Making Stunning Twist Damascus Knife

I'm making five beautiful integral knives with twist Damascus steel so sit back and enjoy this full build now I've got plenty of 1084 and 15820 cut we can go ahead and start uh shuffling these two types of Steel together so we got 1084 15 and 20 1084 15 and 20 I'm going to do that all the way up to about uh 4 in Billet or so I think we'll go ahead and get all this Mig welded up get the sides sealed up with some sheet metal and get this puppy in the Forge you seem to [Music] know I'm using my 40 ton hydraulic press that my dad and I made 16 years ago back when we built this press nothing really existed that was quite as powerful or had the features that I was looking for now you can purchase presses readymade that are kind of like mine but they're still a little bit different and maybe not quite what I would have been looking for to buy a readymade one will probably cost you thousands of dollars the funny thing is when Dad and I built this press we were able to scavenge most of it together for example the frame is made of Sinclair gas station signposts that we doubled up and welded so they'd be extra strong we ended up building this entire press including the 10 horse three-phase motor and pump for $800 because we're able to scavenge it all together the most expensive part ironically was the hydraulic lines that we had to purchase brand [Music] new I'm making a w twist pattern I've got the Billet Forge welded together and I've used the squaring dice to distort the pattern in the steel and force the layers to curve into what we call W's the W part of the W twist is the distorted layers I just mentioned and the twist part of the W twist will come later after I multiply the layers in the Billet I thought this was interesting I'm using about 20 Ft worth of Steel in this Billet coming in at $110 worth I'm a hurricane I'm bring th R I'm a I've got the Billet all cut up into seven pieces and it's currently being held together with some starbond CA glue I'm going to go weld this thing up seal up all the edges make sure no atmosphere can get in there Forge weld this draw it out and start twisting it's going to be tough too because it's going to be a pretty big bar when I go to twist it probably 3/4 to 1 in somewhere in that range and it's currently about 92° out so it's going to be a workout I heat the belet up to 2,200 de F set the welds with the hydraulic press and then continue forging the bar down into a square shape I'm shooting for a size that's around an inch or maybe 3/4 of an inch square that should give me enough material after I'm done twisting the bar to forge out our integrals the Billet is starting to get so long that I have to focus on certain sections of the Billet in the Forge because the whole thing can't fit in there and heat up at the same time so I work on the front then I work on the back then I work on the middle and keep working it around until I get the entire thing forged to the size I want one of these days I want to build an extra long Forge that'll make it a little bit easier to forge out long bars I'll be able to heat up longer sections and not have to do so many small sections of heat on the billets once I get the Billet forged down to the size I want I gently Forge the corners of the Billet just a little bit that'll help keep the Billet from tearing when I go to twist it up tight it's now time to twist this Billet up super tight I use the hydraulic press as a giant clamp and I use a modified pipe wrench with a handle welded to the end of it to twist the Billet up even though this Billet is piping hot and it's not very large it's still a tremendous amount of work to twist the cooler the Billet gets the harder it is to twist too since I can't heat the whole Billet up at once the hard part is making each section blend well with the previous section sometimes it's difficult to get the transition areas between the previous Heat and the current heat to twist up the same so you have to really selectively heat up certain little areas clamp it in certain places and do a little bit of adjusting because I want to get the most even and consistent twist all the way down the [Music] bar after twisting the Billet I let it cool down and cut the end of the bar off dip it in feric chloride so we can have a sneak peek at the pattern keep in mind this is just the pattern on the end of the bar it's going to look dramatically different than this on the sides where all the twisting happened once we get the blades forged out and grind into the Billet I'm going to start by just focusing on one integral I want to make sure I've got the process down before I start working on the rest of the batch for this first knife I'm going to start by forging out the Tang Once I get the Tang drawn out I can then flip the knife around and begin forging the blade [Music] out [Music] I have to clamp the blade in the Vise and do a little bit of finagling with it to forge that integral and kind of scoot it over to the proper position after a bit more forging here is our finished forged integral you may be thinking it looks super thick and chunky I left it that way on purpose because this tight twist pattern Damascus will actually look better if you grind into it really deep I'm done rough grinding all five blades got the Kil heated up to 1525 I'm going to put these in there let them come up to temperature and soak for a couple minutes and then we'll get them quenched in some parks 50 I normally focus on one fancy buoy or fighter or Hunter at a time so I'm not used to having five knives sitting in the Kil side by side by side by side got the blades up to 1525 and they've been soaking for a minute or two I'm going to have Dad run the Kiln door opening and closing it and I'm going to take one out and quench it at a time and uh pull it out and probably just lay it on that uh shirt and then take the next one out all right number one we good wiggle wiggle right there get them cooled down and wipe the oil off and then uh go scrape a file across them and see if they got hard that one's definitely hard very hard very hard nice and hard one left will it be hard or is this one going to be dead soft or somewhere between super soft I don't know what happened to this one just kidding it's extremely hard I'm going let the oven cool down the heat treating oven and uh put these in there to temper for 2 hours at 400° F and they should be ready for lots and lots of grinding after that approximately 10 hours later dad brought over a bunch of poppets left over from 4th of July and wanted to see what they do on the Press so we've got like a hundred of them lined up on there it is time for an explosion break w w oh oh they're flat who I'm using broad Beck's integral grinding attachment to get right up into the integral bolster and leave a nice radius where the integral bolster meets up with the blade I'm trying to grind up to a scribe line on both sides of the bolster and if I grind up to that scribe line exactly the same on both sides those plunges where the bolsters meet the blade will be perfectly symmetrical on both sides because because of the attachment here's how our five blades look after getting the bevels Finish ground I think they're really starting to look good the next thing I want to focus on is grinding the integral bolster to shape right now they're just kind of a big chunky Square I want to get them all rounded and pretty much shaped how they will be on the final knife they're pretty much ready for hand sanding I have one more little thing I marked out here on the chil area I have this nice straight line where the edge goes but I want that I want that nice straight line with a little bit of a little bit of this curve so I put a little bit of a mark in the same position on all five of them and now I'm going to go grind that little tiny curve on the very very tip of that [Music] chil subcribe subcribe sub the most difficult part of grinding these interor RS is the bottom of the bolster where it meets the blade that's kind of known as the chil area it's tough to get in there cuz it's a really tight radius so I have to use a small round wheel and really take my time and be careful not to bump into the blade too much next I can focus on the clip the clips tricky to grind but not as bad as the bottom of that integral bolster as long as I take my time and hold a consistent angle I'll come out with a good clip in the end I rough in the clips with a coarse 36 grit belt once the clips roughed in I move to a 120 grip belt to fine-tune things and then to finish the clip out I use a 320 grip belt here's how the clips look after I'm done grinding this type of clip is a little bit trickier to grind than some of the other types of Clips I do what I'm talking about is where the clip stops at the spine of the blade there's actually these plunges and those plunges have to line up with each other perfectly just like the plunges on a regular knife wood so because of that abrupt stop where you have those plunges it's kind of a trickier clip to grind compared to one that just Fades out to nothing at the spine to finish out these clips I'm going to hand sand them get rid of any inconsistencies or low and high spots that the grinder left and I want to leave them with at least a 320 grit hand sanded finish for now I just got done hand sanding the clips on all five of these the last thing we need to do on these blades before they're ready to start working on the handles is to put my Makers Mark in there so I've got my kroyer Ms that's going to go right here on the blade and I'm going to electrochemically etch that in so we're just going to use some electricity and some electrolyte and a stencil and a piece of felt yes that's what it's called felt it'll basically etch out the uh anywhere the stencil has cutouts it'll etch away the metal underneath and it's really cool I have the stencils custom made from IMG my maker Mark reads K Tilda Royer Tilda Ms I love electrochemically etching in my Makers Mark it's such a a cool process using electricity to eat away at the metal and leave a deep durable mark on your blade once I'm done etching in my maker Mark I use some brass black to add contrast to the mark So it stands out really nicely I finished the marking process out with a little bit of hand sanding I need to hand sand away the excess brass black and clean up the area around my maker marks I got all the names darkened up with some brass black and sanded over them with some 600 just to clean everything up and really see how they look they all look really nice nice and crisp really deep so I think we're ready to move on I went ahead and picked out five handle materials for our five integrals and I've got three of them actually fitted to the blade so far we still have two left to do and that's the two carbon fiber handles those are going to be the most difficult to fit up just because the broches and the drill bits and all that stuff just don't like cutting the carbon fiber uh especially the broaching when we go to clean out the slot for the the tangs I begin fitting the carbon fiber Handle by grinding the right angle on the end of the handle so it meets up with the bolster properly next I lay the blade on top of the carbon fiber handle and Trace around the Tang this will give me an outline of where I need to remove material for the Tang to fit inside the handle I also give myself some layout lines on the end of the handle so I know that I'm Drilling in the center next up I Chuck the handle in the milling machine and begin drilling holes side by side that should be able to connect and leave a slot for the tank here's where the tricky part comes in I have those individual holes but I have to connect them and to do this I just use a drill bit and kind of put sideways pressure using the drill bit in a way that it's not really meant to be used but it does work I got done Drilling and bring out the hole for the Tang slot and it looks really nice it took me quite a while though I had to mess with it a lot because this carbon fiber is really nasty to work with since it's the end of the day I want to stop working on this and at least get a couple of these handles set in epoxy mixing up the West system epoxy got these special pumps because it has to be the perfect ratio it's not a 1: one it's like a 1: four or something I don't remember 1 to five these pumps measure it out perfectly it's not like your your regular two-part epoxy we got the tangs covered in Vaseline we can go ahead and epoxy our first handle together clean off a little bit of this excess epoxy here I put Vaseline around the bolster as well just so I don't have to worry about cleaning it off now I'm going to try something I've never done before but I I I think I've seen a couple guys do that is to hold the handle on with rubber bands my rubber bands are a little dry rot so hopefully it don't break in my face all right that one should be good to go we'll let it set for about 4 hours and then I'll pull it apart clean stuff up a little bit and then put it back together and let it cure overnight the the reason I take it apart after a couple hours and put it back together is just in case there's any weird low spots or something in the Tang I want to catch the epoxy before it's fully hardened and make sure I can get my handle off 5 hours later I let the epoxy cure for about 5 hours which was a little too long because I had a really hard time getting these handles off I probably should have let it go 3 and 1/2 4 hours uh turns out that hour made a big difference plus the temperature was just right I guess to help the epoxy set up really quickly on two of them I used a little bit of heat right around the bolster area not enough to even color the steel but just enough to help get the handles off a little bit and then I had to use a sludgehammer with these blades clamped in the Vise and bang them off it was a big challenge it was pretty hard but it still only took me about a half an hour or so to get the get all three blades off and now we have all three of these blades set in epoxy so now the blades go into the handle in the exact same spot every time and it's like a perfect glove tight fit there's no wobbling or wiggling or anything I don't normally make a pattern like this for shaping the profile of the handle but since I'm doing five of these knives I thought it would save a lot of time to go ahead and make a little pattern so I've just got a plastic piece here that I've have made the rough shape of the handle it's a little bit oversized to give me some wiggle room and I'm just going to line it up on here with the blade and everything and Trace around it [Music] now we're can take it over to the band saw and cut off a big chunk of this right here and then start shaping the profile on the broad backck for so many years I didn't have the convenience of having a horizontal Grinder like this broadback grinder and it made it so much more difficult to do this shaping on the handles a lot of times you'd see me in the shop all tweaked over completely sideways with my body horizontal in a way as I'm grinding the profile of the handle now now with the horizontal Grinders though I can grind until my heart's content nice and relaxed with my body in the upright position and the grinder flipped over horizontally I'm using a 36 grip belt and it Hogs the material away very quickly I've also got the vacuum vent system right up to where I'm grinding and it's sucking away almost all the dust and it's kind of mesmerizing to watch the dust suck into the [Music] vent once I'm done with the profile on the horizontal grinder I switch the grinder back up to vertical and begin working on the taper of the handle I want the front of the handle to be skinny and taper wider to the middle of the handle in the middle of the handle I want it to be thicker and a lot of times we call that the Palm swell in the handle I'm done shaping the profile of the handle this way and the profile this way so the next step to do is to start rounding all the corners cuz cuz right now everything's really Square so I'm going to round all the corners and this handle's really going to start coming together and it's actually going to feel good to sculpt and round all the corners on the handles I'm going to pretty much do it all with a 2-in round wheel on the broadback grinder and a 120 grit belt all the handles are ready for hand sanding I'm going to go through and hand sand each handle starting out with 220 Grit and then we'll go to 320 and then 600 and then, 1500 and then we may even need to go to 2500 or 3,000 for the carbon fiber handles just because they'll be a little bit more difficult to buff than the wood handles I've got my 360° swivel Vie set up and I should be able to just pop the handles on these blades and then have full access to get to every different side of the uh the blades I've got my hand sanding files ready to go yes I use files as my backer for sandpaper a lot of times I've got a big one and a little one here and I've got my coffee break ready to go let's do some hand sanding there's a lot of hand sanding to do on these handles there's quite a few low spots and high spots from using the 2-in round wheel to sculpt the handle and I want to smooth and even all those [Music] out I got the blue handle sanded to 1500 grit and I've got a nice soft buffing wheel with some really fine compound and we can start buffing this to see the wood in its final form it's made a tremendous transformation going from the grinder finish to the 1500 grit finish the wood grain is absolutely gorgeous we've got this dark blue mixed in with this turquoise and then the natural wood grain kind of has these little yellow bits in there it's I love it St electricity don't Shock Me When I'm focused on buffing Z me right on the knuckle of my finger if you have any advice at all on how I can avoid being shocked by static electricity at the buffer or the grinder please let me know in the comments I just got all the blades and bolsters sanded to 1,500 grit and let me tell you it feels like I've been sing for days and days and days because before these blades I was hand sanding the handles for a long time so I am about ready to be done with hand sanding even though I do like it this was a really large dose of hand sanding I'm in my kitchen I've got the ferak chloride tank set up in the sink here we've got to take these out about every 5 minutes and take them into the shop neutralize the acid sand all the oxides and stuff off lightly with some 3,000 grit and then come back in here and etch them and it'll take three to five Cycles before the depth is good and then we'll get them coffee darkened to make them extra contrasty so I'm just going to clean them really really well with Dawn dish soap and I'm going to put some clamps on the ends of the tang and we'll just submerge them right here in the feret [Music] chloride all right here we go first one in the [Music] acid wow this pattern is looking amazing I love how there's tight stuff and bold stuff beautiful this is my neutralizing tank it's basically just tric sodium phosphate with water and the quantities are as much Tri sodium phosphate as the water would physically soak up in fact the bottom of the tank probably has like a layer of Tri sodium phosphate down at the bottom I like to neutralize it between the sessions because it'll probably take a few minutes to get uh to get the blade all sanded off and I don't want that acid that's on there to keep eating away at the steel while I'm doing the sanding and stuff cuz it could cause a little rust spots and weird things so we want to neutralize it between each cycle a few moments later now I want to sand the oxides off of the blade with some 3,000 grit sandpaper and I'm going to use a little Windex as I go this will help the next etching cycle etch cleaner uh by getting rid of those oxides there so I want to do it every couple minutes to just get a a cleaner nicer looking Edge got my extra long drywall pan here for the coffee darkening and and I've got some hot water going going to fill that about halfway up and then we're going to mix in a whole whole bunch of n Cafe bolded coffee probably about half of one of these containers full to soak the blades in there and let them get a nice dark contrast on the 1084 etching neutralizing hand sanding etching neutralizing hand sanding coffee darkening polishing coffee break my arms getting tired neutralizing and sanding etching neutralizing and sanding coffee darkening polishing coffee brake etching neutralizing I'm going to sand through my knife etching neutralizing hand sanding coffee darkening polishing coffee break etching neutralizing hand sanding etching neutralizing hand sanding coffee darkening polishing coffee Brak neutralizing hand sanding etching neutralizing hand sanding coffee darkening polishing coffee break I'm done with the etching and darkening process for the blades so I went ahead and masked them off with some masking tape and we need to prepare the tank to glue these handles permanently onto the blades I've got a couple of knives ready to go for the handles to be glued together we're going to use rubber bands once again and the file guides just like I did when I set the handles in epoxy and uh I've got some tape on the ends of the handles cuz there's quite a bit of curve so I kind of balled up some tape and made it so there's a place for the rubber band to catch on the end and did some dry fit-ups and everything's looking good so I think we can go ahead and mix up some West system epoxy and get these handles permanently put on here [Music] [Music] I'm going to coat the tang and then I'm going to fill up the handle with epoxy I could just fill up the handle and stick the Tang in there but then as it's squishing out the Tang might not get 100% coverage where it sticks everywhere so I want to coat both a lot of you guys have been asking me for the links to materials and tools I use I finally got around to making the ultimate list I call it the master smith toolkit it's a free pdf that has links to almost all the tools and materials I use in the mastersmith toolkit PDF you'll find things like where I get my handle materials where I buy metal for my knives the exact kind of sandpaper I use for hand sanding and a lot lot more like I said before the master Smith's toolkit is free when you sign up I'll email you the PDF sign up with the link in the description to get the PDF for free I've got all the handles glued on there's just one more thing we need to do and these knives are finished we need to get them Sharp to sharpen these integrals I start by using the GRS Graver sharpening hone to rough in the bevel once the bevel's roughed in I fine-tune it on a water stone and then I stro it on a piece of leather glued to a board with a bit of buffing Compound on it this leaves each one of the integrals hair popping sharp all five integrals are officially done they are very sharp they have a nice polished Edge I took it all the way up to 6,000 grit with a stone and then lightly ran it over some leather with buffing compound to get that edge nice and shiny and super sharp I absolutely love the way they came out I love this crispy line on the handle that I kept on there that was a lot of work I probably could have made the handle shaping and hand sanding about twice as fast if I didn't have that that sharp defining line right there so something to keep in mind if you do that it does take a lot of time when you have those defined lines I love the Damascus pattern and how contrasty and dark the coffee darkening came out on the blades it looks really good on all five of them I love the profile the blade shapes I love these nice aggressive Clips with this really aggressive stop to it right here and uh of course it's really cool that they're integrals and stuff too and I love the variety of the different handle materials the resin Ivory is really cool nice and white we've got the two different carbon fiber ones with a a little bit different weave but they're almost identical uh so I've learned with carbon fiber through doing these two different ones that you pretty much can't go wrong if it's a tight weave carbon fiber or kch one I love them pretty much equally and then we've got the two blue handled ones and I love the blue Burl my favorite one out of the five is the purple handled one I love how deep and dark the purple looks and the tiger stripe Maple is really cool too and it looks great with that that dark purple color so my question for you is which one's your favorite which uh which handle material do you like the best the blades look very similar but of course we've got the five different kinds of handle materials so let me know in the comments below cuz I want to know what you like I will see you in the next video May the forge be with you [Music] bye-bye

Channel: Kyle Royer

Views: 102,790

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: 0ynLe5lLNp8

Length: 26min 9sec (1569 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 04 2023