Top Ten Beginner Knife Making Mistakes...and How to Avoid Them!

hey Walter Sorrells back with more tips for the knife maker today top 10 rookie mistakes so the first thing I want to make clear here is I'm not making fun of anybody you know everybody starts from someplace and a lot of times in that initial process of educating yourself and something you know you make some mistakes so what I'm really trying to do here is talk about some of the mistakes that I made so if you're going to be a dentist you go to dental school if you're going to be a lawyer you go to law school but how do you go about becoming a knife maker well truth is you have to teach yourself a lot of the skills in knife making without anybody else outside and I'm not talking about becoming a professional knife maker here I'm just talking about you know learning the basics of the craft doing it as a hobby or anything else that might turn into there's not really a school that you can go to or at least most people don't have access to a school that they can go to and just say hey make me a knife maker so as you're educating yourself in this new skill a lot of times you're going to run up some blind alleys I certainly know that I did so the point of this is not to make fun of anybody for choices that they make in terms of you know learning how to become a knife maker it's much more about honestly mistakes that I made and ways that you can kind of avoid those and move forward in teaching yourself this skill as easily and quickly as possible so mistake number one trying to make the Sword of Gryffindor right out of the gate I don't really know what the Sword of Gryffindor is but you know the point is a lot of people jump into this right out of the gate trying to make something very very difficult something kind of mythological and you know that means a lot to them truth is you have to start small in my case the first thing that I tried to make was a katana total disaster still lying there rusting on the floor of my shop I mean I cannot tell you how many things I did wrong lesson learned rookie mistake number two using mystery steel so everybody has that guy says oh I've got a you know piece of a Sherman tank crankshaft or something is going to make a fantastic knife well it might but it might not you know in the knife making business we call this mystery steel it's some kind of steel that we don't really know the composition of we don't know the working qualities of fact is every single steel is different and you have to treat them differently or you won't get the results that you're looking for number three believe in the hype you know it depends on what kind of direction that you come from in your interests as a knife maker you might come out of martial arts and be interested in Japanese swords or Chinese swords you might be interested in history and you're interested in western European swords but any direction that you come from they're always people who are going to be selling you a bunch of hype about how great certain swords were certain Steel's are and this steel is a super steel and everything else is crap you know making knives is just like any other business it's made up of little bitty details of learning to be competent at little tasks and little skills and there's no magic bullet confidence in almost any field is about blocking and tackling doing the little things right that's what gets you to the big win if you try to do heroic things without the right foundational skills you'll just end up disappointed there's a kind of general psychological point here which i think is common to successful artists craftsman entrepreneurs and what it is is this you have to be able to hold the big picture in your head in the long term vision and immerse yourself in the short term the nitty gritty at the same time you know the vision that's the sunrise the horizon its grandiose it's beautiful its distant the moment where you're actually getting the work done it's dirty it's hard but to be good at knife making you got to be able to balance both of those things you got to have both of them in your head at the same time number four running after the super steel right out of the gate you know a lot of times when you first get started you're looking around on the internet and they're all these guys saying oh this kind of steel is the best steel and everything else is no good and so you think well gosh I had to get hold of that steel and then start working with that steel well the reality is that there are a lot of what are known as super Steel's out there today generally stainless steel that have very complex alloys and they're difficult to use you know and my recommendation is that you start with simpler Steel's if you want to try your hand at heat treating go with oh one steel or with a simple carbon steel like 1084 or maybe 1075 or 1095 each of these is a little different has their own little nuances but they can all be used to make high quality knives with relatively simple equipment likewise their tried-and-true stainless steels like 440c that have been around for a long time and heat treaters really know how to heat treat them well my recommendation start with those first they're cheaper you can make mistakes on those first and then go to the super Steel's late some of the new Steel's really are great but why spend a lot of money on them now when you don't really know what to do with them rookie mistake number five trying to make your knife too perfect what I mean by that is that you know it's it's tempting you're making your first knife you want to make it beautiful you want to make it functional you want you know every idea that you've ever had in your mind about what a great knife is you want to do it the first time out but the reality is that you know you're going to make some mistakes on that first knife a lot of times you're better off trying to really you know start with something that you can get done quickly make your mistakes and learn your lessons and move on to something else and if you spend too much time you know this is what some people call turd polishing you got something that is you know not that good to start with and then you put a big shine on it but it's still a turd so that you know that's something that you want to avoid learn those lessons quickly by your mistakes and then move on to better knives as you sort of up your game rookie mistake number six not making your knife perfect enough okay now I just said that the big problem is that you make things too perfect well what happens is as you sort of progress as a knife maker you know there starts to be a point where you do need to really aim for if not perfection at least you know trying to make your knives really high quality so what I mean by that in particular is that a lot of times after the first few knives sometimes people start to get in a hurry and kind of neglect fit and finish they leave scratch marks on you know from from the tools that they've been using or they don't put a very good finish on it and really you know you have to decide somewhere along the way when you're going to start to pursue perfection as opposed to just trying to learn lessons you know there's not a perfect point where you can say this is where you have to abandon an approach that's just oriented to learning a lesson and this is the point where you have to make everything perfect frankly to this day sometimes I make a knife and I'm just trying to learn something and I'm doing it super-quick other times you know I want everything perfect and so I want to be in control of that decision rookie mistake number seven the gear fallacy so I don't care what you know pursuit you're you're in guitar playing sports you know whatever people are always thinking if I just buy this better baseball bat I'm going to hit homeruns if I buy this cool guitar I'm going to sound like Jimi Hendrix yes gear is important and yes gear can help you achieve better results but at the end of the day you know it's your eye your artistic sensibility your patience your diligence those are the things that really make the difference in whether you're producing good knives or not not whether you spent 10,000 15,000 20,000 dollars on fancy gear you know as you get better you're going to buy better tools but at the end of the day it's not gear that makes the difference in my successes or my failures as a knife mate rookie fallacy number 8 I can't do this by myself you know I need a master I need a teacher a professor a spirit guide you're ultimately responsible for your ability to learn anything I don't care what it is singing dancing playing football becoming a lawyer you know what whatever pursuits are important to you you're the final arbiter of that process and so same thing is true here it's great to look for people mentors people that can help you out and a lot of times having people who've been through the process can save you an enormous amount of work and they've got wisdom to share with you but just because you live in some place that doesn't have 10 knife makers within you know 20 mile radius doesn't mean you can't learn how to do this stuff you have to go out and you have to spend time in the shed make your mistakes and trust yourself trust your own judgment trust your ability to learn new things rookie mistake number 9 and I get this all the time oh I constantly am getting notes from folks who want to learn how to make Damascus steel and they haven't really gone into knife making much at all Damascus steel making is pretty tool intensive it's fairly complicated and even if you get really good at making Damascus if you can't translate the steel that you produce into a really cool knife or an effective knife or a knife that that functions properly you know what was the point of the Damascus thing and I think worse than that though really is that a lot of times people set themselves up for heartache because they think oh I want to do this Damascus thing and it's just very complicated there are a lot of it's expensive there's just a lot of moving parts to it and so they're liable to get frustrated and and kind of lose interest my recommendation really is to just start real small make you know simple knives from simple carbon steel in particular or do it from stainless steel and have other people do your heat treating and you know then you can learn the real foundational stuff and then when you move to making Damascus you just have so much more to draw on in order to produce really high quality material okay so rookie mistake number 10 and you know most of these are mistakes that I've made myself in one way or another and this was this was definitely one that I made and you know in part it's because when I started there was just way less information out there but part of it was just my own lack of understanding of what I was aiming to do so rookie mistake number 10 is not pursuing heat treating and metallurgy enough not this is not saying you have to go to you know engineering school and get a college degree in metallurgy that's not my point my point is that learning to heat treat steel is absolutely the single foundational most important skill that you'll get as a knife maker so the earlier that you come to understand how Steel's work to understand sort of the the main variables in producing different qualities and steel the better off you're going to be in the long run so there are a lot of sources of information out there about metallurgy and you know heat treating some of them are kind of advanced and complicated but a lot of them are very commonsensical and pretty easy to understand so follow that as best you can you know try and find out as much information as you can about heat treating and it will pay dividends forever for you you thanks for watching hope you enjoyed this video if you liked it here a couple of other videos that you might be interested in also like me on Facebook at Walter Sorel's blades and check out my website Walter Sorrells blades comm where you'll find examples of my work along with instructional videos showing all aspects of Japanese sword making including forging and polishing how to make home owns and how to make fittings scabbards and handles for Japanese swords

Channel: Walter Sorrells

Views: 494,792

Rating: 4.8916759 out of 5

Keywords: knife, sword, how to, how to make knives, knife making mistakes, how to make swords, samurai sword, damascus steel, knife making, knifemaking, blade smith, bladesmithing, blade smithing, making a knife, Walter Sorrells, tools, forging, blacksmith, Help, Tutorial, Tricks, Tips

Id: L3Ao6YeRiRw

Length: 15min 21sec (921 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2015