Turn a Farrier's Rasp Into a Knife! - Pops Knife-Making Project of the Month

foreign 's back with more tips for the knife maker today on my pops project of the month making a big Bruiser of a camp knife from this a file [Music] strictly speaking on today's video we're making a knife from a farrier's rasp which is basically just a big file for filing horses hooves now there are a couple reasons you might want to make a knife from a file first pretty simple just to save money most of us have a couple of worn out or Rusty files lying around somewhere or you can buy them from our sponsor Pop's knife Supply but another reason is that they're a fun Challenge and make a really unique knife so for today's project I'll be making a camp knife a large Rough and Ready type knife that can be used for splitting kindling cutting bacon for breakfast around the campfire clear and brush whatever all right let's Jump Right In for this we'll be using a farrier's rasp our sponsor for today's video Pop's knife supply has got the hook up for a huge supply of factory second farriers rasps whatever blemishes they had at the factory there's nothing wrong with them for our purposes brings down the price and perfect for making knives anyway the cool thing about farrier's rasps is that they're really big so you can make much larger knives out of them than you can out of say your standard 8 or 10 inch bastard file the first step of this build will be to anneal the blade annealing is basically just heating the blade up to a red heat then letting it cool as slowly as possible now there's a lot more metallurgical complexity to annealing if you want to dig into it but our goal today is not to get into that just trust me if you heat a file up until it gets non-magnetic and then leave it in your Forge it'll get very soft over the years I've made several videos about how you can make knives without a grinder using just a metal file to shape your file knife if you want to do a make a knife from a file with a file thing you definitely want to anneal your file if you want to make this build with a grinder like I'll be doing annealing will make the task easier and quicker because the steel will be softer okay so now we've got a nice soft piece of Steel first I'll chop the Tang off then I'll grind down these burrs now you have to grind them down to some degree if you want the knife to actually cut but you can choose how deep you want to grind them the more you grind the smoother the knife but at a certain point you start reducing the cool pattern a little so it's a judgment call as to how far down you want to take them by the way this particular rasp and this is pretty generally true of furious rasps has two sides one the rasp side and the other is a very coarse file so the pattern will actually be different on each side today's video is of course sponsored by Pop's knife supplies pop says everything you need for knife making steel for both stock removal guys and Hammer bangers a huge supply of handle materials including all kinds of woods bone horn antler and tons of cool Micarta including Pop's specialty vintage Micarta all sorts of abrasives including every kind of belt you can think of sandpaper and Specialty abrasives Fasteners tools and of course farrier's rasps but here's the cool thing about pops all four Partners at pops Alan Andy Dirk and Joey are pro knife makers so if you need a little guidance on what kind of belt or steel or sandpaper or whatever it is that's right for the knife that you're making there are folks on hand to help you figure out what you need pops knife dot supplies now if you want to file it instead of grinding obviously this is the point where you do the filing I'll leave a link for some videos where I show how to do this [Applause] now I'll go ahead and grind the bevels now I tend to be a freehand grinder so no jig involved the longer the knife the more technically challenging the grind so there's no shame in using a jig a lot of people love them as you can see after blasting away for a while you end up with a pretty cool looking pattern on the side of the blade one of the points I'd make about file knives is that they're always a little rough around the edges so knowing ahead of time that you're never going to produce knife making Perfection you can just really relax and have fun in fact you have the option to kind of mess around with them and take some chances take them in all kinds of different directions experiment and there's really no worry about wasting some expensive piece of steel or trying to make Excalibur now I'll drill the holes for the handle pins normally I do this earlier in the process but yeah just kind of forgot works fine here anyway next time to think about the handle first I'll slice up this nice piece of wenge from Pops this is an oily tropical wood really makes nice handles normally I would slice this with the grain which obviously makes for the strongest handle but just for yucks in the spirit of keeping this fun and experimental on this one I cut across the grain to give it a fine stripy pattern next I'll flatten them by hand on a sheet of relatively coarse sandpaper I recommend always labeling which side is the inside otherwise if you're like me you'll forget and then drill the holes in the wrong place also I'll be using brass pins to hold the scales on just hacksaw and elbow grease here so the procedure is drill hole one in your drill press insert a locator pin drill hole two flip repeat and of course you can do this with a hand drill but this is really the sort of application where a drill press shines now it's time for heat treating if you're new to knife making this is the part where the blade becomes hardened so that it can properly be called a knife not a knife shaped object obviously if you didn't anneal yours you don't need to worry about that we can Harden in the Forge but I'm going to go ahead and do it in my heat treating oven so let's take a quick break from the build and talk metallurgy technically this file is what we in the knife Biz call a mystery steel it's a proprietary steel specifically used by this manufacturer of rasps now there are literally thousands of different kinds of Steel with different proportions of carbon iron and other alloying elements like chromium manganese Vanadium all these things each of these alloying elements affects how the heat treating works now in truth we know that the vast majority of files are made from some variant of a high carbon steel known as 1095 so we'll treat it as if that's what it is if you have a forge you'll want to heat it just past non-magnetic hold it there for a bit and quench in a fast quenching oil like Parks 50. using a heat treating oven I'm going to heat the blade to 14.75 Fahrenheit hold for 10 minutes then quench now look can you quench in something like peanut oil instead of a fancy industrial quenching oil the short answer is yes but unfortunately the longer answer is your results will vary you may end up differentially hardening it meaning that you only Harden The Edge and maybe not that much of the edge now assuming that at least the entire Edge is heated this is not the end of the world that's how every Japanese sword is made and in fact Edge hardening is what we got here leaving us with a sort of Jamon after two two hour tempering Cycles at 400 Fahrenheit I'm ready to grind the knife to its final shape before I do that I'll use my abrasive blasting cab to blast off the scale and crud now that just happens to be the convenient tool for me but you could use a brass brush and a mild solvent like alcohol or even acetone you can use a plastic vegetable brush with hot water and soap even a pressure washer be creative anyway once you clean it up immediately oil it to keep it from rusting back to the grinder for the final grind I'll start with 120 grit ceramic then 160 Micron 3M trisac and finish up with a surface conditioning belt which will give a relatively smooth but not shiny finish something like you might see on a commercial knife again I'm not aiming for a hand sanded Museum quality look here this is just a camp knife now let's put it all together I'm going to color my epoxy black to give it a nice contrasting look with all the barbs and scoring from the file you're going to see a lot of glue here that's inevitable so you might as well lean into that appearance and make it look like you mean it I'm using a carbon black powder that you can get from art stores but there are all kinds of commercial tents used for epoxies varnishes and so on that'll work just fine foreign [Music] by the way if you'd like to pick up this particular knife it'll be available on my websites at tacticsarmory.com and Walter sorel's blades grab it fast because there's only one and these demo knives usually move pretty quick [Music] foreign [Music] overnight I'll grind the handle to shape [Music] [Music] as always I like to start with heavy ceramic abrasives [Music] and then work my way around to higher grit J weight belts that are very flexible and will slide into those interior curves cool product here that Joey sent me from Pops these are colored cyanoacrylate gel glues also known as super glue or CA these are perfect for filling small voids and burls as well as yeah situations like this where voids are pretty much baked into the cookie just blend a little in pops also sells an accelerator product that speeds up the hardening of CHL glues like this let it dry sand it off voila no more void finish up with some hand sanding and buffing and here we are the finished product [Music] you know one of the things I've been thinking about recently is that knife making should be fun and the cool thing about making a knife from a file is that they're always going to be a little rough around the edges literally see it's easy to watch people on YouTube or Instagram or whatever and they're doing this really amazing work and you start stressing about every little tiny detail and then you start to get bogged down and trying to make everything perfect that's all well and good but you know file Knives have a different lesson for you they basically say look you're out here to have fun you'll end up with something that's cool but it's never going to be mistaken for a museum piece and that's kind of freeing sometimes not only can making one of these kind of knives help you learn faster but also most of us started out in knife making just wanting to get out in the shop and forget about whatever else is going on in our lives and file knives are just all about that approach to knife making so if you haven't made a knife from a file or a farrier's rasp give it a try I guarantee you'll enjoy it thanks for watching guys if you like what we're doing here please subscribe and make sure that you click on that Bell so you get notified of all the latest videos want to buy a knife from me check out my modern blades at tacticsarmory.com digging the channel you can support our video making efforts on patreon you know I've been banging away on these videos for like 10 years so I hope you'll show some love for all that hard work Link in the cards and descriptions finally if you're interested in making Japanese swords check out my full line of Japanese sword videos where I show how to forge Japanese swords as well as how to polish them and how to make fittings handles and scabbards Walter sorrelsblades.com [Music]

Channel: Walter Sorrells

Views: 106,678

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Id: 76OCaxfG8O0

Length: 15min 42sec (942 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 14 2023