Neil Kamimura - Chef Knife Forge Process

[Music] now [Music] shut up hey foreign we're not warmed up yet no so today [Music] we're gonna forage a chef knife this it's one of the most requested things i get asked is like they want to see how i forge a chef knife so we're gonna do the most basic chef knife not an inner girl just a standard chef knife and i'm gonna bring it i'm gonna start it from one inch square stock um but [Music] and then i'm gonna squeeze it down to what you would typically buy i only use square stock but we can uh we can uh i'll squeeze it down to square stock i use square stock because it gives me the option to go integral or not um but we're gonna squeeze it down to basically a bar to what you would buy and i'm gonna forge it from there so [Music] hold on so what i need for an eight nine inch chef knife out of one inch square stock is gonna be three inches roughly so [Music] you're gonna need about three inches right there [Music] so while that's cutting let's light the fork [Music] so this is what we're starting out with three inch by one inch by one inch and we're gonna shoot for we're gonna shoot and this is 1080. um i'll write it down on this thing might make more sense so you got 1080 one inch [Music] by one inch by three inches [Music] look at these guys weapons pack them up make them clean [Music] [Music] so forging forging a chef knife is challenging especially if we're going to leave it brute to forge because yes spine thickness can be thin to make a workhorse chef knife but you want it fairly thin this one we're gonna want it fairly thin so we're gonna shoot for about an eighth inch thick spine with forged bevels and distal taper and so that when we grind it the roots of forge is very even we're going to use a little bit of every tool in my shop but this can be done if you don't have a hydraulic forging press or you don't have a power hammer what you can do is just buy squares bar stock like this [Music] you can buy bar stock like this and start um but this is 8670 so i normally this is normally what i forge my kukris from but because we're doing chef knives i like to use 1080 and that's what we're gonna use this weapon right here i made this this this uh tonto is a full integral damascus with butterscotch with traditional wrap and then this is just your basic brutal forge with koa handle on it integral and this one is we've um i etched it so that it has like that satin look we have ashley out here because i'm stupid and i don't own a computer and we have maddox doing absolutely nothing because he's lazy [Laughter] [Music] look how cute she is [Music] so i had this idea and i had this concept i feel like as a business we should always boost people's um uh what's the term morale so we're gonna do a challenge and we're gonna have a foot race for how long should we do the foot race [Laughter] says the gazelle no so what we're all i mean i'm trying to lose weight right now we're all maybe dame maybe ashley not brian's not trying to lose weight but i'm gonna put a hundred dollars let's do it i'm gonna put a hundred dollars for whoever wins this foot race he was looking for his tank top and i told him you want to look like 50 cent after super bowl [Laughter] go shorty it's your birthday you look like dollar fifty max salad with play lunch don't worry i'm not wearing a tank top either okay before i take this thing off and smash it get this thing off so [Music] i mean you're first new yeah i'll go i'll go at the end record who's the winner i'm not [Music] [Applause] i think the dog i think the dog oh my god [Applause] [Laughter] wait hold on wait are you really drunk [Applause] bro why are you breathing heavy already [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] we got to give ashley a little bit of chance catcher brett [Music] and start running up the hill okay [Music] all right [Music] i did it for my bills wait you owe me 100 bucks this yeti keeps my drinks so cool [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] look at this cheater [Music] try to jump a river okay let's forge okay okay so right now you recording this guy breathing so hard he can't even record um so right now we're gonna just squeeze it down into that bar uh so that i can forward so at this point i would be deciding whether i was doing integral or not but we're just gonna do a regular blade [Music] [Music] [Music] so if you don't have a press what you can do is is just buy that flat stock quarter inch or whatever thickness that you're looking for [Music] now that everybody's all warmed up from the run [Music] look at him breathing so hard look at him [Music] [Music] [Laughter] what i'm doing with that is so that i have something to hold on to with my song [Music] see [Music] ashley's pretty fast i think she took i took a third of her i think ten more steps than you did [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so now that we have it flat to basically looking like a bar that you would buy now i'm gonna go into how the forging technique i start with the point first so i start with the point of the knife i forget the point in and then from there i start uh i'll forge the point start figuring out what my spine what i'm gonna get it to look like and then from there i'm gonna go to the tang and what we're doing is a hidden tank chef knife because that's what i do i don't i'm not a big fan of i will do some full tank chef knives but i mean traditionally like japanese knives you never touch this steel like the handle is actually encased with wood so that's kind of the style more than i'm prone to and they're just easier to me [Music] been testing out some for this video safety first and uh so we're gonna actually wear some eye protection uh this company mad son of america sent me out some stuff for me to try out i'm gonna try this eye protection here [Music] so we'll try these out [Music] [Music] i'm gonna my problem is i have like astigmatism in my eyes so like wearing something over my eye i have a really hard time judging and gauging what i'm hitting but uh hey where's my uh hearing protection [Music] where did i put that i found one on the ground where's the other one so cool [Music] son of a [Music] you ready this is how to forge a point da so basically what you saw is me coming up and over and pushing that in so that the bottom bulges so that you don't end up with a fish mount [Music] [Music] so now on this one i'm going to smooth out the back transition of the spine and taper the blade i like to forge to shape and then kind of draw it out and then like keep auto correcting on that profile as i go i don't like to just try and blast it all out super thin and then try and profile it because it has a tendency to fold over itself and create inclusions this way it's thick and it's easy to kind of get my profile to where i'm going [Music] [Applause] so this bottom part right here is the bottom of the edge this is the edge so what we do is we forge the point down because when i go back to hitting it on the cutting edge what it does is it creates the blades to curve so you want to anticipate the curve by forging this down so that it lands right where you need it to land because if you were to do it this way and to forge this edge it would bend up and bend like a banana so when this thing comes hot what was that heat three yeah okay no heat four right whatever i did two heats on the press one heat on this no two heats on this so one two three this is fifty so on this heat what we're gonna do is now we're gonna isolate the uh so if you here grab my paper so what we're doing is we went from a square and then we went into a stock right a stock piece of steel and so what we did is we came over hit it this way push this bump in to create this so now what we're going to do is we're going to isolate a chunk here and then bring that up to here then bring that up to here and then bring that up to here [Music] okay so you want to do is get at a low angle like this okay okay so now that we isolated that tank now i'm gonna draw it out and uh and so with that what we're gonna do is we're gonna switch hammers i'm gonna use this hammer and i'm gonna draw it out this way with a peen like any time you use a peen it's like basically putting your foot in mud and like pushing the mud over and that's kind of like what we're doing so these these peens so this peen allows my arm to be like this and to grow straight out you know and then we'll use another peen to pull the heel down [Music] so i would normally just draw the tang out on the press but what i'm trying to show is how to use hand tools from an actual situation if you were starting from bar stock [Music] we'll move back to this one [Music] ready so i'm gonna correct the profile of the tang i'm gonna hit from this way too so okay so go over there so now that we're there so now that we have this isolation right here so now that it looks like it kind of looks like it kind of looks like this now with this and so now we're gonna hit it right here with the peen and what that's going to do is really draw this heel down you always you always want to go with before length because if you go length first and then you might not have enough material to come down so we're gonna pull that hail down make sure we get a nice and tall chef knife so our hands don't hit the knuckles don't hit the cutting board so you have a lot of clearance in between it here and so we're gonna pull this heel down then we're going to hit a little bit here they're going to hit a little bit there and then we're going to push that thing out so then we'll get length [Music] so this is the hammer that i use and if you're wondering all all of these hammers right here is the main hammers that i use and they're all made by john from sunset forge these are all the basic hammers that i use this is a cutlery hammer this is another dog head so these two are dog heads this is a cross peen and this is a straight pin so we're gonna work into so we're going to use this one to uh to pull that heel down [Music] so you're gonna put it right up to this edge so you're gonna hit it like this and you're actually gonna see the heel bulge like that then you come on this side [Music] and then sometimes i like to come this way to make sure that heel part is pulling straight down okay so now next you notice i don't hit the whole edge all i hit is one path then i'm gonna move the next path i don't hit it all the way down the edge i want to concentrate it in one area and a lot of times what i'll do is subconsciously i'll count in my head how many times i struck on one side how many times is going to strike on the other side if you want to forge thin and you want to force your shape the peen and if you look at like a store-bought hammer like uh like a hammer like this you see how pointy the penis versus something like this these are the degrees that all my hammers have i think this is 36 degrees this leaves so much marks this is a little bit more gentle and curvy and allows a little bit more forgiveness so if you have a store-bought hammer like that you can grind this into it to create less dents and marks in your knives okay one more time [Music] okay and then we can correct it back down okay one more i have a tendency to do really tall heels i like it it creates a straighter cut um it kind of gives you more shovel like as you're using it on the cutting board to dump stuff and i just like a taller heel i have a lot of friends with like really big hands and they have a problem with their knuckles like hitting the cutting board and so it's kind of one of my things is i like a pretty tall heel [Music] and also a taller heel allows you to have a thicker spine at the transition because you get a longer geometry it's not so much what matters what's up on the top of the spine that just creates friction so if you have a really thick chef knife when you cut through something hard like a kabocha or a pumpkin like that's where it kind of gets wedges but cutting meat and vegetables a thick knife is fine but you just need a lot of tall geometry and that's why the heel helps so when you're doing brutes of forge the taller the heel is is is a good thing [Music] okay so now we're gonna fill that out a little bit [Music] to do all my peening to get all my width and you have to remember too when we go back and forth it with a cutlery dogged hammer it's even going to widen even more so you might see me correct it and narrow it a little bit because we don't want it too wide but it'll be fun [Music] good [Music] so now that we have our width there's now we need to start forging it thin and that's going to bring our length so there's two ways to do it you can go back to a hammer that's like this and start drawing out your length or if you don't have a hammer like this what you can do is hold it and hit the knife and recreate this with this so you can draw it out i'll show you real quick so you can take the knife like this and literally start hitting it and start drawing it out like that um but i have a press and a power hammer so i'm just gonna draw it on that but you see how that works like this creates a good base and a surface to start lengthening out if you don't have one that's how i did it for years until i started buying other equipment [Music] [Music] so now that we got it squeezed out on the press and we got it fairly thin what i'm going to do is i'm gonna switch back to my japanese doghead hammer and what i'm gonna do is start forging the bevel so the cutting edge into the knife and so that's the least that i have to grind i don't want to grind it at full thickness so what we're going to do is we're going to right now the knife's bent this way so now when you watch when i forge the cutting edge it's going to bend it all the way back this way and then i'll put it back in the power hammer and then take the spine thickness out and then it moves it back this way and we work our way back until it's dead in the middle [Music] so watch this overhead and you'll see how much this thing actually will curve ready [Music] [Music] then we go back to correcting okay but you see how that curved that back up so now when i go to forge the spine thickness down on the power hammer you'll see it bend back down [Music] it's pretty cool huh you can see it oh so now we're gonna just be working our way backwards and forwards and when i forge chef knives i like to keep the transition of where it goes into the handle thicker than the rest of the knife so you'll see that this where the tang is to the tip it's going to be fully distal tapered so this is my power hammer this is from the 40s and i got it from andrew alexander blacksmith tools they're not very expensive used but i bought this one and then i had him really fully restored they report the lead they refixed absolutely everything this used to run on a leather belt in the shop and now we have it transformed to electric motor but it's pretty cool okay ready so you see how it curve back because i'm thinning the spine now we're going to hit this edge and curve it back up and then we're going to hit the spine again [Music] you're gonna go back here not my bow by hand now so as soon as i pull out of the forge i'm gonna tap this spine then i'm gonna forge the cutting edge in again and then we're gonna go this is gonna be bigger than an eight inch left whoops i should have been two and a half not three inch but whatever big chef knife's never hurt nobody gonna take it out i'm gonna kind of straighten that spine you see how it's straightening itself back out okay the spine yeah because we want the spine to be fairly thin thick so because i had already forged the bevel and bent it that way it was only hitting the thickness of the spine which bends it the other way and you're constantly doing this this this this this this until it just goes even [Music] but you see my dog's tip i was dragging on the ground little mr lobo so now before i get out of whack i'm gonna correct the profile and don't worry about if it's straight or what you're doing like just keep looking at the overall shape don't try and keep straightening it and doing different things so i'm going to flip it around and i'm going to thin out this tang because you see how the tang is thick right there yeah profile straightening is dead last the thing going to be all whatever it doesn't matter until the very end you know you have to imagine like you're when the steel is hot and you're hitting it right it can work like clay so always work your steel hot and you won't ever have issues and like one of the things that people's misconception with forging is they're afraid of the steel so they stand far away and they punch it and they punch and they punch and they punch but when you hold the hammer out here you see how much strain it is so i like to stand as close as i can to the anvil so basically pick your hammer straight up it's super light when you pick it up like this it's heavy when you pick it straight up like this then when you drop it it bounces and you pick it back up and then this is the mechanics the hammer is weightless when you're forging right [Music] [Music] [Music] so you see how good this heel pulled down we didn't have to cut it in with a grinder we didn't have to do any of that you know we literally just used our tools [Music] okay so our spine thickness we're gonna this is gonna be a huge ass knife so what we're gonna do is we're gonna thin the spine one more time get our get our geometry in there um and then uh then we'll do the finished bevels and finessing and we'll just do the basics this is about a basic as a chef knife but if you can do this everybody always wants a brute to forge chef knife it looks good it's cool it's something i've been doing since i started making chef knives and i used to get for it all the time people are like oh the brute the forge the roughness might attract bacteria that's wash your knife like boy was i way off this is gonna be like a 12 inch [Music] like so as you're hitting it and hitting it it's growing growing so every time it pinches it it grows pinches it it grows pinches it it grows you know what i mean and so like that tonto that i made with the integral damascus tonto that was a two inch by two inch square that made that whole sword you don't need a lot of material i mean look at what we started out with we started out with a three inch by one inch by one inch i'm going to end up with a you know 10 to 12 inch chef knife [Music] eight inches of steel makes me an eight inch integral chef knife not a regular flat chef knife whatever hey so today we'll be making a ginormous good knife it's cool like a lot of people are intimidated by large chef knives but like large chef knives are great because you can cut things in one slice you can use you have a lot of edge real estate so when you have a lot of edge real estate you can keep the back side nice and crisp for cutting straight down and then you can drag on the tip and you have a lot of real estate of edge so if you can get used to a larger knife it's good [Music] so we're gonna profile it bring the edge back to where we need it to where it's facing straight down so that when i actually go to forge the edge it lifts it to the exact curve that i want [Music] so once again i'm not worried about whether it's straight or whether there's density what i'm really focused on on is that edge yeah [Music] so i like to work off the center mass of the anvil [Music] okay so you see how it brought it you see how it pulled this up now and then our edge is getting thinner and once again if you look it's still hot yeah so know your steel know your shadows know your heat one of the things that i like to do before i start pulling really getting that heel crisp is i like to work the choil area a little bit so i'll put this side in [Music] what we're gonna do is we're gonna do some choil work right off the the blacksmith vise [Music] and what we're gonna do is set it up in here and i like to like kind of like pull this in so that my heel is extra crisp and if you want you can actually i start once it's thinner you can isolate that i don't know if you've seen sometimes on my on my knives i do a little forged choil right there but we're not going to do that on this one i like to keep that area clean and then we'll kind of straighten it out [Music] so that's looking nice in a clean sweep and a transition you hate when the knives are like this and then the choil it doesn't start crisp and clean like this um it looks pretty bunk okay so now we'll flip back [Music] no all my tongs are specifically made for each of my style knife so like this is for when i'm doing a hidden tang the other knives for every step i've made a tongue for that procedure there's not one tongue that is the magic one [Music] so we're gonna keep watching our profile [Music] we're going to keep watching that profile so that we don't get out of whack and make it start getting too round okay you don't want you want some belly on a knife but it depends on the longer the knife is the less belly you need because what's happening if you have a lot of belly you're going to have to cut like this yeah and so what you want is a low entry rocker on a long knife so you can take long sweeping cuts [Music] [Music] so i'm going to forge this edge down and then i'm going to come back down the spine and start forging in my distal taper because this has to be thinner than here so you're starting from thick to thin so now i'm going to do the same thing i'm going to hit this side and then work my way back up here to create my distal taper ah mr miyagi-san wax my car [Laughter] wax on wax off bro i got like enough white hairs to be mr miyagi pretty soon and i got the little dog too okay now we're gonna do the same thing [Music] we come back up that spine [Music] bango so you can see here how thick it is right here but how thin we're getting down this line [Music] [Music] booyah then you can be like i too can forge with fire [Laughter] [Music] so once again i'm going to correct my profile and i'm going to hit it very light because now we're getting real thin [Music] and not to fold it [Music] we're gonna keep correcting our profile okay [Music] what so are all your hammers the same weight you don't have to look at me why are you asking me questions you're here to assist me not i assist you no my hammers are all heavy because i'm not a no i'm just kidding no um no yeah i'll use a smaller hammer for for certain things uh when like like you notice like this hammer is heavier right like so like now that i'm getting more towards the finale i'm kind of making my hammer a little lighter but because the less hard you swing you know what i mean and then the other thing that makes a difference is as you start getting to final final uh finish you want to hit less hard and you want to hit at a colder temperature because uh you're not going to want it like scorching hot because it's going to leave a lot of dense so if you don't want to leave a lot of dense you want to hit it at a lower temperature not cold but you don't want to hit it at red like smoking hot so if you look here from here it looks cold but in here it's still red you know it's still red so you you can light forge it at that temperature and it creates a lot less dense when it's orange and you're hitting on it's just like you know but you know what get back to work [Music] do [Music] so you see this now we got a nice low entry rocker knife that cuts we got a clean spine you know you see how thick too thin it is and then you see how thin the cutting edge is even so we're gonna do a little bit more fine-tuning and then we'll call that side good i'm running out of propane and i don't have any more propane okay we gotta get going okay so now i'm gonna switch to my planishing hammer this hammer was made by my buddy nitsan and uh it's a great hammer i've had it for a really long time and it's my go-to planishing hammer [Music] it's how i take out all the dents [Music] do [Music] so now i'm going to switch to this the tang [Music] so now we're gonna even out this spine and then i'm gonna adjust it a little bit for [Music] how i want the handle to sit on it okay so that gives us plenty of uh room to mess with with the spine [Music] okay now i'm gonna stamp it [Music] [Music] where's brian i need him to shut up never ever strike you this is my forging stamp made by buckeye engraving never ever strike a stamp or drive anything with your actual forging hammers use an ugly hammer because it just mars it and then if you mar your hammer then you're gonna mar your knife for the rest of your life okay i'm gonna set my forging stamp i'm gonna wiggle it make sure i'm in boom [Music] just to make sure i'm set in so you don't double bounce it yeah so i wiggle it a little and and if i move the knife then i know it's in if it just moves on the knife then i know that i'm not in so now we're going to kind of correct this part [Music] okay we're going to come back and then now i'm going to set it in here like this i'm going to pull the heat off of it i'm going to let it come up to temperature then i'm going to pull it out and i'm going to start thermocycling it so now that the forge is off now you know we got a nice good even color i'm gonna start [Music] and sometimes you have to really get down and look at it like as you're forging it [Music] [Music] [Music] yeah it's going to be a nice knife set it in there give it a little bit more heat [Music] then i just like shut it off and let the residual heat do its thing and helps me kind of normalize it i'm gonna normalize it and reduce the grain structure after i grind it and go for heat treat but it doesn't hurt doing it this doing it twice make sure your grain structure is really good so the grain structure is while you're forging it all the grains inside are are all big and so um there's less molecules to there's less molecules bonding the steel together so when you reduce the grain structure like if you were to harden this and crack it it would look like baby powder in this if you were to just take it from forging it at crazy high temperatures and just harden it the grain structure will be big and it'll look like sugar and then it breaks really easy so if you want to maximize the strength of 1080 the steel that i'm working with or any steel what you want to do is make sure that the grain structure is right [Music] yeah you want to heat it up to an orange and you want to heat it up to a red and you want to heat it up to lower temperature so it starts and slowly letting it cool and reduce its grain structure down we were forging it at like orange and yellow and so the forge is really hot so we want to reduce that grain structure it helps to drill it it helps to grind it it's nice and soft it's not hard and it's fully you know annealed and uh it'll drill really easily [Music] so we don't have if you notice we don't have any heavy hammer marks in it [Music] and sometimes when you go to straighten it you don't want it like some people when they go to straight and they hit it hit it hit it hit it and then they bend it the other way sometimes when you're straightening stuff you just want to hit it once and see what you did you know [Music] [Music] you know and this is what you end up with so we got we got this section right here that's thick and then reduces itself down to super thin can you see that you see the spine thickness so here it's stand up and i'll just go over this and then you go thick and then taper taper taper very easily to almost nothing and then that's a distal forge taper then when you look at it from this side you can see how my cutting edge is nice and even it's ready to heat treat you know and so now all we're doing is basically just straightening making sure [Music] you know put it back for a little bit more residual heat [Music] [Music] so i mean if this wasn't a chef knife and this was like our standard hunting knife you could just sharpen it and it all your geometry is ready to go you know it's all in there and uh but because it's a chef knife we're going to want to really grind it thin but when you actually [Music] when this is it always can be better i could be a lot better and but this is what i practice that is forging it to shape we're only going to grind a minimal amount off of this you know and then we're only going to grind a minimal off this edge we just got to get we're going to grind this to zero you know but everything is there that you need the strength in the tang your distal taper to your tip so when you're cutting through onions you don't want it to be super thick right here because it's going to wedge itself so this side needs to be thin and then it goes so it's thick to thin thick to thin everything is done by hammer now you know gi joe knowing is half the battle this knife ended up becoming silver at 11. and i said it was between 10 and 12 inch f9 which is 11. so it's good it's a nice sized knife we're going to lose a little bit here lose a little bit there but it's perfect it's a good sized knife nice low entry rocker ready to go and that my friends is a wrap next we'll show coming up we're going to try to make videos on sharpening we're going to try and make sure episodes on grinding we're going to try and make episodes because from here a lot of people are scared to grind this and leave this to brew to forge and i can go over that and show how you do that but the only way to help us is to subscribe and like and be nice so that no because we're doing a lot of work and it's annoying and so we're trying to get our if you like it you like it [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Neil Kamimura

Views: 71,075

Keywords: tkamimura, tkamimurabladesmith, bladesmith, neilkamimura, hawaii, kailuakona, blacksmith, knifemaker, coffeeetch, damascus, toymunkee, forgedinfire, chefknife, forge, howto, tutorial, chefblade, kona, samurai, japanese, whoistoymunkee, rpmneil

Id: Bhn6Xl8fh5E

Length: 62min 46sec (3766 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 24 2022