Next Level Ball Bearing Damascus Knife, Blacksmithing and Knifemaking, Forging Knives, Bladesmithing

hey guys welcome back to the shop today we're going to use some of these and some of this to make a knife like you've never seen before so the first step is to cut off a piece of our 3 8 inch 01 tool steel rod and using this in conjunction with our 3 8 inch 52-100 steel ball bearings we're going to make a really cool knife today first thing i need to do is bend this in some precise places here so use the torch to heat up just one spot there that allow me to bend this uh where i need it to a lot simpler than trying to heat up and heat it up in the forge along a longer length and then trying to bend that precisely so you're probably familiar with uh ball bearing damascus as it's known and it's just a type of pattern welded steel but typically you make yourself a steel canister and throw a bunch of ball bearings in there and then add some powdered steel and forge weld the whole thing together this makes a this can make a great knife and it makes a cool pattern but what you invariably end up with is some very elongated or stretched out type shapes from those ball bearings in your in your finished product and there's nothing wrong with that but i wanted to uh develop a method a while back that allowed you to make a consistent non-randomized pattern so more symmetrical and then also retain some of the shape of the ball bearings and so this project today is is continuing to build on that and you can watch some other videos on the ball bearing projects that i've done today though we're going to use this 01 tool steel rod as the edge steel in fact it's going to run around the entire perimeter of the blade i am using a can that i'm building from various pieces this is 3 16 inch thick mild steel and 3 8 inch square mild steel and this allows me to make a specific shape for this particular project the white paint keeps the contents from welding to the outer steel and makes removing it much much easier so we've got our canister finished and we can go ahead and assemble our billet inside this so this method works because when you crush a sphere it bulges out around the circumference of that sphere and when you line up a bunch of spheres next to each other and crush them simultaneously they'll provide that lateral pressure that's necessary during the forged welding process you need pressure and heat to successfully forge weld and that's why this works so having that round tool steel rod around the circumference is is also great as well because what can tend to happen in this particular method is at the edge where the sphere runs into a a wall instead of another sphere it doesn't have adequate pressure to to forge well necessarily to the next one so this is actually going to work in our favor as well as provide an additional component to this whole project so adding powdered steel this is 1080 powdered steel with four percent nickel powder added to that and that's going to give us a nice contrast against that high carbon steel in in this blade so i've got this arc welded all together and this is just to keep everything together and keep the air out now you do want you know very small vent holes so you don't pop your canister but for the most part you know overall you want to keep the air out so you don't have oxidization problems get this up to forge welding heat and we'll take it to the press and you can see i'm not uh squishing it down very much i'm going to do multiple passes and and compress it maybe a sixteenth maybe an eighth of an inch at max and this allows me to do multiple forged welding heats on this and uh make sure we've got a nice solid piece of steel when we're done with this uh forge welding process and since i have the power hammer go ahead and use some of that quick sharp uh blows there after the press just to make sure everything is nicely bonded together now that we've got everything forged welded together we can let it cool off a bit and then start getting getting this canister off so the nice thing about this method is you know you're forging forge welding it and once you've done that process you should have a billet that is you know ready to make a blade out of and you have a pattern that's already engineered into the billet so it's kind of cool so you'll see that this uh once you cut off the the arc welds this canisters comes off very easily now you'll notice right at the top here inside this canister there is a couple of ball bearings that did not forge well together this kind of goes back to what i was saying earlier where there's no additional ball bearings next to them or something round to continue that lateral pressure so i've noticed at times you can end up with a failed weld on the edges like that another thing that could have happened in this case is i there was a little bit bigger gap for a vent hole there some air could have gotten in and cause some oxidization inhibiting the weld not a big issue though we have plenty of material here i can go ahead and just cut that off and cut back to where it is solidly forged welded together and we can continue on from there so go ahead and heat this back up and start forging our blade out here now i will say that initially when i was planning this project i was thinking of doing like like a dagger type project seemed like a double-edged blade with that symmetry would be a good idea and i still think it would be this project kind of took a little different turn i think it turned out great so you'll uh see what you think here at the end but um it's not a dagger let's just put it that way anyway i'm gonna go ahead and work this down a little you know carefully uh on the outset here don't don't need to get crazy on this right off the bat use the hand hammer to forge in the tip a little bit and this is the point right here where i decided that i was not going to make a dagger after all just didn't uh i don't know i just wasn't feeling it so i came up with a different type of blade and uh i think i think you'll like it i should i sure like it but now i need to go ahead and work the tang down and stretch that out a little bit i don't want the full thickness of our steel and the tang it's kind of a waste of steel there as far as i'm concerned and it also helps balance stuff out when you thin that tang down and uh it just makes a better use of the length of our steel here so now that i've done that i need to go ahead and forge in the finger choil and start defining where our handle is actually going to go on this knife using the straight pin and the edge of the anvil together to kind of forge that in here this is especially important in this particular case because we've got that that o1 tool seal running around the entire circumference so i want to make sure to forge that down into the finger choil instead of we certainly don't want to just grind that out and then interrupt that continuous uh you know piece of steel all the way around so continue to work the the tang down on the power hammer makes it nice because as you finish that out you know i like to taper that out and that's a lot of hand hammering so the power hammer makes that a little quicker and easier i'm going to go ahead and forge in the bevel a little bit on here not too much but definitely you know widen that blade out a little bit make the best use of our steel here and and forge that bevel in a little bit all right so i left it uh i kind of got it up to a red heat in the forge and tried to um spheroidize or anneal that tang just a little bit there's our forged blade and we're ready to uh clean the profile up a little bit on the grinder here the main reason i'm doing this in this particular case is because i want to put a series of pinholes in this handle uh measured a specific distance from the edge of the tang and i need to make that pretty close to the finished size and shape before i put those holes in there and i need to put those holes in there before i start normalizing because our steel is going to be very difficult to drill through after after normalizing and heat treating so just using the calipers here to put myself about 350 thousands from the edge and map out where i want these holes to go these are three thirty seconds inch holes and i didn't quite get the tank soft enough so i have to go in here and uh heat it up to a dull red and spiritize that a little bit and we'll get a drill bit through this all right so on to normalizing and we'll do this multiple times refine that grain structure and initially reset the grain structure and relieve all that internal stress we created with the forging process so looking good we've got a solid blade here and this is what it looks like after the normalizing and thermocycles we can go ahead and first of all grind off the scale and then i'm going to go ahead and rough grind this take some of that material off a couple reasons i like to rough grind first of all it's no fun grinding hardened steel secondly depending on your steel and the type of coolant you're using it does make a difference as to the depth of hardening i'm not worried about that in this case with the o1 tool steel or even really with the 52100 but it's just a matter of practice for me and if you're using something like 1095 which is not a deep hardening steel it definitely makes a difference whether you have you know a quarter inch thick edge versus you know an eighth inch as to how far up your steel is going to adequately harden for an edge not to get on a rabble trail there but let's go ahead and quench this blade and harden it and of course temper it so once it's tempered we can go ahead and finish grind this and remove more of the material that needs to come off here it's obviously important to make sure that the blade stays cool at this stage otherwise the temper is going to be ruined and we would not have a good blade [Music] all right so working the blade up to 220 grit and putting a bevel on and then i sharpened it up off camera and we're going to go ahead and do a sharpness test on here as you can see it's shaving sharp we're gonna go ahead and chop through this 2x4 a couple of times and test this blade now this blade is not a chopper it's more of a fighter style it's pretty light invariably what happens in that case i went ahead and put my little lanyard on there but what invariably happens in this case is with a light blade you end up chopping the 2x4 many more times than you would otherwise have to all that does is i guess further demonstrate the edge holding capability of the blade and it still shaves pretty nicely so i'm happy with that we can go ahead and proceed with the build here which of course leads us to everybody's favorite part hand sanding all right so you get the idea on the hand sanding there i went up to 800 grit and we'll go ahead and etch this in ferric chloride takes multiple cycles there taking it out cleaning the oxides off etc and i'm going to go ahead and use some of my favorite all-time handle material and that is cocobolo wood got a nice piece here get the scales all prepped up make sure they're flat you don't want any any gaps there using the tang as the template to drill the pin holes per usual and of course sanding the front ends of the scales up to the necessary finish here's a riveting shot of the epoxy curing and after that happens it's ready to ready to work the handle down and make a nice grip here for our blade a little more hand sanding up through various grits and then we'll go ahead and buff it out really bring out the character of that cocobolo all right guys this knife turned out really cool i'm going to put an edge on it and show you a bunch of pictures but before we do that if you've enjoyed this video and you like what you see on the channel here and you want to support the channel you can do that at no cost to you just hit the like button leave a comment subscribe it doesn't cost you anything takes a couple of seconds if you want to go step further there is a patreon link in the description and you can go to my website firecreekforge.com where i have a bunch of cool knives axes etc for sale putting new stuff up all the time so you can check that out as well as always thanks for watching and we will see you on the next video [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Fire Creek Forge

Views: 2,542,618

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Id: hs3f6dccBn8

Length: 15min 15sec (915 seconds)

Published: Tue May 03 2022