving tool it's a super simple tool but it's really satisfying to peel off layers of the sheath it's similar to a potato peeler only instead of it having kind of a dull blade it has an actual razor blade on the edge [Applause] the skive can leave the leather a little bit rough and uneven so i take it back over the grinder and just clean it up a little bit with that 120 grit belt [Applause] [Music] the next step is to use contact cement on the shark skin and the cowhide in order to stick the two pieces together permanently you apply a good layer of contact cement on each piece and then let it dry for about 10 minutes or accelerate the process by using a hair dryer and then stick the two pieces together and then as the name contact cement implies use a hammer and lightly tap all over on the leather to really seat the glue and make it stick really well i can then use a razor knife to trim off the excess shark skin [Music] right now is the time to round over and smooth the edges around the belt loop and the top of the sheath if i wait and do it later it'll be much more difficult once the sheath has been folded into a pouch so i'm using a quartering tool to round the corners you want the fibers of the leather to lay down so they're not rough and coarse so the gum and the burnishing with the antler makes it lay down nice and flat and becomes super smooth and even shiny to a certain degree now i need to focus on folding the belt loop and sewing it to the body of the sheath i mark out the area i want to use contact cement on and then i use a razor knife to roughen up the surface and that'll help the contact cement adhere a little bit better to the smooth leather i use a hair dryer to accelerate the contact cement's drying process a little bit instead of waiting for about 10 minutes we can use the hair dryer after about 30 seconds and be ready to stick the two pieces together get the belt loop all lined up right where it goes and then add some contact [Music] i want the belt loop to be sewed in place so i cut a small groove where i want the stitching to be and then i use a stitch marker to mark out where each stitch will go i like to use my dremel tool hooked up to a drill press attachment and drill out all the holes for the stitching [Music] now that we see where the holes come out on the other side of the leather i can use the small grooving tool to connect all the holes with a small groove that'll allow the thread to sit below the surface of the leather so when we put the knife in and out of the sheath it won't be scraping on threads sticking up [Music] i want to add my maker's mark and ms stamp to the belt loop so i wet the leather down let it sit for a few minutes and stamp both of them in [Music] [Music] i now begin working on the welt of the sheath so we need to lay out where the welt will go inside the sheath and i just kind of roughly mark it out with a pin and then i can cut out a piece of leather that will become the welt if you don't have a welt as you slide your knife in and out of the sheath it could cut the stitches open and your sheath would be ruined but with a welt as you slide your knife in and out if the edge touches anything it should just rub against the welt and the leather is very tough and wouldn't get cut into for a very very long time once i'm done shaping the welt we can use contact cement to cement it in place but only on one side of the sheath for now [Music] [Music] before i permanently finish contact cementing the sheath together i want to use office clamps to simulate the sheath being completely closed up and then i can put the knife in and out of the sheath and kind of get a feel for how it fits because i can make minor adjustments at this point by adding or removing a little bit of the welts to make it thicker or thinner in places if i want [Music] everything's looking good so we can close this sheath up i'm going to coat everything in contact cement use the hair dryer and close up this pouch [Music] before we stitch the sheath together i want to clean up all the edges some of the layers of leather don't match up perfectly with the other layers so we can quickly grind them all nice and even with 120 grit belt on the broadband grinder [Music] so i cut a small groove where i want the stitching to go so the stitches lay below the surface of the leather mark it out with the stitch marker and start drilling away once all the holes are drilled in we can cut the small groove on the back side of the sheath so that the thread sits below the surface of the leather once again [Music] i'm doing a saddle stitch on this sheath using some very strong wax covered thread for the saddle stitch i like to use two needles and go about two holes at a time before i pull everything nice and tight and then continue on another two holes [Music] [Music] something i like to do after the stitching is finished is go over it with the stitch marker the stitch marker makes the threads lay down nice and flat and it makes everything even out and look really good [Music] one of my best secrets to making a sheath look a lot better is to round the edges of the sheath they'll make the sheath look much thinner and more streamlined so once again we're back at the broadband grinder with a 120 grit belt and i put a really nice dome to the edge of the sheath trust me this will definitely make your sheets look a lot thinner and more streamlined [Music] and just as before to make all the fibers of the leather lay down smooth on the edges we used the gum trag and the deer antler to burnish the fibers of the leather down you can keep doing this until the leather is super smooth and actually gets kind of shiny [Music] i'll let the sheath dry overnight and then we can put the finish coat on it i like to use some wyosheen leather finish and an airbrush to apply it [Music] and here is our finished sheath we've got a nice clean elegant look with shark skin covering the entire outside of the sheath and for the inside of the sheath we have the nice smooth black cowhide so the knife will have a nice place to live i'm very happy with how the sheath came out i will see you in the next video may the forge be with you bye bye if you enjoyed this content then please consider giving it a thumbs up it really helps the algorithm and that really helps us out

Channel: Kyle Royer

Views: 124,869

Keywords: knife making, how to make a knife, how to heat treat a knife, how to make a bowie knife, how to make a bowie, knives, kyle royer, kyle royer knives, making a knife, sharp, how to make knives, bladesmith, master smith, blades, damascus, knifemaker, diy knife, anvil, forging, custom, knife, great content, steel, bowie build, bowie knife, 10 inche bowie knife, blade, knifemaking, knife maker

Id: J4qjJ_vfMco

Length: 11min 22sec (682 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 11 2021