These tips will improve your bevel grinding!

hey guys welcome back to my channel i'm erin with aileen knives and tonight we're going to try to perfect our grinding i'm going to take this bar right here and i'm going to chop it up into a whole bunch of pieces [Music] [Applause] foreign [Applause] check this out small batch we did seven these are all unique i didn't use any type of uh pattern or anything like that so each one of these is slightly different and i kind of pride myself in doing one-offs and unique knives so each one of these is different they're all a different length different grinds some of the grinds are going to come a little higher or lower it just depends on you know how high the grind comes to get them even that's all i really care about and i'm going to go ahead and get these finished out so what i'm going to do to finish these i've got these heat treated so now i'm going to walk over to my horizontal grinder and we're going to do the profiles on these we're going to get the profiles completely dialed in and sanded out it's much easier to do it on the 2x72 than to do it by hand so i'm going to go ahead and get these profiles completely dialed in before i move to the flats i definitely don't want to do anything on these flats and then do the profiles because i slide these back and forth on a work rest and it could introduce new scratches on these flats with that being said we're going to jump over here to the horizontal and we're gonna get these profiled out since these are heat treated i'm not gonna wear gloves because i really need to feel the heat transfer through the metal and make sure that i don't start getting these hot so i'm gonna go ahead and run these with bare hands that way i can feel how hot the metal is the cool thing is since i'm doing seven i could do a little bit and set this one down do a little bit set this one down and just move right through the stack and that helps out quite a bit normally i'd have a bucket of water here and i'd take some time to dip these in but since i'm doing a small batch i can just keep moving this whole time it goes pretty quick actually i just real quickly wanted to show you what i was talking about profiling these and getting the scratches see the wear marks on the the flats of these knives and this is from moving these back and forth on that work rest so you certainly don't want to go and clean these up and then profile these and put these wear marks on your nice clean uh flats next i'm going to take these over to the the vertical sander and i'm going to use a magnet to hold these and we're going to clean up the the flats and then we'll move on to grinding the bevels i've got my stack of blades i've got my magnet basically i'm starting with a fresh 80 grit belt here we'll just take it like that stick it on there i like to grind it from the tang down if you put it like this you could put pressure at the top and since the material is thinner here what's likely to happen is you'll put an offset distal taper in your blade and you don't really want that you want this to remain flat you don't want to put an extra taper in it i'd like to say it's always good to move back and forth on your belt that way if you get any worn spots on your belt you're not cutting a track into your knife if you go back and forth then you get in a nice even grinding you're not going to wear down any particular spot on the belt especially if you're grinding the the edge of a knife in any way if you stick that in one place or you're going to wear a line in your belt and then if you try to grind a flat it's going to leave artifacts in your blade there so you definitely don't want to go and do that i like to move it back and forth always let's go ahead and get our safety gear on and get this wrapped up kaboom so i've noticed when i grind my flats i really start to see the shortcomings of my initial grindings you know you start to see where your grindings were either low or high this one came out where i was kind of washing out the tip that's going to be a totally different kind of grind but all these you can kind of see now of course i do rough grinds on these so i'm not too worried about it before i go to heat treat but you know you could see little dips and stuff in the grinds now is where i'm going to go in and i'm going to perfect those grinds and i'm going to bring them up to my finish height i've taken the flats out to 220 grit and you'll also notice that i don't really care about scratches down here i'm focusing on the flats right in this area right here because really this is the only area that you're gonna see on the knife after i'm done finish grinding this little tiny area right there all the rest of this is going to get finished ground when i bring these bevels up uh this is fairly thin material so taking the bevel from there there goes really fast okay guys here's the first one i just finished the grind on this one i took this one up to 120 grit on a fresh belt i made sure to take my grind all the way up but not to break the top spine of the knife because you definitely want to stop your grind before the top of the knife oh look i got a helper down here check him out what's up dude quick rundown on how i finished grind these i take and put a brand new 36 grit belt on that's the workhorse right here the 36 grit belt on these hardened blades i can really get into this blade with this 36 grit and pull this grind up and it's not going to heat this blade up much at all in fact the 36 grit it throws all the sparks away from your metal and there's less surface area contact because it's such a coarse grit so i do most of the heavy lifting with this 36 grit i'll get these lines dialed in pretty close to where i want them and then i'll go ahead and pop on an 80 clean this up pop on a 120 clean it up further and then if i'm going to do surface conditioning belts i stop at 120 and move over to the scotch brite and then if i'm going to hand rub this i'll go from 120 to 220 the 120 to 220 probably takes the most time on the belt sander for me it seems like the 220 is real finicky on the platen i have to fiddle around with the knife quite a bit to get the 120 scratches out all up to 220 without washing out my lines the 220 it's really easy to wash out your grind lines or to mess things up when you get to that 220 you got to be real careful when when you're drawing your blade across so you don't burn the steel or put any little divots in it or surface imperfections because when you move over to your hand sanding sled you'll see it immediately and those are really hard to get out a lot of times when i first started making knives i found that it was better for me to stop at 120 and then immediately jump over to hand sanding and sand it out it only took a couple years of me getting tired of hand sanding to really buckle down and figure out on the 2x72 how to step up to that 220 grit belt and really work the finesse pulling through on the knife to get a good grind off of the machine to make the hand sanding a little easier i just wanted to give you a quick run down of how i'm grinding all these like i said i'm going to pound out the 36 grit belt draw these bevels up to keep this nice and cool i still use water the whole time and bare hands so that i know that i'm not overheating it but i'm doing two things here i'm drawing the bevel up and i'm also thinning out the edge to my ending edge thickness that i'm desiring for these knives each one of these will be slightly different these are different blade profiles and different shapes some of them i want a full flat grind with a really thin edge so it has perfect cutting geometry for skinning and things like that some of these are going to be more bushcraft style knives where i want this a little thicker and then the edge geometry will lend itself better for you know chopping wood and or not chopping wood but whittling wood sticks and stuff like that and it's that the edge will have more meat behind it and will stand up a little bit longer [Music] so [Music] so number seven done done seven knives ground out let me take you over and show you as i suspected i was absolutely correct grinding a whole pile of knives all in one session did absolutely work at improving my grinds i decided to grind seven knives this time seven knives is what i came up with because i could fit seven of these knives within a four foot piece of stock this was incredible i could suggest doing this for every knife maker out there here's the gist of it every time that i've made a knife i normally make a knife from start to finish i design it i grind it i profile it i grind the bevels i heat treat it i finish grind it i make a guard i put the handle material on it finish the handle material i go into sheath making i make a sheath i finish the sheath i take pictures i produce a video the whole meal deal that entire process i've got now condensed down into about a week it takes me a week to do that entire process but from start to finish that puts me a good solid week out from doing another grind so it's not fresh in my mind this was really cool i decided to do seven knives to grind them all at once i'll admit the purpose wasn't to learn better grinding i've got a whole other reason that i ground these seven knives but what i found out through grinding seven knives together all at once was that doing that much grinding in one session taught me several things it taught me how to be more fluid with my grinding it taught me how to get my grind lines to match up better from one side to another really what it boiled down to was the time in front of the grinder the time in front of the grinder was multiplied times seven to do all these all at once i would say that that was huge i can't wait to do this again in fact now that i've done this once i'm going to do this again and again and again each different time that i grab a piece of stock i'm going to go ahead and knock out five or six knives all at once i found by the time i got to the end my grind lines were so much better than the first one i was able to pick that first one back up at the end go back to the grinder and clean them up and now all these knives have been pushed higher i'm gonna spend less time hand sanding and more time doing the things that i enjoy in knife making the gist of the video if you want to improve your grinding don't make a knife from start to finish hammer out some grindings all together hammer out some blades pick one design or two or three designs even it doesn't even really have to be the same as long as all this the grinds are similar the blade handles and shapes and different things like that can change but as long as the grind geometry is roughly the same and you're doing the same motions then you are definitely going to learn how to grind better all in one session and i think if i do this two or three times that success is just gonna go through the roof the whole point of doing these videos is to hopefully teach you guys something and guess what i'm teaching myself at the same time this was incredible i would suggest everybody try to grind multiple blades at once because it's definitely going to increase your success level right off the bat all in all the total time elapsed from the time that i had a piece of bar stock till right now is 12 hours i've got two hours profiling these out an hour to do the heat treat i'm not including the couple hours to do the temper cycles and then i had two sessions grinding these and and you know one night and then the other night i couldn't grind all of them in one session just because it just got too late and i needed to wait till the next night to finish up the rest of the grinds but i still consider that one session it's still fresh in my mind i did them one right after another before i moved on to a different part of the project i ground each one of these about the same each one's different each one's a slightly different shape different contour you know some of these had a more dramatic drop point some of them had larger bellies they're all about the same length one of them came out a little shorter this one this bevel was looking really nice low and even on both sides so i just kept it right there instead of taking it all the way to the top and then i kind of did a sweeping plunge line here and when i clean that up that's going to look really nice i decided to leave that one just like that instead of grinding it all the way the top this one's pretty cool this one's got a real long drop point on it and a real tall grind i'll probably do something like a surface conditioning belts on this this is going to be a really neat one here i like all these to be honest with you and the thing is even though i ground seven these are all one-off knives i didn't use a template i just you know let my imagination run free when i was profiling these every one of these are just kind of ground out anyhow i'm really excited about what's gonna happen next the reason that i chose to grind out seven blades is because i'm starting a whole new playlist on my channel where i'm gonna be showcasing using different styles of handle materials each video is going to break down how to use that type of handle material the different kind of trials and tribulations that i run into using that material you know the different grits that you use different ways to finish each material i'm really going to dive in deep you guys can have a library that you can resource say you know you want to make up a cody handle or you want to make a mammoth handle or you want to make a hybrid handle or an oak handle or a maple handle you can easily jump into my library click right on the video of that handle material and i'll teach you some tips and tricks for each different material i'm really excited about it so i ground out seven knives so i can show you seven different handle materials right off the bat but i've got so much on tap for you guys so stay tuned make sure you subscribe to the channel because you're not gonna want to miss any of those and if you guys want i've got some affiliate links below that are links where my channel makes a small commission and you guys can look at all the different tools that i use in my shop i even have some cool mugs for sale now that say alien knives on them so come on guys support me out there click the link below and enjoy

Channel: Aleeknives

Views: 43,776

Keywords: Aleeknives, knifemaking, knife making, bladesmithing, grinding, bevel grinding, grinding tips, grinding bevels

Id: nXGy0g3tdGE

Length: 18min 39sec (1119 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 22 2021