The Coolest Knife Blade I've Ever Made!

i feel like it's been a little while since i made a proper steel knife and i think that's we're going to be doing today but it's not just going to be a traditional stock removal knife it's going to be stock removal from this piece of bar stock now this was sent to me by another knife maker who's got some great youtube channels out there his name is kyle royer he is a master smith and he is amazingly talented both at knife making and at making the metal to make the knives out of so this is a very fancy piece of damascus steel that he made and sent to me and the patterning on this thing is just unreal so hopefully i will be able to turn this into a knife worthy of this piece of steel tall order i wanted to pick a knife design that would really highlight the the blade so i wanted something that used as much metal as possible i didn't want to waste a lot and i wanted something that was a pretty wide and flat surface so i decided a chef's knife would be a good choice for that obviously i can't do anything too wide this is my bar stock i don't have any forging tools to flatten this out and even if i did i would be worried about ruining the pattern so this is the approximate blade design that i've come up with this whole blade including the tang fits on this bar it's close but it fits and i think we have just a really good amount of like flat smooth surface i'm going to try and do just one grind all the way from one side to the other so nothing is really interrupting the pattern of the metal because as i said that's what we want to highlight the most i've also tried to make the knife design one where it it tapers basically to the center so that the center of this design will go up the whole blade and keep going to the point and not have the blade go up off the side so we now have to cut this shape out of this bar of steel although at this point we may want to thin this down before we do that just because there's a lot of metal in here and a chef's knife does not need to be that thick in fact that'd be a really intense chef knife all right so this is a mark for where i want to use the surface grinder you know experimenting doing something brand new that you've never done before with a very fancy and probably expensive piece of steel what a good time to experiment and try new things that may or may not work i was about to start grinding but then i realized i should really have a way to make sure that i'm grinding the same amount from both sides other than just looking at it with my eyes so i am going to put marking fluid on the back edge of the metal and i'm going to use tools to mark an equal distance from both sides and that's how much i'm going to try to go in i think that's going to do a much better job of marking evenly than just looking at it [Music] all right so i want to explain a little bit with a diagram what it is i'm working on in case it's not been clear which makes a lot of sense so imagine this section of the metal that's what i've drawn here on the whiteboard just the edge from you know between my two fingertips that's that's about what we're looking at so i've drawn it larger and all of this all this has just been ground away so it is gone what we're left with is this nice taper this looks okay maybe on a whiteboard but it's actually very shallow on the metal so what we want to do is change this up just a little bit so instead of this gentle curve we want it to come back a little farther and have a much more aggressive curve so we want that on both sides that was high quality drawing right there but much more aggressive curve there we go all right i was thinking about the order of operations a little bit how i want everything to fit together when i'm finished and it's not yet time to add on that extra radius we're going to do that after we've put in the primary grind for the blade otherwise we'd have to go back in and clean it up a ton later so that's going to happen after we do a lot of things including heat treating so we have to finish cutting the shape out of this knife so i've got my blank and i am going to take this part and just bring it back a little bit more so we've got space for the the cool transition point we're building and i'm just going to trace it out onto our block of steel cut it out with the angle grinder [Music] i'm familiar with using an angle grinder and it always throws sparks but most knives i make are stainless steel which sparks but not nearly as much as this this is a carbon steel a high carbon steel knife steels actually it's a couple different ones mixed together that's how you make the damascus pattern but they're both high carbon and high carbon sparks so much more than stainless like i i can see it visually there's a lot more i can feel it there's way more heat coming off of it i was like moving out of the way because i was pretty sure it was going to light my shirt on fire if i didn't it's just so much sparking it's crazy [Music] [Music] all right basic shape is ground in i'm definitely liking how it's looking uh before i do the heat treatment a little bit more i want to do especially i want to get this shoulder all nice and cleaned up that's going to be something i do with putting on a file guide that's some really hard some tungsten carbide plates that i can't file through those will make a line and i can line that up just right and grind right up against those plates because they're too hard for me to grind but i want to make sure i do all that shaping of this area before i heat treat it because after heat treating it using the hand files doesn't work very well on hardened steel this is the file guide these plates right here on the top they're slightly darker color are made of carbide tungsten carbide my files can't scratch through these and even the sandpaper on the sanding belts won't scratch through these you basically need to use diamonds to start scratching into these so i can put this against the belt grinder i can just press right up against the belt and it won't go any farther down than these carbide plates so it lets me get a nice square fit up which i'll then touch up with files and uh should be nice and clean that way [Music] this is looking really good i'm very happy with what we've got here and i believe our next step is going to be moving on to the heat treatment so see that look at that look at that it's knife shaped practice my stabbing so with the knife blank ready we've now turned the kiln on heated it up to temperature we're going to put the knife into the kiln that's going to lower the temperature a little bit opening the door and the amount of heat that the metal is going to suck in we're going to wait for it to get back up to temperature which is 1525 fahrenheit and then we're gonna let it sit there for five to ten minutes while it's doing that we've got our quench oil and we're gonna slowly warm that up using a blow torch on the outside of the container and that way the oil temperature will be about a hundred degrees fahrenheit which will get the oil to the viscosity that we need for the proper heat treatment once it's been in the kiln for five to ten minutes i'll take it out with these pliers which i've already set to the right size to get a good grip on the handle take it out plunge it down into the oil move it up and down in there for a couple minutes to get it down and by that point hopefully it will be hard and very hopefully it won't have warped much because if it warps a lot about all i can do is try and fix it in the temper okay that's probably going to take 15-ish minutes to get back up to temperature and then we have to give it about five minutes once it hits temperature so we've probably got around 20 before we pull that out [Music] the knife should be ready time for to go into oil as soon as i throw some safety glasses on in case the oil splashes anywhere [Music] good news is it is looking very straight yeah all right that has come out looking very nice so far it is still theoretically possible that it will warp but at this point i think we're probably good a lovely amount of scale on the outside of that [Music] there we go so this part that i was holding on to with the tongs didn't go into the oil nearly as quickly and the file kind of bites into it like even with a light pass it just kind of grabs it over here on the spine [Music] it just kind of glides right off it's a very good sign this has been hardened we'll do a proper hardness test now what we have to do is temper it we'll wait for it to cool down to about room temperature and while that's cooling down our oven will cool down we're then going to put this into the oven at about 385 for two hours and that will help make it softer because right now it's very hard but it's very brittle you could likely hit it on something hard and it would just break we don't want that the knife is cooled down it's time to temper it in the oven but first i want to do a hardness test and see where it is okay yeah 62 our our machine probably runs about half of one low so this is probably 62 and a half or something like that which is very hard the heat treatment went very well so far all right the knife has been heat treated after getting it hot and quenching it we then did the tempering cycles i actually ended up doing three because well it's tempering is a time that you can try and fix warps if you counter bend the knife just a little bit while heating it up to the tempering heat sometimes you'll get a change in it and i had a slight warp in the tang and then after the first two heat treatments i had the tip was just angled off a little bit so i did a third one where i tried to fix some of that warpage and i think it did a pretty good job so we are very close just straight i think we'll start by throwing it back in the surface grinder taking off a lot of this scale and making sure that the blade really is straight and true then we can take some measurements of where the middle is and start grinding down to actually put in the bevels on our blade after doing all the heat treating and tempering all three cycles of it i did do another test on our hardness tester and this thing still came out at an hrc 59 so this is going to be a very good hard probably quite tough blade so this is fun my two lines are pretty nice and parallel down the length of the blade looking good getting right here it's maybe a little closer to one side than the other and then i get into this thicker area that i'm hoping to turn into a sort of bolster transition point and the lines sort of skive off in one direction a little bit meaning this thicker spot is not quite in line with the rest of the blade i am just going to grind to the lines and that's going to change some of the shape of this and that's all right [Music] at this point the knife has had as much grinding on the grinder as i feel like i can safely do without ruining it so it's time to move on to hand sanding and i'm going to be trying to smooth it out really nice and flat and pretty taking away all the sharp corners there's some edges that i want to make sure aren't there i want to make sure the spine is really nice and rounded and smooth and that's that's gonna take a while because hand sanding takes forever i have here a very lovely setup by which i mean this is very weird because i've got the sort of integral swell in the middle i can't lay the knife flat onto my sanding plane like i normally would um or at least i can't clamp it there very well so i've got a lot of popsicle sticks stacked up underneath it to try and give it some support and keep it nice and flat we're gonna learn if that actually works in just a [Music] minute the hand sanding should now be complete at least the stuff that i need to do up to this part of the process and the next part of the process is the acid etch so because this is actually a piece of damascus steel it has amazingly cool layers of two different kinds of steel running through it one of those types of metal will react with ferric chloride and turn a very dark color it's going to turn almost black the other type has i believe more nickel in it and it does not react the same way and should stay silvery shiny so properly done this acid etching should bring out the pattern that was forged into it and look just so freaking cool so we're gonna do that and the first step is to thoroughly wash the blade so i don't have any of my oily fingerprints all over [Music] all right with our solution mixed up it's time to put the knife into the solution for about five minutes i have never done the ferret chloride to damascus before so i don't know how much it's going to start revealing it in the first pass got it sitting up with the you know it's laying on the edge there's going to be multiple passes and on subsequent classes i'll alternate so next time i'll do blade down spine up it's probably not contacting in very many points on the spine right now anyway but just to make sure it gets everywhere we'll switch around there's our timer for five minutes time to rinse this oh and it is already bringing that pattern out and looking good this pitcher has water with baking soda in it to neutralize any excess ferric chloride that's still on the blade and it's not fizzing which means i probably rinsed at least almost all of it off [Music] after we take it out of the final etch we're going to be rinsing it off and putting it into a different chemical which is instant coffee so i've prepared it's about eight cups of instant coffee and this concentration from what i understand is you know ten times stronger than anything people would normally drink including like espresso or anything like that the coffee which is also acidic and extremely potently dark it should help stabilize the etching and darken it a little bit and maybe even etch just a little bit more into the metal so i've got this tray set up with wires to hold the knife off the bottom with minimal contact and we're going to pour the coffee into here and then the knife will go in that tray and it's going to stay in there for four hours and i have never tested pouring with this pot before so i'm just really hoping it's going to work and not dump coffee all over my studio oh good it pours nicely [Music] i might turn it over halfway through it shouldn't matter there's so little contact anywhere but just in case when i took the knife out of the coffee it had quite a bit more black staining on it than i was hoping it would something about what i've done has made it so that the parts that are supposed to be silvery have ended up getting etched black and i talked to kyle royer about what could be causing this and it seems that my ferric chloride mixture is working way faster and more intensely than it would normally be expected to so i did another buffing i did like a 3000 grit sandpaper took it back to cleaner and then i put it back in the i actually diluted the ferric chloride a little bit more i put it back in for only a little bit of time like 20 seconds and it still got fairly dark so very carefully i did a light sandpapering of the surface while it was under running water to try and just take the oxide off of the part that's supposed to be shiny that seemed to work okay and then i put it back into the coffee for another four hours and now i've taken it out and it is drying and hardening and it seems to have worked great i really like the look we've definitely got a good contrast between the spots that are supposed to be black and the parts that are supposed to be silvery which currently are sort of like coffee stained silvery the idea is that after i've let it dry overnight i'll be able to take a polishing cloth and get rid of the coffee stain on the silvery part but the staining on the darker part should stay there so it took some doing but i actually really liking where we are right now the knife has been through the acid bath and the coffee bath in fact we've gone back and forth a couple of times and i'm gonna see what happens if i now try to polish the silvery parts of the blade i've never done this before with the cloth and the acid etched damascus i'm not sure how much polishing it's supposed to take i guess as long as i'm seeing it improve i should just keep going [Music] all right i think i still had a little bit too much of the oxide buildup on what's supposed to be the silvery part so instead of just using jewelry polishing cloth i grabbed a piece of 7000 grit sandpaper and i had it wrapped around this little bar which let me do a very focused but very straight abrasive on the top so it shouldn't go down into the recessed areas at all which is the blacker parts and as you can see it really picks up quite a bit of the oxide on the paper so i have to keep moving it but it doesn't take much to get one whole side of the blade going and i think that's a much better silvery effect really gets the contrast that we're hoping for more than just using the cloth not that using the cloth is the wrong thing just that because i got too much oxide buildup from its bath in the ferric chloride i needed something a little bit more aggressive at this point i am going to call the blade done and that's where we're going to end part one of the knife build video part two we're gonna be finishing it up getting all the handle done and just really cleaning this thing up to look perfect sharpening it all the good stuff so two parts this is part one and i am so happy with how this has turned out the pattern that kyle put into this as he forged it is just absolutely beautiful his instructions on how to get a nice finish on it worked great and just tooting my own horn a little bit i'm very happy with how i was able to grind it i like the the shoulder i like just the thickness i got the distal taper that goes all the way down it i think it's going to be a nice light very usable functional knife while also just being absolutely beautiful which is really the goal in knife making is a beautiful work of art that is also a very functional tool so loving how this is going make sure you subscribe so you'll know when to come back to watch part two and uh thank you so much this has been really fun i hope you've enjoyed watching this process as always thank you so much to my supporters on patreon your sport means the world to me and if you are interested in joining them the link for that is down in the description and thanks for watching we'll see you next time

Channel: Nate From the Internet

Views: 163,466

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Id: 1jQ5xtbqTNk

Length: 21min 40sec (1300 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 04 2022