Start forging TODAY in your own backyard - no special tools required

welcome to the show we got a great show today if you've thought about forging but you haven't gotten into it yet or maybe you just want to try a different technique than what you've done before this show is for you i'm going to take you step by step through the process of how you can not only build a forge in your backyard with real common tools that you probably have around the house but actually use that forge to make a knife so you see that i'm starting by building up a little enclosure out of bricks that's because i happen to have bricks laying around the property here but you could do the same thing by digging a trench in your yard with a shovel where i live the soil is really dry and rocky so for me it's easier to build up than to dig down but if you don't have bricks or rocks that you could use to make this type of thing or if you just find it easier to dig grab a shovel and dig a trench to feed air into this forge i'm going to use a blow dryer this one cost about 10 bucks but i bet if you look around your house you'll probably find one you can use and remember it's easier to get forgiveness than permission i'll just leave it there now if you want to protect the blow dryer from the heat of the fire you can use some aluminum sheet like this to build a little nozzle or a little extension you could also use maybe an old soup can or something but you actually don't need this at all and i'll show you here in a minute it just helps to protect the blow dryer from the heat and it'll probably extend the life of the dryer a little now the whole key to making this work is that you need to get the fire up to a temperature where you can forge the steel and obviously a campfire isn't normally going to do that but if you feed air into it you can use regular charcoal or regular wood and with a little bit of forced air you can definitely get easily get up to the temperature that you need to forge steel i'm using charcoal because i happen to have some but you could use wood scraps if you'd prefer i'm going to put a little bit of a cover on this that actually isn't necessary but it's a windy day and in this area it's fairly dry it's not really smart to have open fire on a windy day but again not necessary for forging just a way to protect the fire and keep it where it belongs you're probably familiar with the process of lighting a charcoal grill that's basically all you're going to do now except that as soon as you get the flames going you'll turn the blow dryer on and start feeding air into it and just like with a charcoal grill it takes a little while for that fire to spread and to get some really good hot coals to work with for an anvil you can use a lot of different things really any flat piece of steel will work i do have this 15 anvil i bought at harbor freight i'd recommend going and picking one up they don't cost much money and it makes life a lot easier but people have used all kinds of things for an anvil you could use a slab of concrete i've even seen somebody forge on an old stump but i will tell you if you can get a hold of a flat piece of steel it's going to make life a lot simpler i do have a review on that 15 anvil i'll link to that video here so you can check it out but the short version is for 15 you really can't go wrong run to harbor freight and pick one up you don't need any special tools besides that a regular old claw hammer will work if you do happen to have a ball peen hammer or something like that that'll work fine too as you get more advanced with blacksmithing you'll find that there are different specialized hammers for different purposes and of course there's tongs and other tools but those things are really just there to make life easier they aren't absolutely essential basically here if you can heat the steel up to a red hot temperature you have a hard flat surface to work on and any kind of a hammer to strike with you're ready to start forging now i'm using rebar this is easy to find at a hardware store i happen to have some on the property sometimes if you look around you'll just find some laying around on your property but it's really cheap stuff you can buy twenty feet of it for three or four dollars at a hardware store once you have the steel up to a nice red hot temperature which sometimes can be a little bit hard to gauge depending on the lighting if you're in full sunlight sometimes it could be hard to see i recommend fighting in a shady area anyway because you're going to get really hot if you're sitting out in the sun doing this but you can pretty much eyeball this look for the metal to glow red and actually if you can get it up to almost an orange color it's going to forge a lot easier so when it comes to actually forging the knife i think patience is key especially when you're starting out don't be taking big wild swings but take forceful purposeful well-aimed swings and just accept that the process is going to take a little time you'll know that you've lost the heat when the metal is no longer glowing it's not really a good idea to keep trying to work the steel after it's cooled that far just put it back in the fire heat it up till it glows again and get back to work with the hammer for about the first 10 minutes of forging i'm just trying to flatten this out in a symmetrical way i want to take the top three or four inches and use that as my blade so i'll just keep working that with a hammer flattening it out until it gets to a thickness of maybe between an eighth of an inch and a quarter of an inch then i'll decide which part i want to use for the edge and i'll strike that more with the hammer to get a little bit of a taper going down toward the edge that we're going to sharpen again there are a lot of different techniques that a true blacksmith will learn i honestly don't know most of them i've only been forging for about six months but if you want to learn more about that there are thousands of videos literally thousands of videos on youtube that will teach you everything you want to know about blacksmithing my purpose today is just to get you started and honestly it's pretty easy to make a knife you just pound the steel flat then pound it a little more on one side so you have a bevel and keep flipping the work piece over to make sure that you're keeping things symmetrical i'll stop every now and then and kind of look down the spine of the blade make sure that things aren't getting way off to one way or the other and if they are you just flip it over and pound it back one of the nice things about forging is it's perfectly fine to make a mistake because any kind of an error that you make you just heat the steel up and forge it out now i'm going to be doing some file work on this after i get the rough shape done there are techniques i could use to give me a more precise shape on the blade but i do want to show that all you really need is a rough sort of butter knife shape and then you can profile it a little more with a file or with a hacksaw some people who are real like blacksmithing purists will say well you shouldn't be using those tools you should you should use your hammer and keep practicing until you can you know what i don't care there are plenty of professional knife makers and blacksmiths and bladesmiths that are more than happy to use power tools grinders files hacksaws whatever they have available to make life easier now i'll heat up the handle area of the knife a little bit and put just a little bit of a kind of a recurve on that and then once that's done this would be the part where i would probably quench the blade if i was going to be using power tools later to finish the process but once you've quenched the blade it'll be very hard and it's a lot easier to work on softer metal especially if you're going to be filing by hand so i'll save the quench for later you'll see i'm using a bench vise if you don't have a bench vise that's fine there's a lot of different ways you can secure a piece of metal and work on it with files or with sandpaper or a grinder or whatever you have but of course a bench vise makes life easier if you don't have metal files they're pretty cheap too you can buy a whole pack of them at a place like walmart or harbor freight for just a few dollars of course a higher quality metal file will cost a little more 10 11 12 but if you take care of it it'll probably last longer and it'll be a little bit more effective at removing metal but if you're just starting out there's nothing wrong with using a cheap file like this one whatever gets you started now as i mentioned before you know i'm a huge believer in using simple tools hand tools i would never stoop to the level of using something like an angle grinder to save time so after you've spent about 37 hours filing and you have exactly the shape you want it's time to file a little bit more of a bevel i like to take it down to about a sixteenth of an inch thickness if you go any further than that you're gonna run the risk of cracking or warping when you do the quench so with that done we'll cut off this handle right about the length that we want again we'll do this all by hand with forging methods or with hacksaw because it would be just totally wrong for us to save time by using power tools so with that done it's time to do the quench we'll go back to the forge should only take a couple of minutes to heat this back up to quenching temperature there are a couple of ways to tell if your steel is up to quenching temperature for a proper quench you want to be well it depends a little bit on the steel but i've found with rebar i want to have it up to a like a bright cherry red color again depending on the lighting it can be a little bit hard to tell so another way to test is to use a magnet you can actually touch the blade when it's hot with the magnet and if it doesn't stick that means it's non-magnetic and it's pretty close to hot enough you might want to put it back in the heat for just another few seconds and then go to your quench oil i don't have a magnet handy so i'm just going by site i'll also mention that you can use water or oil for this i've done a couple of videos where i experimented with both methods for quenching rebar honestly water will definitely give you a little bit better hardness but it is a violent process and it's a lot easier to crack or warp a blade with water so for this project i'm using oil you definitely want to wear gloves when you do this because sometimes you will get a fire when you're quenching an oil you can use just about any type of oil you want this happens to be i think some type of vegetable oil that we had in the kitchen some people use motor oil of course there are specific quenching oils that you can buy and when you get to a more advanced level you probably will want to look into that because some of those have specific properties that are tailored to uh to give you the best results with a quench but all those are things you can learn about as you go and a good vegetable oil or motor oil quench will actually work pretty well for hardening the steel now once you've hardened it it will be very brittle in fact if it's a thin metal you could actually break it with your hands it'll be that brittle so when you're done with the quench you want to put it in in this case i'm using a toaster oven but you could use the oven in your house put it in there at 400 maybe 450 degrees give it a half hour maybe an hour depending on the thickness of the steel i usually go 45 minutes or an hour and that will soften the steel up just enough that it won't be brittle anymore once this is cooled off i'll take it back to the vice and i'll do a little more work on that edge with the metal file now for this part of the process you can take as much time or as little time as you want if you want to get a very nice precise even edge i'd recommend going slow working on one side then working on the other side start at one end and work down the length of the blade again if you have power tools this will go a lot quicker you can use an angle grinder you can use a belt sander use something like a high speed rotary tool like a dremel whatever you want to use to put the edge on whatever you have available but the best way is just to go slow especially if this is not something you've done before and then when it comes to putting that final edge on the knife and sharpening it up just in the interest of time savings here i'm going to use a little 1 by 30 belt grinder that i have but you could definitely use sharpening stones you could use sandpaper there's a lot of different tools some of them are very very cheap some are more expensive it's entirely up to you you know how fancy you want to get with the sharpening process but since this is not a sharpening video i think i'm going to wrap it up here and just show you how this cuts i will say if you are interested in getting a better education on sharpening check out a channel called outdoors55 he makes some of the best knife sharpening videos that you will probably ever see on youtube and a lot of it is aimed at helping people who maybe don't know as much about sharpening to learn how to put a really really nice edge like a razor's edge on a knife or pretty much any tool with a blade so check out his channel i'll put that link below and with that i think we'll wrap it up i will say this whole project start to finish only took me about three and a half hours and that includes everything from finding a spot to build the forge all the way through every step of the process right down to putting the edge on the knife so if you've been thinking about getting into forging if you have just a few basic tools and pretty rudimentary knowledge of how to use them there's no reason that you can't do what i just did in a single afternoon like i did i really hope you got something out of this and i do hope you go out and give this a try it is one of the most enjoyable hobbies i've ever tried thanks again for watching please subscribe to the channel i'm usually here about three times a week and i would love to have you as part of the community here i'd love to hear if you have any comments or any questions absolutely join the conversation below this video and whoever you are whatever you're doing have a wonderful time and i'll see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: FargoFX

Views: 3,077,641

Keywords: Creative, how to, diy, homesteading, survival, forging, knifemaking, bladesmithing, blacksmithing, do it yourself, start forging today, how to start forging, how to build a forge, how to make a knife, start forging now, start forging for free, backyard forging, how to make something awesom, how to make a rebar knife, simple forging, do it yourself forge, makers, primitive technology, diy forge, how to forge a rebar knife, forging a knife, easy backyard forge

Id: Fuk7Lw_uV5s

Length: 13min 31sec (811 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 08 2017