The Loveless Legend How to Make Custom Knives Loveless Merritt

the knife making it in in its most simple form is a repetitive series of steps and it's easy to teach a man to master each step and go on to the next what i find impossible to teach is an understanding of what the knife truly is and if we analyze a cutting edge and if we're aware of what's going on in the modern world we realize how universal a cutting edge is some people view it very lackadaisically very prosaically to me the knife is a supremely useful tool it's a very honorable thing to be doing making knives it's very traditional i i sometimes think that the first specialist among prehistoric men was a man who ran across a bed of obsidian and reached down and picked up a char a sharp piece and realized because perhaps he cut his finger on it that that was a useful tool and he developed his talent at flaking flint or obsidian and suddenly bingo we had a knife maker in that tribe who was so good at it that he could swap his labor of knife making for the other guys labor of going out and hauling in the meter harvesting the potatoes or something so knife making in that sense is among the very earliest of vocational areas the very earliest of craft because after i made my first knife on the ship my god i thought i died in god they haven't all of a sudden i had created something that was so bloody useful where there had been nothing before and i did it it came out of my hands and my mind and i've i've been very happy as a knife maker i'll be a nightmaker until the day i can't be anymore it's really important when we're working with steel to keep in mind how hazardous this work can be if you're careless these grinding machines most of them run about one and a half to two horsepower and they'll eat fingers if you happen to get the fingers in the way you have to be aware of what you're doing in the knife shop all the time if mother's going to come out and tell your supper's ready the first thing you do is shut down you don't try to run a machine while somebody's talking to you you've got visitors in the shop you don't try to do your work on the grinding machines or on the drill presses or anything and keep a conversation going it doesn't work if you get distracted in this work the prices fingers gone and so forth this big 1272 is the strongest grinder we have in the shop and we use it very respectfully the grinders are hazardous probably the most hazardous machine is is the buffer here if it's used carelessly it can jerk the blade a piece of steel out of your hand and sometimes throw it right at you now you'll notice that the center line of this grinder is pretty high the way you use a buffer in polishing steel is the way we do it here is to stay under the middle center line of the buffing wheel like that so that if the if the rag wheel jerks the blade out of your hand it's going to throw it away from you if you're working up here above the center line and it and it jerks it out of your hand and this will happen it always does it can throw it towards you there have been two or three knife makers who've had very serious injuries from buffing machines alone now we told you the buffer was dangerous and the grinders equally dangerous as a drill press and every knife maker either has one and use it or is going to have to sooner or later the drill press is a dangerous machine it's hurt people probably for the last hundred years mechanical shops there isn't a man alive that can hand hold a piece of steel and try to go through it with a 3 8 inch twist drill about a quarter of an inch is about the limit beyond that you want to have your work solidly clamped on the drill press table before you turn it on if you're trying to hand hold a piece of steel while you're drilling with a big drill inevitably as you start to break through the bottom surface the drill is going to catch the steel and start turning it and then it's just a big round rotating slicing machine that's why we clamp our work the drill press is dangerous as are the milling machines or the lathe or any other machine that rotates under power they're all dangerous and you have to be careful when you're using them this is no job for an amateur and it's also no job if you're accident prone if you're always looking for an excuse to get some sympathy for mama stay the hell out of a knife shop now we're going to start the process of actually making a knife and we're going to use probably the most popular knife this shop has ever made it's the four inch drop hunter this is the pattern came off the pattern board and this is a piece of steel we're going to put it on a piece of steel and we're going to clamp it in place now for several minutes now it's very important that we keep this piece of steel very well clamped so that it doesn't shift we're going to go over here we've got a vice set up with horizontal jaws rather than vertical jaws we're going to clamp it up good and scratch our line around it i want to also point out that we're using a carbide pointed scriber here to get these lines an ordinary steel scriber will not hold up to even one pattern it goes dull in a hurry that's why we have to use a carbide scriber the back half of the pattern is scribed that will describe the front half and what you end up with is a picture of the outline of the knife on the piece of steel now we're going to take the the clamped up pattern on the piece of steel over the drill press and we're going to drill the fastener holes in the thong tube hole now these drills are pretty small drills the the smallest the fastener drills are actually less than a three sixteenths and the thong tube hole is less slightly less than a quarter of an inch so it's possible when you're careful to hand hold them and now we're going to ream these holes for precision pole size now we're going to ream this the hole this size and this is a this is a precision reamer and when you're reaming you can generally tell whether the reamer is cutting properly or not if it's not the reamer's dull you need a new one now we have the pattern scribed and the holes in the tang drilled and reamed to size at this point we're ready to take this clamp off now we're done with the layout of the of the pattern and drilling the fastener and thong tube holes and what's going to end up being a knife now we're ready to start grinding this picture we made on a piece of steel to do that we're coming to this big 1272 grinder and because breathing steel dust isn't particularly healthy or pleasant we're going to put a mask on and we're going to put a magnifier on because what we do here determines whether or not we end up with a successful four inch dropped hunter all right at the end of this grinding process we've ground the knife to outline to the layout lines and we now have the definitive controlling shape for the four inch dropped hunter you've noticed that i've been wearing a magnifier while i've been doing this job that's because it's easy to go past the line or not come all the way through it not come all the way to it and then if that's the case then you don't have what we're aiming for the level is four inch dropped hundred that's the reason for the glasses and working close and so forth a lot of work yet to do but what we've done just now determines whether this knife is shaped properly at the end of the job now we're going to do the layout work to guide our grinding operation we want to have a precise set of lines down the center line of the blade exactly 25 000 apart centered on the vertical center line of the blade so to do that we have to know how thick the blade is and it turns out it's 201 thousandths so we simply go to a little pocket calculator we put in 201 and we take out 025 and we end up with 176 divided by 2 is 88 000 we go to the height gauge and we set it for 88 thousands and this is a carbide tip again steel won't do we go in there and we scratch the line around and we flop it and we scratch the other line around and there's a little set of railroad tracks going right down the middle of this chunk of steel that'll tell us when to stop grinding when we get to the grinding machine now we're going to grind these little leading edge angles and come right to these layout lines we just put on the surface plate and the reason for this angle is so that we'll have a warning when we get to the mat the regular bevel grinding will have a warning of how much is left to take off and the other reason for this entry angle which is rather abrupt 45 56 degrees because when we start grinding the major the major edge the the blade bevels we'll use a brand new belt with fresh standing grit if we just grind with that belt against this edge we strip off a lot of that grit before the belt gets a chance to work now we have both sides done the same way we're now ready to go to the next step on the blade itself we'll be grinding the major blade bevels we've come away from the grinding room to take a step here that's very important that we do now and that is to roll the radius at the bottom of the ricasso and we do it with a file we simply get in here and file a radius on here okay now we're going to use a radius gauge this particular one's 560 force and we're going to check the the curve we just put on there and that's a pretty good match the reason we use a 560 force radius gauge is because you double that to get a diameter which equals five thirty seconds and not the size of the end mill that we're going to cut the nickel silver guard that slips right down on here we're going to brighten up the sides of this knife especially in the ricasso so we've got good clean sound steel to mount the guard on you start out with about a 120 grit belt here but then you want to finish up with a much finer belt and take those deep scratches out all right what we're going to do now is hologram the tang on both sides a little bit to take most of the meat off so that we don't have so much to stock to take off when we go to the platen because that's a very severe operation you've got the eight inch wheel on here this time don't you okay all right that that's looking good we've got a nice nice hollow grind there and it flares out good here on both sides and we're down to our layout lines at the heel of blade so i think we're ready to go to the flat platen now what jim is doing is grinding both sides of the of this tang to a two plane and establishing the taper that we'll basically be building that hammer on later that handle on now the reason for tapering the tang in this shop is to put the center of gravity of the knife in the center of the blade rather than having it be so butt heavy as it would be if all that fuel were left at the back end this way we've taken a lot of steel out of the back and we've taken a lot of steel out of the front when we get our master bevels ground we've got a very nice light lively knife in the past we've always ground these bevels free hand but not too long ago we started using a base support this platen here to hold the blade up while we force it into the curb of the grinding wheel it gives us a better initial control to set up the first hollow and that's that's the important hollow so go ahead jim turn it on [Music] [Music] now that blade gets quite hot while he's grinding you have to stop every few strokes and get it in the water because the blade gets hot enough to burn your fingers you'll lose control of your grind and ruin the blade there you go you can see how we're developing the first hollow you're getting a little bit thin once you get your hollow established on the straight part of the blade you can follow it right around to the point as he's doing now at this point we're putting on a 120 grit belt to start start smoothing up that rough bevel because ultimately when this thing's ready to go to heat tree it'll be a very smooth blade because you don't want to heat treat it the way it is now because these grind lines are very deep you wouldn't dare put that into heat treat as it is you remember what i said about a sharp burr edge you see that edge right there it's like a very rough razor and if you handle it carelessly you can really get hurt by it now we're going to the 120 good belt to clean up that bevel we've taken away the work support so now it's all free hand work notice he's got his wrists in against his body the reason for that is if he's out there the belt will jerk it down and ruin the bevel you've got to be able to support and control the way you're holding the blade on the wheel you'll also notice we've slowed the grinder down so it's not going so fast the general rule is as you go toward the finish work you slow your grinder down as you get successfully finer belts we start with a 60 grit belt we'll actually end up at the very end of the process with a belt called the 15 micron but our steps are a 60 grit 120 grit 220 grit 320 grit 400 grit and 500 grit we'll use about eight different grit sizes on this belt the finer the belt the slower you want the grinding wheel to go that's looking more and more like a knife blade now we've gone to a 320 grit belt to eliminate the two drunkard scratches which we use to eliminate the 60 grit scratches as we go down in grit size we get a finer and finer finish on that on those blade bevels you'll notice that these belts are running and open on open pulleys and wheels there are no guards on the belt line ideally to be totally safe for any given setup you should be have your belt line very well guarded and only the face of the the wheel accessible but the fact is we use so many different belt geometries so many different ways of running these belts that we we keep open belt lines but that's an invitation to trouble in the one-man shop where the fella doesn't know what he's doing osha would never pass this way of doing things the blades are looking better and better and smoother and smoother all the time in this shop we use the tapered tang form of blade the full tapered full tang and of course we grind a full blade bevel instead of a half bellow the object is to have no more weight in the hand than necessary when you're actually using the knife but still have all the strength you need the same strength of the the the strength we need comes about of because of the steel structure we're using and the way we grind it and shape it what we're going to do now is fit the guard to the ground blade and we do that prior to heat treat now this actually measures 0.196 thickness across the picasso and this guard has been pre-cut but undercut and it's only about 192. so we're going to go into the milling machine the little six-inch mill clamp it in place and pick up this dimension we want and we're going to gradually come to size you don't take off a lot of the time because one thing that's important to remember in this line of work once you take it off you can't put it back on so we nibble away at it to be sure to come to size oh beautiful good nothing wrong with that job what we're going to do now this blade's ready to go to heat treatment except for for one thing we're going to install the guard or some people call it the hilt put it right up and through the bottom of the ricasso seat it in place and clamp it so that it's very secure and can't slip we put it in the vise and we're going to drill a hole yes yeah that looks good we've drilled the hilt pin holes but now we're going to do one more thing and i want to say here that the essence of success in the mechanical arch is predictability you want to know how it's going to work out before you do it otherwise your successes are just accidental and we don't like accidental successes because we can't always duplicate them so these two drill holes are now going to be reamed to a precision size now we've got two precision holes that'll take our hilt pins exactly and precisely with no slop well we reamed the hose to precision size and now check and see if we did if we picked the right reamer if you pick the wrong rear yeah that's pretty good well what do you know things are going pretty good today here all right that's looking pretty good okay now the guard or hilt as they call it is in place and pinned in place so it can't shift so now we're ready to make our finger cut out for that we go to the big bridgeport mill we've got that guard pinned in place now you'll notice that since we be after we set the guard in place on the blade and we clamped it up the clamp has been on all the time since we've not unclamped it now we're going to make the finger cut yeah that's looking good now we just made that finger cut looked like it turned out pretty good i think we're going to be able to save this job at least i hope so we're going to make any money this week [Music] that's at least as good a job as they do down in the high rent district all right we've got it drilled we've got it ream we've got a pin and we've got the finger cut made now one last thing we need to do to this thing before we send it out for heat treat otherwise things can be very confusing what we're going to do is number this set and here's an interesting little number a six there and a six there now we'll go to the other number the other number there and the other number there that way i'll never forget this knife now the guard and the hilt are numbered together we gotta unpin it and there they are the two parts mated and fitted together with some some degree of precision each of them numbered the same and this knife is ready for heat treat now because this kind of steel is a fairly complex high carbon high chrome high manganese tool steel it's not the sort of a thing that you can stick in a microwave nor can you put in a celery a selling torch on it and just bring it up red hot and dip it in the nearest can of motor oil this is heat treated in what we call a gaseous furnace where all the oxygen in the furnace chamber is purged so the steel can't decarburize while it's being brought up to heat and it gets pretty hot it has to be brought up to around 1975 degrees and held for something like 10 or 12 minutes and then gas quenched which simply means that the furnace suddenly has a great deal of nitrogen under pressure admitted to the furnace and that quenches the steel and hardens it at that point it has to be chilled down to room temperature and then it's put into a deep sub-zero chamber where it's taken down to about minus 200 degrees depending on the shop you're using at that point theoretically you've gotten all the martensite structure you're going to get out of this piece of tool steel now you pick it you take it out of that deep subzero and you put it into another draw furnace at 975 degrees for two hours after the two hours you take it out you let it cool down to room temperature then you put it right back in that draw furnace bring it up to 975 for another two hours now this is the very famous among heat treaters and tool makers it's the very famous two plus two tempering draw that almost all high speed steels get it's one of the reasons why we get such great performance out of this particular alloy grade for a working field knife there is no other alloy grade that will work quite as well as this does for most of us well that looks pretty good jim come here what do you think of this i think we can save it looks good to me i think we might even make a dollar or two off of it if we can find a customer good if we don't i can always put it in the house for a collection or you can steal it and take it home you know we can do something retirement fun yeah retirement from that that's the typical and classic loveless dropped hunter than which there ain't no better right as you kept you kept telling me all these years good knife really good night yeah matter of fact it's the first deer hunter's knife that was truly designed specifically for that kind of work been very successful for us and this is what the same thing looks like after heat treat you'll notice it's a sort of a dark very dark gray purple almost a black color but aside from that the geometry is the same the shapes the same now the difference is this is soft steel this is 60 rockwell steel this still has been he treated it's hard you could wrap some kind of a handle on this thing put a cutting edge on it go and work it all day that we don't but you could whereas this steel is useless as a working tool but that's the difference the shape is there guards have been installed everything's everything's the same except for the condition of the steel one is soft and one is hard now we're ready to go ahead and finish off this heat treated blade polish it out get the guard soldered in place and then finally we come to the building of the handle now jim's got a fresh new 400 grit belt on the grinder it's going pretty slow and he's what he's doing is getting back to clean steel from that color that left over from heat treat see how that's brightening up this is the beginning of the process of finishing off the blade prior to assembly we're starting with 400 and then we'll go to an 800 grit belt a 15 micron belt and then we'll go to the buffing machine where we really put the glaze finish over the so-called mirror polish on the blade now all through this process we have not had the fan and the vacuum on now's a good time i'm going to put the the finely ground blade onto the polishing lathe now and show you how we come up to the mirror finish now this is a roughing wheel and it's quite aggressive from this roughing wheel which has a stainless steel compound we're going to go to the green chrome [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] the object here is to be able to come out like almost like a mirror [Music] you'll note that again we're below the center line of the wheel so if the wheel were to catch the blade it would take it away from us this is very hazardous work i've got my wrist hard against my body to control that blade against the polishing wheel and if we've done it right we end up with this and it's at this point where if you haven't done all the preceding steps carefully you might find some deep scratches in there maybe even from back at the 60 grit stage and if you do you've got to go all the way back to the beginning and do it all over again we've got pretty much of a mirror as you can see the way this thing handles the light it's a brilliant high polish what jim is doing now is washing the blade and here's why you'll notice that the last thing i did on the buffing wheel was use a green chrome wheel to pull up the mirror shine but the problem with that is that it leaves a very very thin coating of a wax on the blade that will inhibit a good solder joint so we wash this thing with a mild detergent solution very carefully so now this blade is clean and it's ready to solder and that's going to be our next step we're going to install the guard on this braid that we polished a little while ago and get it ready for soldering of course we very carefully drilled and reamed those holes before heat treat and fitted the guard before he'd treat and now everything fits up real nice but it's not ready for soldering yet because it's got to be closed up a little bit and to do that we're going to actually peen these pins in place here on the bench block the bench block is a section of 132 pound standard mainline railway track that's been cut off and i've machined one in and we use this curved end it's a very fine piece of equipment we're using by the way a very smooth faced hammer it's only kept the reason why the the handle is red that means it's a very special hammer it's only used for this particular job as we as we peen these pins down we're closing up the gap so that when we solder we'll have a very close tight fit the pins are exactly the same material as they hit it as the guard itself that is to say 30 nickel silver and they're very malleable they do a very good job of riveting down okay that looks pretty good yeah okay we're gonna solder the guard on now that we've assembled it and pinched it down with the pins we're gonna solder it i've prepared the electric soldering iron with a special nose piece on it and now i'm applying flux around the guard this nose piece has been machined to just take the tang thickness and we put it down with a tang into the fixture with a blade up now we start applying the solder and we solder around those pins that we peened over to be sure there's not going to be any unsightly gaps and we start flowing the solder along this this joint face now the object of this is to have a totally saturated joint with a very smooth finish line visually after the handle is assembled we're using a solder that is not a lead tin solder it's a bismuth alloy made by eutectic alloys and it it flows at a good deal higher temperature than the regular lead tin solder this particular solder is used when that when the when when they assemble food processing lines stainless steel food processing lines for instance the new york board of health approves this solder because there's no lead in it to leach out and transformed arsenic what we like about it in the knife business is it stays bright it doesn't go dull like a lead tin solder very good robert only been doing this for so many years but we got a total saturation all the way through that joint in other words we've got a good solder joint here because we've got lead coming out the back end that means it's a totally saturated joint and thus it's a weatherproof joint and it'll survive as long as a knife will survive we're going to now that we've got this thing beautifully soldered we're going to take off this surplus solder on the rear surface of the guard and on the tang to get it ready for precision handle pieces so that we really got a tight fit we used to do this with a file years ago it was a very tedious job and you couldn't really keep it straight very well there was always a little bit of fall off on the on the ends so we developed this technique several years ago and it's been very successful the object of course is when we put that handle material on there and glue it all up with epoxy everything you want it you want the handle to be perfectly matched to the rear surface of the guard the way we do this is with a milling machine you have to come down and just if this is a carb a little carbide end mill you have to come down and barely touch the tang if you hit too hard you go to gouge it and ruin the jobs [Music] that noise you hear is the bottom of the cutter just touching the tang so the carbide cutter which is a very expensive piece of gear but nothing does it quite as well we have a true plane on the rear surface of the guard that'll match a true plane that i'm going to make on the handle material and we come down and contacted the tang so that all that surplus solder is now gone you can see that it's not there anymore we've got true straight flat metal surfaces and this is the only way i know to do this job you can't do it as well with a hand file it can be done but not as well i just about got this knife ready to start putting the handle on now we're going to do one last thing to this knife blade before we start building the tang we're going to sand blast and clean up the tang now that has there's two reasons for it one is of course to get it clean so that we don't change the behavior of the epoxy adhesive and the other thing is that the other reasons give that epoxy adhesive a very tight firm grip on the surface because tang sandblasting it roughens it up it makes it almost impossible to remove the handle slabs without literally destroying them now we've got a very smooth and slightly rough surface on these planes that the epoxy will bite very good there's no other way to do it than with a sandblaster i used to try to rough these surfaces up on a sharp burr on the polishing lathe but that didn't do the same thing this is the greatest improvement in handle construction we've made in this shop in the last six or eight years now once this tang is sandblasted it shouldn't be touched with any greasy hands or anything because it's in fact mechanically and surgically clean and that's what the sand lasting does of course you've got to be very careful with your sandblast cabinet to keep it away from your precision machinery because if you don't the grit will migrate and the next thing you know you're in trouble with your good stuff that's why it's here where all the grid is anyway good job now we're going to build a handle on this knife what we're going to do now is prepare these two pieces of green canvas micarta to precisely fit the tang and the rear of the guard now this fixture gives us both angles at the same time this plane is at about three quarters or to almost a degree of incline and then the divergence is on the pins so when we come off of here these handle pieces will go right against that that knife blade that tang in a perfect fit this is another little thing we worked up here several years ago we used to do it on the platen of a belt grinder and then clean up with a file when we do it this way we don't have any cleanup to make we've got perfectly sanitary clean sharp [Music] there we are perfectly machined surfaces to go onto the tapered tang and match up to the back face of the garden there isn't any other way to do this as precisely and nicely as you can do it on a milling machine with the proper fixture now we're ready to fit the handle materials i've prepared the red liners and we've got the green canvas pieces we just took off the milling machine cut and we put it up into the tang and fit it very tightly and closely and then we clamp it very firmly in place and you check for fit and that's a good fit this isn't going to be a good knife it's going to be a great knife now notice that we're making this handle out of green canvas micarta the very trade the most traditional handle material for a hunting knife in the american market is stag 150 years ago we used the horns of domestic animals but the last 20 years we've been using the horns of the sambar animal from india they dropped those horns on the plains of northern india every year you don't kill the animal to get the horn they just drop it like our own our own animals do and companies import this stuff and so we we have to make a lot of stag handles the the japanese market is very very demanding of stag the european market on the other hand they don't like stag they want micarta such as this material whenever a customer asks me to build him a knife and he wants the very best handle material the very best quality i can put on the knife there's only one answer this green canvas micarta on the other hand some customers say bob please make me a knife and give me some good stag the handle then i always say well why do you want a second-class handle material on a first-class knife because in fact that's what it is there's no stag or animal horn or hard wood in the world that will give you just give you a lifetime of service that this material with will it's in fact the best thing we can put on a knife it is not visually pleasing to many people but it is to me and to a few other people i've got customers that won't have anything but green canvas and that's all i want on my own personal knives now we're going to drill this half handle assembly that we've got clamped up it's very tightly fitted we're going to drill it to take the handle fasteners and the thong tube now we're going to pin these holes off so that this handle plate can't possibly shift in the clamp up while we drill this other big big hole by the way you'll notice that each of these little drill presses has its own individual little 60 watt lamp shining right on the drill point the overall shop lighting is large eight foot twin fluorescent fixtures and it gives us a very good overall light level probably as good as you'll find in most shops but we still like some very small direct lights on our work sites to help us see precisely exactly what we're doing if there is any typical failure of a shop craftsman it's his vision over the years it'll get worse and worse if he doesn't take care of it if you've got enough light that helps now we're drilling the tong tube rough hole now that handle is drilled in place and it can't move our next step will be to saw the surplus material away and then grind some more and we'll have to turn it around do the same thing the opposite side going to be a great knife no question about it now we've got this thing drilled and pinned off so that the handle material can't shift but now we're going to trim off this surplus material on the bandsaw [Music] before i start i want to warn warn you that this is the most hazardous machine in the shop if you handle it carelessly you're going to leave pieces of yourself on the table when you walk away and it will smart some not to mention the fact if you lose your critical members you know like like the apes we have opposing thumbs and these digits are very important you lose them you can't work no more got a couple things more to say one thing that's very important when you're dealing with a band saw i'm sure some of you have noticed this is when the blade gets dull you got to push harder and that's dangerous you want to stand at the saw erectly and you don't want to be leaning into it you want to be in control of the work you're feeding through the blade all the time you notice these two pins sticking up they're my hand hole for feeding this job i'm not pushing with my hands in alignment with the blade they're well off to one side because as you finish your cut and break through inevitably it jumps forward a little bit now we've cut away all the surplus handle material to within about a sixteenth of an inch of the steel of the tang itself because that's all surplus it's not on the finished knife the next operation is we're going to go into the grinder or take them going to take a little bit more off come very close to that steel outline with a little bit of a slant on it and that will very make a very neat job when we go to the epoxy now we're just going to clean up a little bit more of this surface material and then give it a little bit of a slant that'll just naturally lead into the handle profiles turn those things on darling [Music] [Music] all right [Music] now if you can follow i'm going to step to my right about what 48 inches [Music] so okie doke well now we're going to take this handle off just punch out these these pins and we'll go ahead and do the same thing to the other side that we just did to this side starting with the initial clamp up the drilling band saw job everything exactly the same but in a mirror image this the the red fiber material is nothing more than a little personal vanity of my own i've always liked girls that had a little bit of lipstick on them and i think red is a very exciting color it's an up color so we put red fiber between our handle material and the tang and it has another true function especially with stag handles in that it's very compatible with the epoxy and stag has a natural wax content in it where it doesn't like to stick to the epoxy nearly as well as it will to the red fiber so we use the red fiber as an additional adhesive element in the sandwich structure now i've got some white fiber and i got some black fiber and i've had customers ask me to put in black or white liners and i say nope the loveless knife has a red liner it always has and it always will i happen to like red fiber and basically i make these knives to please myself now i'm very gratified if it pleases everybody else but basically it's me i've got to please and i just like red on my knife something like the red insert on the front side of a pistol we use a particular form of handle fastener that i designed years ago it's not the ordinary cutlery root in fact it's a it's an 832 flathead machine screw and under the head of it we use a brass bush in this case and on the bottom end we use a brass nut they have to be installed to precise dimensioning depth the countersink to precise dimensioning depth in the handle plates or the handle form won't come out now we've learned over the years what for various model knives what depth we need and i made up this little setting plate some years ago and in this case for the four inch dropped hunter we're going to use a critical depth from the back to the top of the counter the top of the nut of 197 thousandths and that's what i've set the depth of the countersink at 197 thousands no i'm wrong we're going to use 212. excuse me all the hell now we're going to countersink the front holes but we want the the rear part of the knife to be slightly thicker from front to back than the front side so we put in a spacer that'll keep the countersink from going quite as deep on these rear holes now this these handle parts are just about ready for epoxy assembly all right get these out of the way for a minute and we're going to mix our epoxy now this epoxy is pretty common stuff this particular brand happens to be cone app and only because it works well and it's it's not at all critical for mixing ratio the base resin has a big hole in the tube the hardener has a little hole in the tube and you just squeeze out equal lengths and i'm not sure what we knifemakers did before we had epoxy i guess we used something but anyway this is miracle stuff mix it up we've got about a 20 minute pot light for this material so you can't mix it and then go in and have lunch you've got to stay here and put the knife together and we're going to start we're coating the near side of the tang or what the collector boys call the obverse side i've never been able to figure out why they do it but i just say the near side we cut it up good then we grab the piece of red fiber that i've already marked in for near side we put it down on it now we coat the fiber this is nothing but a common ordinary soldering brush that's been cut off a little bit to make it more manageable we cover this whole surface for the mixed epoxy and then the near side handle goes on there at this point we install our fasteners push them down through that hole now we unclamp this and just turn it over this horizontal vice by the way is one of our secret weapons around this shop now we'll put the far side red fiber in place and put some more epoxy on be sure that you get plenty of epoxy up behind the guard all the way around both screws and the thug tube and we put the far side handle piece on and we run a couple of nuts down there i've already checked these nuts to be sure that the threads are good and they're free running now we take it out turn it back over again so the near side's faces and i reach up and get another one of my favorite tools a power screwdriver [Music] now you can set various degrees of torque on this thing but we don't have it set up to maximum torque because if you really squeeze too hard with a screwdriver you'll squeeze all the epoxy out of your sandwich and then it won't work but you'll notice that we have epoxy coming out all the way around both sides of the handle material that means we've got a good epoxy job you don't have to do this but i do it it's just less to take off when it hardens up and we go back into the grinding room to shape this handle and there's our knife ready and we'll we'll just wait for it to get hard and then we'll shape the handle the knives we make are very simple they're almost classically so they exhibit an economy of line there's no there are no protruders there's nothing there's nothing superfluous about the loveless knife design it's very pure supremely functional and in its way it's very restrained it's uh they're just very neat they look right they look right to me and practice has shown over the past 30 years that they they look right to a lot of the world or a lot of knife users i can't explain quite how i get there except that friends of the drop hunter which is the most famous knife in the shop has gone through about seven generations of design each time being refined more and more in a minimalist way the very earliest dropped hunters were nowhere near as functional and neat as they are now it's taken time to get there but then of course it's taken time for me to mature my own views of of cutlery design too the mirror finish is a primary requirement if you're trying to achieve corrosion resistance a maximum amount of corrosion resistance or as we say down on the street resistance to rusting and you have to have a mirror finish a super finish a very absolutely smooth highly polished finish because any place there's a rough part microscopically there's a little rough scratch or something the active corrosive agents and they are in even in the air can attack those little rough grooves and that's where corrosion can start once it starts of course it grows these are not truly rust proof knives they are rust resistant knives we get it from the technology we get it from the in the alloy itself any any steel any tools deal that's got 14 16 18 chrome is going to be essentially corrosion resistant way back in the delaware days i used jesus 139b with two and a half percent nickel that was very hard to rush to but this stuff is uh so much better than anything we've had in the past that it's uh it's just incomparable 20 years ago if you ask the average knife user would he want a stainless knife or a carbon steel knife joe i want a carbon steel knife i can keep them sharp well those days are long gone these steels that we use now primarily the ats 34 the 154cm vg42 they are to all intents and purposes rust-proof with a very minimum amount of care that's the reason for the brilliant shine that we worked so hard to get here in the grinding room and on the buffing as for the hollow grinding there are of course two major ways to grind a knife either hollow grinding or flat grinding the problem with the flat ground knife is that after years and years of being in the field and being sharpened many many times each time it sharpens it gets an increasingly blunter cutting edge the hollow grind knife on the other hand can be ground over years of time halfway up the blade and you're still within thin steel and you can still achieve a sharp cutting edge you can't do that with a flat ground knot flat ground knife ends up like a bloody cold chisel a toil on a well-designed knife is a total waste of good useful blade surface the toil of course is this big cut cutout right ahead of the at the lower part of the blade ahead of the guard and some traditional makers in this country used a big choil so they could put their finger ahead of the ahead of the guard and choke the knife when you've done when you have to do that you've made the damn knife too long anyway aside from that in use the point of maximum leverage in the cutting edge is that is the is the cutting edge that's closest to the guard where you have maximum leverage coming down on the job for instance cutting tent pegs or starting firewood or something like that i find no need for a choil visually they're very disruptive and technically they can be a weakening point in the blade too we've got this thing several hours ago we epoxied this up the epoxy is now cured and it's hard and we're about ready to start shaping the handle you're going to hear some noise because this generates a lot of smoke and flames so we're going to turn on the vacuum and the fan [Music] now so now we've got the rough shape of the curves cut into the cut into the handle with the big rough belt machine now we're going to smooth this thing up and make it feel better i'm going to do it with this thing this is a flexible belt it's not backed up and it's these wheels are rounded a little bit so it gives the belt a curvature which helps us actually shape the concave surfaces of our handle symmetry we're looking to for symmetry both sides of the knife the vertical center line both have both sides of the knife have to be an image of the other side each side has to be an image of the other so in other words we want a symmetrical knife handle if we knew that every knife was going to be used by right-handed people we could make it a certain way but we don't have any control over that so we have to make it so that it's useful to anybody plus which is just pleasing that way because the human be the human spirit has a natural urge to achieve symmetry and that's what we work for in this position now we roughed it in over there we pretty much finished the shaping here now it's a matter of polishing out and getting it ready for the trademark and the leather work in the sheath this steel must be mirror polished to give its best corrosion resistance all stainless steels need a very very finely polished surface to be the most corrosion resistant or as some people would say rust proof that's that's not really true but when they're highly polished they're very corrosion resistant whereas if they were less scratching everything corrosion could get a bite that's one of the reasons we put a mirror polish on these loveless knife blades when we're finished with this object they'll go out and give somebody two or three hundred years of service if they know how to do it and there isn't a better deer hunter's knife in the bloody world than this one it's exactly and precisely what it needs to be and nothing less and nothing more i don't know how to do any better than this well we got this knife all finished and the last thing we do is we want to put a trademark on it and this is the way we do we got the machine hooked up the ground wire goes to the blade the power wire goes to this stencil holder with a wet cotton surface and we've got the stencil taped onto the blade we go down on this for about a second or two come off and let it degas another couple of seconds and degas we do that four times each time we're burning it deeper then we reverse polarity from dc to ac and that will darken the bottom of the etch about three or four seconds take it off unclip the ground and now we have a trademark now the way we make a sheath for this knife of course we've cut it out to a pattern folded over the back flap and stitched it out stitched it down this of course will make our our belt loop but now we've got to get it into hot water and get it pretty wet so that we can actually wet mold it around the knife so one property that leather has that no other substance has and it's why leather the height of a cow is as far as i know absolutely irreplaceable we set it down in there about like that we hold it shut and we with our thumb we press press it into the into the leather push the leather down around the knife now this is called the wet molding process it's the only way there is to get a really good special custom snug fit for the knife you're putting your sheath around these knives although they're very very closely alike they are not interchangeable and when we open it up we'll see the line of the blade on the back side and the front side of that sheath and there's the reverse pattern of the handle and the other thing we need is on the back flap down the bottom of the blade pocket a couple of drain holes so if you happen to be wearing your knife and you're crossing a creek in northern colorado mountains trying to chase down a mule deer or an elk and you fall and slip and fall into the creek you get water all over everything when you stand up the water will drain out of your sheets instead of just sitting there and rusting the blade or otherwise messing things up now it's wet molded and we've already cut a welt to fit that blade now the way the welt fits the knife put into the sheath it's held slightly open the weld fits in there very snugly when you close that up and stitch it up you've got the level of snap fit sheet and that's all there is to it i'm going to have to wait for that to dry and then we can cement it in and stitch it in the finished job looks like this this very knife you can hear that little click that means that the point of the guard has gone past the internal cam of the welt into its home position i don't like keeper straps on leather on knife sheets especially so i came to this sweat form pouch design many years ago and i've never had reason to change it and literally is the best there is even if you happen to go upside down off your horse on a shale slide on that mountainside that knife's not going to come out of the sheet it's made of eight to nine ounce backs cowhide backs the very best grade leather i can buy runs about five bucks or so a pound and then a very heavy piece of sole leather which is exactly the same kind of leather the shoemaker would have sold your shoes out of down inside the two halves of the of the sheath clam shell and that stitcher is strut is that structure is stitched up and it becomes very thick and strong and rigid so that you now have a safe sheath to keep your knife in there's nothing flimsy about a loveless knife sheet probably one of my greatest criticisms of most factory knives is that the sheets are miserable but ours aren't and that's the end product and i'm also pretty proud to put my name on it too once a sheath is made like this it should give you 25 or 30 years of service perfectly good service without having any problems at all unless you use a lot of soft wet saddle soap in which case it will limber up [Music] [Music] [Music] satisfaction is in making a useful tool a tool that can be perceived by many men to be of obvious high quality and having been able to do that from the most pedestrian of raw materials a steel bar and chunks of other stuff and some micarta and maybe some cowhide and so forth and you end up with such a magnificent tool that it has a unity it has a purpose it has some honor it has a and it has my name on it and if if you want to call that egotism then so be it i tried to get along with my fellow man but i won't compromise my night making this is living creatively making something out of nothing is the biggest kick in the world there's nothing like it i don't care what kind of drugs you want to talk about what kind of whiskey you want to drink what kind of sex you want to play with there's nothing nothing absolutely nothing that comes that that gives you this tremendous high of creating something out of your hands and your mind and your hand-eye coordination with your shop tool sure it's not pleasant gotta eat a lot of grit [Music] those of us who've done it over the years hell is probably gonna accelerate our dying but i don't really care about that i'm gonna leave around and leave behind me a hell of a good body of work and i can see where two or three hundred years from now if this society still exists there are going to be men who will have loveless knives and who will like them and use them value them and that's good enough for me i don't need anything more than that [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Fernando Maia

Views: 62,127

Keywords: knifemaking, bobloveless

Id: _kV3kHo6z_c

Length: 92min 30sec (5550 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 11 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/danelectro15]

Not my video but thought I'd share.

Loveless style knives are possibly the most deceptively simple knives you could make. Hidden in their minimalist, form follows function style is a complexity and difficulty known only to those who attempt them.

Making a loveless style dropped hunter will teach you basically everything you need to know about knife making.

[u/southsamurai]

I'm slightly in love with that guy now.

The casual competence and clear manner of the instructions remind me of my grandfather. And the way he talks about knives is the way I think about them.

A few weeks ago, my stepdaughter asked me why I'm so into knives, why I have passion for them. Part of what I told her is similar to his intro, about the fundamental nature of humans and tool use, how the knife is the quintessential human tool. He said it differently (and better), but it resonated with me on a deep level.

It also makes me really want one of his knives lol.

Thank you very much for sharing this, I don't think I would have run across it on my own.