Thick EDC Knife - Knifemaking

hey guys welcome back to the shop today I'm gonna be making a knife at a 3/16 of an inch stock now normally I use an eighth of an inch stock so this is a little thicker than I'm used to working with it's my last piece of 3/16 and I wanted to make sure to be able to make it into a knife so I'm gonna have a very short every day carry three-finger knife for you here I'm hoping that it can still be a pretty good slicer I'm going to intentionally make the blade fairly wide about an inch and a quarter wide and I'm gonna do a full flat grind to give myself the best possibility of making this thing a good cutter one thing I want to mention is that towards the end of the video I end up scratching the finish on this blade while I am making the sheath now this was 100% my fault I normally take my time a little better when making a sheath and I did not take my time this time and I messed up so I will point out to you exactly what I did wrong towards the end of this video so with that I'll go on with my normal narration and I hope you all enjoy the bill already so up to this point we have drawn out the blade cut it out roughly on the bandsaw and then brought it over to this 2 by 72 belt sander with a worn 60 grit BSM ceramic belt to get the blade profile after I hit it with the flat platen move on to my small wheel attachment so that I can get into this finger choil here this small wheel attachment has really come in handy for these small knives that ones from origin blade works so we'll go ahead and mark out the center of the tang here that I can drill my holes we're gonna go ahead Center punch them and then we will drill these holes out to a number 13 bit this number 13 bit will accept our core B fasteners I then drilled out some weight reduction holes here and also I don't know if there's any science to this but epoxy pinholes so that the epoxy can pass through these holes into both scales I should have done this first while the stock was still square but I was very slow in care here I went ahead and used a 3/16 of an inch in mil-to-mil out my sharpening toil so we're gonna go ahead and heat treat this knife while it has not been ground so I used to grind my bevels in then he treat the knife I've found that without heat treating without grinding the bevels before heat treating a knife I've reduced the chances of warping greatly and this is one of those tips that I got from the guys over there at blade forms and I have put it into practice and I really like this method better so as you can hear it this blade is nice and hard I did not pick up a work during the heat treat but even if I did I would not try to correct it until it the second tempering cycle so that I do not risk damaging the blade just for precautions I go ahead and clamp this blade to a flat piece of stock during the second tempering cycle at 213 degrees Celsius so this is what it looks like out of the tempering oven it's nice and straight and it is ready to be cleaned up so I'll go ahead and get the profile cleaned up with a 220 grit belt now to save me some time later to get those scratches out and then I'm going to use my new surface grinding attachment to clean up the flats I actually built a or forged a hook for my surface grinder that you'll see soon I will go ahead and actually put out a video of me forging that hook since it's the first time that I've done a forging project like that and I really enjoyed doing it so this is the hook that I'm talking about very simple but it gets the job done I got these three and a half no three-inch belts by 79 inches from combat abrasives it's a 100 grit ceramic shredder and it does a pretty darn good job here of getting this blade cleaned up so I get the blade on the surface attachment and I start making light passes back and forth slowly moving the blade towards the wheel until it starts making sparks and then making numerous passes at each set point to make sure that I am NOT putting waves or anything like that into the blade I then moved on to a 320 grit surface conditioning belt to kind of give me a nice finish there on the flats when I get one side done I'll take some scotch tape lay it down over to blade so that my chuck does not scratch the blade on that side and then take the other side up to that Gator belt 320 after everything's nice and smooth I'll go and mark the centerline of my edge with a 3/16 of an inch drill bit and then start grinding so the first step is to take a very aggressive angle around the 45-degree angle on the belt using an old belt it's not worth using a new belt in this scenario because you'll just tear up the abrasives so using an old VSM belt I went ahead and knocked off that corner after which I will start working down towards the spine of my knife so that's about as far as I'll take it with a sixty I'll then move on to a 120 grit j-flex and then after that a 220 grit j-flex belt to finish off my flats you can see from this angle that I am getting deep into that plunge line and rounding over the belt on my platen and it actually turned out pretty good I got some pretty symmetrical plunge lines in this knife lastly after the 220 grit Jake flex belt I'll move on to a surface conditioning belt I'm pretty sure this one's considered fine from scotch-brite I'll go ahead and hit the blade with some wd-40 then this belt and that is the finish that you will see so this is how far I take my blades before doing a stone wash finish I think that they would actually be pretty good to start hand sanding at that finish as well just for fun I went ahead and used my micrometer to check some widths this is not a perfect indication of flatness but it kind of gives me an idea of how well my surface grinder is doing so I marked off three different spots here that I can measure and then I'll take the total variance between these three measurements to kind of see what my total variances across its piece and it's around eight ten thousandths of an inch so I feel like that's pretty good it looks like it was a little lower towards the bottom of the tang but for what I'm doing as a full tang knife maker that is perfectly fine amount of variance there so we're gonna turn on the etching machine here on this little DIY editing machine and I'm gonna make a very deep edge at DC power after which I will clean off my stencil with wd-40 and then go ahead and hit the flats of the knife with a scotch brow scotch brite belt I actually know I clean the stencil with Windex by the way I'm trying something new here when I'm itching I went ahead and took some steel wool and alcohol and clean the blade before putting in the acid and then two and a half minutes in took the blade out hit it with some Windex and then used a piece of steel wool to clean the blade off after which I put it back in the acid up until a total edge time of around nine minutes and then I took the steel wool and clean it off again after cleaning up the steel wool I went ahead and hit it with some baking soda to neutralize the acid and then put it in my steel tumbling machine or I guess my wood stone washing machine I'm gonna take this moment right now to ask you to see it in your heart to please hit that subscribe button and do me a solid thank you so this is the finish I was able to achieve with that tumbler in the edging cycle I think that cleaning the blade like I did before and during edging that made a big difference on this knife and I got that idea from Dave evader knives so go ahead and check his YouTube channel out so after I get the blade nice and stone wash I'll go ahead and tape up the blade to protect it while I'm working on the handles I'm be using two pieces of orange and black g10 the first step is to take them over to my surface plate and flatten these scales now I got some questions about this granite plate that I have I got that plate from a countertop shop they have a lot of sink cutouts that they'll give you free so if you're looking for something pretty flat go ahead and go to your counter shop show countertop store and get yourself some sink cutouts so after I get the handle scales nice and flat came over to the bower bandsaw got them rough cut and then to the belt sander to get them rough profiled you can see that I also have holes drilled in them those are number thirteen holes for the core piece and then I'm going to get a 45 degree angle at the front of the scales to make it so that's not a sharp drop-off at the front there before glue up like you know you want to go ahead and finish out the front of your scales I'm taking these up to a thousand grit finish so once the scales are finished up in the front we're gonna go over to the milling machine and knock down some counter bores here for the core B fasteners that counterbore bit I got from pops knife supply and I cannot live without it I'll be using some G flex epoxy here and stainless steel core B fasteners these core B fasteners have to be slightly modified in order to be the right length to attach these scales so make sure you do your math there we'll get them nice and snug but not too snug let it sit for 24 hours and then we can go on to shaping our handle scales first thing I'll do here is go ahead and cut off the heads of the core B fasteners and then grind the sides of the knife flat and then the handle scales down to the metal on the profile of the knife when I get close I'll switch to a 220 grit belt so as not to put really deep scratches in the spine of this knife and then you can see my motion there I am rocking the knife back and forth in order to get a nice rounded finish and so it's nice and smooth and kind of contoured in your hand and then move on to a one-inch scalloped belt the 320-grit scalloped belt to round over my edges before hand sanding and then back to the 220 grit belt then take out all the cross scratchers I put in there and then it's on the hand sanding I start off with a 320 grit Rhino wet sandpaper move up to 600 after that and then finally to a 1000 grit paper I really like how g10 comes out it's fairly easy to work and it has a really nice finish when it's brought up to a decently high paper one thing to mention is that the g10 seems to be softer to the sandpaper than the stainless Corby fasteners so make sure you're using a flat bar when you're sanding so that you don't get any doming of those pins so this is where I messed up I went ahead and started making the sheath all these pieces are what I normally would do but where I really messed up was during the shaping of the sheath itself I actually didn't grind away enough initially so that my retention was too tight when I went back to fix this tension and grind a little more I had already put in the sheath together and I've got some grit inside of the sheath when I adjusted the tension what I should have done was adjust attention and then thoroughly washed out the sheath or take the sheath back apart adjust attention with my grinding and then put the sheath back together both of those options would have been better than what I did which was lackluster ly clean out the sheath after adjusting attention section and then scratching my blade so this is a section that I had to come back and grind some more away you can see that I was pretty high there and if you were to put the knife in you would not be able to get it out this was the initial look at the inside of the sheath when you take the two pieces apart and that is why I generally make sure to have them very clean before putting the whole sheet together so I clean them I put the sheath together and then I went ahead and made my mistake and adjusted that tension section right there I ground it down a little more you can see that I did ground it a little deeper my attention is right however I left some grit in the sheath so you can see in the right angle horizontal scratches on my blade destroying the finish of this knife and really taking me off that day not a fun moment when you realize that you rushed needlessly and ruined your finished product so this is now gonna be my knife for around the shop you can see with a unique lip or Alti clip that there's lots of options here in the pocket or in the waistband so after we get the sheath made I'm gonna come over here to the Wynn water stone sharpener a lot of questions about this sharpener it's been working out great for me you can get a very quick edge on a knife up to around a 220 grit finish so it's it's pretty rough but it will shave hair and cut paper very well so I'll take it up to a 220 grit finish on the stone I'll go back and forth one pass each side and then I will hit it with the strop wheel which is a leather wheel that I have loaded with compound to knock that burr off and after that this thing's pretty sharp it's a good working edge finish for around the shop or a hunting knife or anything along those lines now if you want to take this a step further you can probably get some diamond stones or or even just a higher grit stone to finish off this edge but this is how it turned out I hope you guys got something out of this build if you did go ahead and hit that subscribe and like button and I'll catch y'all on the flipside [Music]

Channel: Red Beard Ops

Views: 98,778

Keywords: red beard ops, jkeetonknives, knifemaker, knifemaking, how to make a knife, knifemaker explains, knife maker, edc knife, best edc knife, how to make an edc knife, how to make a small knife, making a knife in your garage, custom knife making, g10 handle scales, corby fasteners, corby bolts, small edc knife, diy knife making tools, diy knife making, knife making tools, surface grinder, full knife build, beginner knife making, garage shop, simple little life, how to make knife

Id: RlQXbYf291s

Length: 15min 22sec (922 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 07 2020