Now That's a KNIFE | Huge Bowie! | Complete Build of the 5160 Bowie | Vlog

what's up everybody so we're back out in the shop and in this episode we're gonna do something i haven't done yet i actually took all of the episodes from one of my shop talk tuesday build series actually the one where i made this knife right here the big old buoy and i compiled them all into one episode now in order to keep it under an hour i did take the intros and outros from each one of those videos out so this is purely me doing all the work with all the steps in between and all the explanations of what we did within each step so hopefully y'all like this particular format if you do let me know in the comment section down below i know it's a longer episode it is what it is hopefully you all enjoy it now let's go ahead let's jump into this and let's get this thing knocked out so we want to go ahead and start cutting off these pieces that we're going to remove to make our lives a little bit easier during the forging process i know a lot of people out there are thinking where is his guard at he needs to put his guard on his grinder you're right i don't even know where it's at anymore though so it is what it is but once we get this cut out we're going to go ahead go into the shop get it hot because we want to forge this hot even though on certain parts my lighting with my shop door being open and my camera tends to make it look like the steel is colder than it is right now that is glowing orange to me so it's uh it's definitely hotter than what it actually looks like on the camera and you want to forge 5160 hotter you don't want to forget cold because you'll be hammering forever and not really doing anything now what we're focusing on now is just getting the handle kind of shaped roughly where we want it to be so that we can start focusing on the blade portion of this and the big thing that you want to focus on whenever you're forging is if you're going to be manipulating the steel quite a bit you need to go back and flatten it because everywhere where you're hitting is flaring out and if you were to just forge this the profile and never flatten it whenever you go back and flatten it it's going to throw the profile completely back off again so you just want to forge a little bit flatten it forge a little bit flatten it and all we're doing is just at this point trying to get that handle like i said roughly where it needs to be so that we can then focus on the blade because we're going to come back and kind of mess with the handle a little bit later we want to get the blade profiled and what i'm working on is just getting the belly kind of where it needs to be because i'm going to end up dropping that tip down but i wanted to get it to where the belly roughly was where i wanted it to be so that i knew how much i needed to drop the tip down and that's what we're focusing on right now is getting that tip dropped down and flattening it again as we're going because this is going to create a little taco if you if you were to just do this much forging from top down it would curve the blade quite a bit so you want to make sure you're flattening it back out so once we get it dropped down to where we want it to we start swooping it back up because if you remember on our profile it has that swooping motion coming from the harpoon area like what we're forging in right now all the way through to the tip and one of the things that i did here was i did move the harpoon area just a little bit further forward and i think it'll look better in the long run having it like this as opposed to being further back towards the handle but it was something that i started doing then i thought oh is this going to look good but then i just you know committed to it so right now we're refining the handle just a little bit to make sure that we're not having to take off a ton of material i actually have the profile of the knife drawn on a piece of steel behind me so that i knew roughly where to get the dimensions to that's why i'm modifying it a little bit right now and thinning the blade out because i i wanted to make sure that whenever this is all said and done i barely had to remove any material on the 2x72 so the whole point behind forging the profile is to get it as close to that profile as possible and you're going to see later on that we're going to end up modifying the profile a little bit to fit this size because i did forge this about an inch longer than the actual profile but we're going to go through start refining the belly of this knife a little bit a little bit of that recurve in there and thin out the area just in front of the handle kind of towards where the ricasso is because it was pretty thick right there and i was gonna have to remove a bunch of material so i wanted to pull that in just a little bit and now we're doing our hammered texture so this is just a ball peen putting all the little ball peen dots on there which looks really cool whenever you have this on the flats and your grind bevels up to it gives it really cool dimension to the way your blade looks now one of the things you have to think about is when you're using this ball pin hammer it's moving the steel around everywhere so you're going to end up needing to come back and flatten it and you want to focus on both sides while you're doing this so you're not thinning one area more than the other but then once you get it to where you want it you come back with light hammer blows and flatten the whole entire piece out in a way that it doesn't remove all these little hammer strikes you just put in here you can see right here that is what we're grinding to the last time i did something like this i ended up using my blue layout die which actually didn't stand out very much i would suggest that if you're going to spray paint around your template so use something like a white or black spray paint because it really stands out in contrast of your forge scale that you have on the blade so as you can see here we really didn't need to grind hardly anything at all which is the benefit of drawing out your profile to where you roughly want it to be and then forging it out and not being afraid to modify that profile to fit what you forged out you know you don't have to forge these things a hundred percent to profile especially for something like this where this isn't for a customer you know i i could have easily used the profile that i had but i wanted to keep some of this extra length so that's the reason why i went this route and didn't modify it to make it smaller so what we're going to be doing on this is coming in at an angle about 45 degrees and we're just gonna get close to our center line that we have marked here and just work it in i'm going to be coming at an angle let's keep it pretty consistent there now we're just getting this defined we're not going to the 100 on it again same thing with the bevels here they're going to be 90 so we're just setting that in place so that we know the center is correct everything like that and then we'll start grinding the main bevels here up to it but you want to do this first because it's a lot easier to get everything centered and even from the spacing even from here to here from here to here without the bevels being done on here because once you start grinding in these bevels it's going to start tapering this bevel down to almost non-existent so to make sure you keep a consistent bevel you can easily see how even that line is all the way down on these flats so it's just something we're going to do to set it in place and make sure everything's even so you can accomplish this by a few different ways you can do the 2x72 like i have here you can do this on a 1 by thirty you can use a file jig and hand file it dennis over at tyrell knifeworks actually does it that way primarily and he gets really good results with the file jig i might end up trying that in the future but for right now i'm going to go ahead and continue using the 2x72 but there is a good chance that i'll be switching to a file jig because i like the results that he gets whenever he does that and how consistent you can be now when it comes to this 45 degree angle that we're putting on you don't technically have to put a 45 degree angle a lot of us knife makers just say that because it's easier to convey but you can do a 50 degree angle a 35 degree angle a 60 degree angle any of those are fine you're just trying to put a pretty steep angle to get to that center line that you scribed so that that part is done and all you're doing is bringing it up the side i'll explain that more here in just a second but all you're trying to do is just define that center edge so that you can look straight down it and make sure it's even with the tang like i said i'll explain it more as we get into this but that's all we're trying to accomplish here is a steep [Music] angle so what you can see here is we got our top bevel done i went ahead and hit it on the oscillating spindle sander to kind of smooth it out a little bit did that off camera but you can see here on the tip whenever you let me get it focus a little bit whenever you start grinding in the secondary bevel or this this main bevel right here it starts erasing where this comes forward so as you start bringing these bevels up it's going to make this area smaller and smaller and smaller and if we were to grind the bevels in first here and then grind this in second you wouldn't be able to see that this is nice and even all the way down the same space all the way down so that's the reason why you want to do that first and of course the whole point behind this is to create a line that ease even with the spine here so the spine comes through and flows through and just this piece is raised up above it but we're going to go ahead grind in this other 45 degree angle and then we'll start bringing the bevels up so now that we have our bevels ground on both sides and we've established that center edge we want to go ahead and bring these bevels up what we're going to do is get on here start grinding in and what i'm going to be doing is gradually raising these bevels up by putting more and more pressure on the spine of this and slowly bringing those up as we come across now the whole point behind this is just making sure that we gradually come up so that we don't accidentally come in here too flat and we start grinding this area and putting grind lines in this because it'll mess up our texture so we want to slowly bring it up until we're done that's why we're just gonna come in at a bigger angle or a steeper angle and slowly work our way more vertical we're gonna be doing that we're gonna be making nice even motions being consistent with this coming in moving our body and just working it in i am gonna be switching this to a new belt and then we're going to get to grinding [Music] now right here through the miracle of editing i'm gonna make this look like it only took me two minutes to grind in the bevels to this and all it is is just because i wanted you all to get the highlights of the grinding and the bevels it took me approximately [Music] it was three and a half hours to grind in the bevels to this just to be consistent with it and taking this much material off hindsight i should have forged in some of these bevels it would have made my life a lot easier so i didn't have to grind this much material off but it is what it is i sat here at the grinder for seriously about three and a half hours grinding this and it took a long time but it was worth it in the end and like i said through the power of editing it looks like i did it a lot faster than what i actually did [Music] [Music] now when it comes to drilling the pin holes i went with 3 16 pins for the area where the handle is going to go so the scales for the handle on the tang and then i went with a 1 8 bit for the pins that are going to be pinned into the guard so that i didn't end up putting too big of a pin in that guard area and i didn't have to make a really large holes even though 3 16 are not large holes i didn't want to make large holes in that section that's going from the ricasso into the tang because i didn't want to weaken that area so with 1 8 pins and that way make sure that we're not going to have any issues in the future as you can see here i did put a piece of angle iron inside the forge to act as a baffle to disperse the heat around the forge so i didn't have that flame directly on the blade creating an unnecessary hot spot you want to make sure that your blade is heated evenly especially during these normalizing cycles so that the normalizing cycles can do what they need to do now i brought it up to 1550 degrees for this first part and then let it air cool on my hook and block which just happened to be a little bit underweighted for this size of knife so i did have to mess with this a little bit too much each time i did these normalizing now other than that everything else worked how it's supposed to but the second heat we did bring it up to right at about 1500 degrees and let it cool and still air still air is important because 5160 can air harden a little bit and you don't want that to happen so once we did that cycle brought it up again to 1420 degrees and then let it air cool and once those normalizing cycles were done we did end up bringing it back up to just under 1550 degrees it was right at that 1550 mark and then we quenched it in 120 degree peanut oil and whenever you do this you do want to agitate it so that it cools how it needs to and you get a nice even quench once we did that we file tested it and then i took it inside my house and tempered it inside my home oven because it wouldn't fit and my smaller oven that is inside the shop so once we tempered it which was at 375 degrees for two hours we were able to start grinding it and this first grind is just grinding off the d carb layer getting all of that gone so that we can then start evening out our bevels and getting them exactly where we want them so once we got the d carb layer round off we went back after it with a brand new 36 grit belt and started evening out those grind lines which are going to create the striations once we do our acid etch and sanding process that gives us our really cool texture on the bevels you want to make sure that when you're doing this step that you're taking your time you're not really pushing the blade into it you're letting the belt do its job and grind nice and evenly across the bevels once we got the bevels done we went ahead and started working on the false edge or the swedge to create those grind lines on it as well and i'll tell you you want to be careful with this because like i said this is a brand new 36 grit belt and if you want to attempt this finish you got to take your time you got to be very gentle with it you're doing light pressure because if you accidentally nick this wrong you're going to be chasing a little blip in your bevels and you're going to end up messing with your grind lines and the way that you want everything to look and it's not worth it just take your time so for this project i'm only going to be using the piece but in a future video i'm actually going to be forging the curled piece that is in the vise right now i'm going to be forging that into a knife now that big chunk of steel is going to make a pretty large knife and i've seen videos of people forging these into katanas and stuff so definitely going to make a cool looking knife out of that now we're going to start by flattening one side this is going to be the side that will meet the handle skills later so we want to go ahead and get it nice and flat because everything else is going to be squared off of it so flatten it and then we can start measuring everything and figuring out how much we need to take off the sides how much we need to take off the top to kind of get the initial squaring of everything in the initial measurements once we get it all squared then we can start marking our lines for the slot and stuff like that [Music] so once everything's squared i went ahead and marked a center line and right now i'm marking the lines for the slot that's going to be cut into this the blade itself is about a quarter of an inch wide and this slot is right under that so basically i'm going to end up cutting it out and then filing it back to make it fit perfect now i wanted to make sure that i had enough room between that slot and the sides to fit a set of scales so i ended up using the scales that i just have as multiple sets of and figuring out okay i need that excess to be just over a quarter of an inch so right now i'm marking that so from the center line over to the line that i'm marking right now is a quarter of an inch wide and then i'm going to cut on the outside of those lines to give myself just a little extra room then we've got to get the ricasso measured so that we could then mark how deep we need to grind this slot i'm giving myself a little bit of extra room to where this guard will go up past the spine so that i can always grind it down to meet the spine later like i said i'm going to be cutting on the outside of the two outermost lines on this so that i give myself just a little extra room to be able to grind back or do the texture with and and go that route and then on the slot we're going to be cutting on the inside of the lines and then filing it back to meet the ricasso area so that we don't have any gaps or anything like that you can always remove material but it's very hard to add material back [Music] now we're going to go ahead and drill our holes through the guard the previous episode i had drilled the holes through the ricasso and already had that set up so all i needed to do was follow those holes and drill them through the guard [Music] so now we need to go through and start filing everything in this slot to make sure that it matches the ricasso really well and i will tell you what i did end up doing is i filed it just a hair too far so whenever i go through and do this process right here this is the the first fit up of the guard to the actual knife itself i did end up having a little bit of a gap where the base of the the slot meets the bottom of the ricasso area and i did end up welding a little bit of material just inside there i only needed to add about a sixteenth of an inch but i did end up adding a little bit of material back and filled that gap exactly how i needed to fill it but you'll see right now i'm using a brass hammer the nice thing about this hammer is all the times that i needed to put the guard on and take the guard off and put the guard on and take it off i can and adjust it a little bit i could use that brass hammer and it was not hurting the knife itself the brass is softer than the knife and it doesn't actually hurt it even when i'm sliding it up down the side or anything like that so if you don't have a brass hammer i highly suggest you get one and there was a lot of this there was a lot of putting the guard on taking it off putting the guard on taking it off a whole bunch of filing that went into this but this first fit up is just trying to make sure that my pin holes matched up and so that i could see exactly how much i needed to fill in that little area that where i had the gap the nice thing is there was no gaps on either side so all i needed to do was add a little bit of material to the bottom and then file it away like what i'm doing right now and then there was a bunch of filing and then putting the guard on and then filing and then sure enough putting the guard on and then when i was done putting the guard on i had to file some more and then i put the guard on so the nice thing about this was i got it pretty close but not close enough i had to file some more once i did this last little bit of filing it ended up lining up perfect and i was done with that part then what i needed to do was cut off a little bit of the excess on the bottom of the guard just to make it the right height now that we've done all of that it's time to go ahead and put the texture on this i'm using a 80 grit drum to do this i end up using a few different drums to get everything that i wanted to do i use an 80 grit drum and a 240 grit drum basically i start with the 80 grit drum and i get the rough pattern on there and then i come back with the finer drum and start fine tuning everything a little bit so the trick to doing a really good pattern on this is to be pretty erratic with it don't don't try and focus on making a real uniform pattern because that doesn't look natural you want it to look like you could have hammered this in and it just ends up being a nice cool pattern without even focusing on it now i will tell you whenever i'm doing the initial grinding to just start the pattern i am going pretty uniform with it i'm i'm grinding roughly in the same little areas so that i can start putting the indentions and then as you start going over those indentions that's what gives you the extra lines and the craziness to it this is definitely something that you want to play with and and try out i do like this tool it's less expensive than a small wool attachment and it lets you use it for so many different things but it's definitely turning out pretty cool so now we need to go ahead and etch our blade i've already cleaned everything off this is a 50 50 ferrochloride and distilled water mixture that i've had for a little while now it is still pretty strong but not as strong as it was the first time i ever used it but this works out real well we need to go ahead put it in there we're gonna do our first bag or bathing bath etching time whatever you want to call it for about five minutes let it go in there and then we'll take it out we'll clean it off with windex and then go back in take it out clean it off go back in take it out clean it off and then we'll end up sanding it etching it sanding it and cleaning it so let's go ahead and get these processes started so on this first round of etching all i'm going to be using is windex and the texture on these gloves so i clean it up [Music] the reason why we want to do that is right now you can see there's like i don't know if you can see that on here but there's little lines going this way from where we've cleaned it and did all that stuff and i want to take and rub off as many little random imperfections and all that stuff as possible because let's say you have something on top of here and it's etching it will etch around that and actually mess up your etch so you want to go through clean it a little bit wipe it down and then it goes right back into the etching give that little wipe down and then right back in and this time we're going to leave it in there for about eight minutes and then we'll take it out clean it again then go back in until we get it the darkness that we want once we get that darkness then we can go ahead and start focusing on the sanding and etching and sanding and once we're good there we'll add the nice finish that we want so let's go ahead let it soak for a little while that's the word i was looking for when i was talking about bathing it and all that stuff soaking it there you go round number two we're getting there getting darker all right this next one is going to be for 10 minutes the next two so this is going to be for 10 minutes and then once we're done with that we should be able to sand the peaks off and then we're going gonna go back in for another 10 minutes sand the peaks off clean it and we should be good and that one is done let's take a peek at it yeah i think that's good i think we're at a point now that's where we can actually sand the high points off got ourselves a nice dark blade let's go ahead and give this a little sanding we got our little sponge here with a 1500 grit sandpaper on it okay oh oh boy oh boy oh boy okay so i'm gonna move this light so that y'all can actually see this oop oh there we go let's get it like that and there is our texture now of course this is just the first round of it i feel like okay let's see how we can get the light to there we go see that see all those lines that is what we're going for right there it's gonna look absolutely awesome whenever i get done doing this a few times and then we really really really get a good close-up shot of it that is starting to look absolutely awesome oh it's gonna be sick all right finish sanding it back in the acid pull it out sand it back in the acid so so so one of the things that i did to make my life a little bit easier is i made a template of the tang and the whole reason behind this was to make sure that i actually got the proportions right on the scales so i went ahead and marked you see right there mark that on here so that i knew that the scales we're going to fit the tang for where the top of the antler is and the bottom and all that for both sides so now what i need to do is go ahead cut them apart cut the excess off now we're going to leave them a little bit large so a little bit bigger than the actual tang itself because we'll end up shaping it back to that the area that we're going to focus on the most is this front piece where it meets the guard because that we got to make sure it's perfect so that we don't have any weird gaps up here so that's we're going to work on now go to the porter bandsaw cut everything down and then start working on that front so through the magic of forgetting to press record they are now cut out now what we got to do go ahead square the scales together since i have them lined up where they need to be we need to go ahead square this front off right here and make it match this line this right here so we can then start focusing on drilling some holes [Music] so what i'm trying to do right now is just make sure that the front matches up how it needs to match up and then the tang is going to be right into the antler material i think we're going to be perfect right there so now what i'm going to go ahead and do is drill a hole through here and start this process off so now we're spreading our epoxy on everything and we're not trying to go too crazy with the epoxy we're not trying to just put a ton on here we just want to go through and coat everything because if you go through and put a bunch of needless epoxy everywhere it's going to just squeeze out and not be useful at all and because we're coating all the surfaces you're going to have squeeze out by default but you don't want to go too crazy with it make the cleanup just a nightmare and i have went through cleaned all the surfaces with acetone just to make sure we were nice and good no oils on here from our hands residue from heat treating and whatnot so you might be asking yourself eric why did you uh why did you use that pinhole right there if it doesn't go all the way through you put epoxy in there epoxy in the center here and all of it squeezes into that pinhole and creates a hidden pin there you go you [Music] [Music] [Music] uh [Laughter] so [Music] [Music] so now that we've got everything profiled we're going to be using our sand and stick and our sand in pad this has a soft side and a firm side we're going to use it to get everything nice and finalized finish sanding the spine sanding over the pins and things like that right now this thing feels absolutely awesome the handle is pretty beefy but my hand fits around it perfectly so it's nice i love the way this is turning out but let's go ahead start sanding i'm actually just going to start off with the 500 grit and then go up to a 800 grit and leave it there um so so now we're going to go ahead and etch the spine and re-etch some of the parts right here belly and all that it does look cool like that but we want everything to to match each other so we got to go ahead and etch it all now i'm going to end up letting it soak in the boiled linseed oil but i want to give y'all a little peek of how it's going to look put the oil on it check that out all right guys let's go ahead and wrap this episode up here i know it was a long episode but hopefully you enjoyed it i definitely enjoyed making this knife it was easily one of my favorite knives that i've ever made and i just love everything about it the thickness of it the texture on the bevels the flats the way that the guard fits everything about it it just is a massive knife i mean that is my forearm compared to the knife it is huge and i wish that i was keeping it but it's going to end up going on the website there is experience.com i'm going to have it on there in about a week from the release of this episode plus we'll end up having the insanity builds on there the quran buoy is actually already on there i've got so many knives they were all made on the channel so if you want to check those out you can if you end up purchasing one of those the best part about it is you actually to show your friends and family how the actual knife was made which is pretty cool because you typically don't get that whenever you buy a knife but it's one of the unique experiences with purchasing one of my knives now if you want a shirt too i've got these shirts on there now i got it in this gray color i've got it in black and i will end up putting more shirts on there here soon but go check out the website tell me what you think about it tell me what you think about this episode and how long it was guys that's it if you would give the video a thumbs up share the video subscribe to the channel you all have an amazing day y'all stay safe out there and i'll catch y'all next time [Music] you

Channel: The Rivers' Experience

Views: 119,400

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Id: VExSLtAjPa4

Length: 52min 25sec (3145 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 30 2022