The art of freehanding a custom knife - The Bob Ross approach in knifemaking

hey guys you've stumbled across the knife making hot spot today we're going to make a simple stock removal knife this will be a time lapse of the knife from start to finish and it will show all of the steps involved to make a knife i'm just going to kind of bob ross this knife i don't really have a design set out i'm going to take a little off the back and a little off the front to give it a nice gentle sweep and i'm going to shape out the handle i'm just roughing it out to what i think might look good giving it a nice little finger toil up front there you go you can see me testing it in my hand as i grind and now i'm going to go ahead and rough out the shape of the blade i often come to my grinder and just attack it like this and decide what looks good as i go i find that i come up with a lot of unique designs by doing this and i actually prefer this over drawing knives out before i start i finally settled on something that i think that i like here i do think that i will step over to my horizontal grinder and clean up the finger toil area just give it a nice positive place for that front finger to sit you could do all these processes on simple tools you can use a drum sander and your drill press to accomplish these different tasks that i'm doing right here making sure that the entire profile is clean and smooth all the way around before i move on to the next steps after the entire perimeter of the knife is finished and sanded i give myself some layout lines real simple lines and i center punch all the holes for my pin placements this makes it much easier when i step over to the drill press to get my holes exactly where i wanted them in the first place so go ahead and drill out all my holes next to my handles before i start grinding on my main bevels here's the process that i use to describe my center lines this makes it really easy for me to grind my bevels it gives me a visual indication of the exact center line slap on my beveling jig this keeps everything nice and straight and keeps my bevels equal from one side of the knife to the other when i approach my flat platen for grinding real simple jig to use real simple jig to make if you don't have one grinding is a real finesse you you really just have to step up to your grinder and spend some time behind it you'll find that as you use it you will start to see how much material you need to take off in certain areas or other areas to compensate for a strong arm or a weak car here's my makers mark i used to hot stamp these but i found that it introduces warps so now i like to cold stamp them while the metal is still soft before i go in for heat treat gives me a nice crisp maker's mark when you're doing a small knife you don't need a huge quench tank so my quench tank is small enough to where i can heat my oil with a railroad spike that's what you saw me doing there i used the railroad spike just to heat it up and then i'll use that to heat my quenching oil [Music] go ahead and pull that spike when it's up to heat swirl it around in my quench bucket warm up the oil before i go in for my quench right after my oil is hot i can go ahead and start heat treating the blade i have reached non-magnetic and i'm going to go in to differentially heat treat this blade where i don't dunk the entire blade through the surface of the oil just the cutting edge of the knife and you can see how the heat starts to dissipate back across the spine of the knife and then i go ahead and cool the entire thing down you'll see later why i like to differentially heat treat blades like this it gives you a really neat design in the blade afterwards i test it with the file make sure everything's super hard and i'm gonna put it in the tempering cycle we're gonna go for 425 for two two hour cycles here's the knife right after the quench i wanted to show you what it looked like before we went in for a temper right after the tempering cycle i go through all the same processes on my grinding i grind the flats and then i grind the bevels again i generally go into heat treatment with a 36 grit finish because i do have a belt sander so i know i'm going to clean it up afterwards i come out and i go through all my grits the disc sander is the queen of my shop obviously the 2x72 is the king but the disc sander has a firm place in my heart if you don't love to hand sand the disc sander is pretty amazing it gets things really nice and flat and you can use a standard 9x11 sheet of paper and cut it to size it makes the hand sanding go by like a breeze and here we are doing my hand sanding you could create a hand sanding sled like this by just using a two by four and cutting it at an angle so that you can get into your beveled areas near the tip that's why this is shaped the way it is i work this knife all the way up to the grits i believe that i come back to it and i start at 220 and then i move it up to 400 and then 500 sometimes i go a little bit past 500 but most of the time i top out at a 500 grit finish and i do some nice long pull strokes to finish it out here please subscribe to the channel it certainly helps me out and it could help you out if you're getting into knife making i've got a lot of really unique videos that can teach you a lot this is my ferric chloride tank it helps bring out that differentially heat treated hormone do you see the difference in the blade there to me not only does this add something that's visually interesting and striking but it also makes the knife a little more usable now for my favorite part picking the handle material i do love my handle materials i've sourced materials from all over the world ah there we go we're going to use the red malibu yes take my block separate it into two separate handle scales on the table saw i do find that it's better to keep your material in blocks and then create handle scales if you would like to make a full tang knife when you're ready to make the knife that keeps your wood from warping or moving as it sits in a drawer so i like to keep them in blocks and i'll rip them down to size when i need to now into the handling process i go ahead and take my knife and i position the knife on the material to get the best most appealing portion of the material within the shape of the handle it's something you definitely want to think about before you just lay your knife on there and start drilling holes you'll see that i drilled all the holes on one side and now what i'll do is i'll go through and chase those holes with the bottom scale on the other side that way i know that my pins will go all the way through the knife into the scale on the other side and also put a piece of sacrificial wood underneath so that i don't have any blow out on my scale material if you don't put that wood there when you drill through it could spall out wood on the other side now everything's ready to go i mark out the perimeter so i can cut off the excess of these scales it does make it easier if you don't have a ton of excess after glue up run these over to the bandsaw and cut off the extra material here it's little steps like this that will help improve your knife making watch your thumbs this machine bites a lot of fingers lucky me i've not bitten a finger if you've watched any of my videos you you know that on the front end of the scale there i use a lot of different odd things around my shop to create the shapes that i find on my knives that was a piece of teflon tape or a roll of teflon tape that i used to get the radius that i was looking for on the front edge of these scales and you definitely want to clean this front edge up and finish it out a hundred percent to polish before you glue your knife together because you can't touch up the front of these scales once they're glued to the knife you'll scratch the blade so get that front nice and dialed in and then we're gonna go for glue up here i like to clean everything thoroughly with acetone especially the wood a lot of the exotic woods that i use are extremely oily so if to ensure a good glue bond i like to go ahead and take it clean those slabs off with acetone and let them dry clean my pins i clean the blade i mix my two-part epoxy up and then i make sure that the epoxy drips down through the pinholes and then i pin everything together clamp it and then i take the acetone soak some little pieces of paper towel with it and i used a sharp corner after i folded it to clean off the excess epoxy on the leading edge of the scales you definitely want to clean this off while the epoxy is still malleable and you can get in there there we go now we're ready to go ahead and grind off the excess material down to the perimeter of the knife you want to be sure that you don't grind into the metal we've already dialed it in and we've got the pins placed evenly around the perimeter of the knife so if you remove the metal the pin will appear a little closer to the outside perimeter than it was intended to be then i just go through and i clean up the entire perimeter first i want to bring this all the way out to a finish grit before i do any other work on this knife so the perimeter will go all the way out to 500 grit and then we'll move on to shaping these scales and i've landed on a process of shaping that works pretty well for me i do it on most of my knives i use this wing divider and i go ahead and give myself a scribe line all the way around this is a grind two line and i try not to overshoot this line when i'm shaping my scales you can go with a lot of different shapes on knife handles but what you do want is you want an area next to the spine that is not rounded so you'll have an area all the way around the perimeter that is nice and flush with the spine and not rounded right up to the spine and that's why i like to use these grind two lines that i put on these these layout lines that i use now see i put lines on the side also and i come up to my grinder and i grind from line to line and i create these little flat facets and that keeps everything perfectly symmetrical so essentially i'm starting the rounding process by grinding these facets all the way around keeping everything symmetrical and then i'll go over to my hand sanding rig and you'll see how i blend all these together to make it really comfortable in your hand and you also won't have any hot spots i like to utilize all of the different places on my grinder you can see i'm using the bottom wheel here it works really well for these inside contoured areas and then i like to chase the front edge of my scales down and give them a nice ramp so that they fit in my sheets a little better this spot right here is really easy to nick your blade i could do this without taping it up but believe me i have nicked a blade before and it is a super bummer when you mar the finish on a blade when you're this close to finishing it so my suggestion would be to go ahead and throw some masking tape on your blade before you shape your handles it will save you some heartache down the road this process right here i've also learned it is a good idea to tape up the blade you can get some grit in your vise and you know mar the finish on the blade here i'm doing the shoe shine method this is where you take your strips of paper and you just run them back and forth like a shoe shine since i kept this really symmetrical all the way throughout the grinding process i'm really not changing the shape here all i'm doing is blending those symmetrical lines together so instead of having perfectly flat facets they're just semi-rounded and they feel a little bit better in your hand so i work this all the way up to 500 grit make sure you get the butt into the knife you can see i'm also using sanding blocks [Music] there we go and then at the very end i like to just feather things together with a piece of sandpaper this triangular piece of sandpaper i'm using right here that's actually the cut off from my disc sander i try to use all of the scrap in my shop nothing goes to waste so when i put a piece on the disc sander and i cut it off i ended up with these little triangle tips and i use those when i'm sanding out my handles after i get everything finished i come back with a block wrap my sandpaper around it and i go over the pins so that my pins don't seem domed or protruding from the handle material by using the hard block and wrapping the sandpaper around it you could very easily go in there and take down any high spots or anything like that since i did blend this together with just sandpaper in my fingers you will get domed pins so it's a good idea to come back in with the block block everything down and make everything super nice and smooth on this one i'm gonna do a tongue oil buildup finish and i it just comes out absolutely amazing you guys will love the finish on this handle this was my very first youtube video that i ever made and now i'm doing a audio commentary over the top of it because this video actually did really well so i thought i'd just add to it and show it to you guys now [Music] bye

Channel: Aleeknives

Views: 206,326

Keywords: Aleeknives, knifemaking, knife making, bladesmithing, freehanding a custom knife, knifemaking tutorial, knife tutorial, beginner knifemaking, beginner knife

Id: 0MZ7NDGEGmk

Length: 16min 10sec (970 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 05 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/a_cycle_addict]

I see zero happy trees.