Upcycling a Layout Knife | Paul Sellers

We use a layout knife for our work for laying out joints mostly I use them all the time and have this is one of my favorites in fact it is my favorite we make square lines with it we can do all manner of other things with it we can carve with it chip carve with it we can do all manner of things like this and sometimes you may not have your hand on a knife you may not have access to this knife this is like I said it's my favorite but not everybody can get hold of one let me show you everybody can get hold of a kitchen knife these are just common kitchen knives one has a more refined handle, but you could reshape this handle to make it more comfortable like this one but to make one of these knives just takes about three or four minutes how I'm going to make this one is I'm going to snap this off here so I've got a piece of wood these are inch and 3/4 so I'm leaving one of the pieces about quarter of an inch from the end of the handle there, we're clamping this in the vise here or in these two pieces of wood and then in the vise and I'm just going to cinch this in the vise like this to make it super tight right around the base here then I'm going to take a pair of locking pliers like this lock them onto the bar and then I was going to bend it back and forth until it snaps which shouldn't take too long just keep going it'll break and I'm going to keep this piece for another knife or for another piece I could cut this here like this cut an arc on here and make another knife from that piece so I'm going to keep that set it aside this is a stainless steel and stainless steel is not always the best for a knife but we're going to use this one because it's available and it will make a knife and it's a very practical knife so what I want to do is I want to create a shape like I've done with these here these are a couple of knives that I use this one is more standard for certain types of carving especially for my type of work here you might use this for more carving work chip carving work whatever type of work you want but you can make all types of different shapes that will work for you so I want to take this back off here along here and I don't really need the line because I'm just going to eyeball this till I get the shape that I want but I'm going to basically take this off here so to do that I have to create a vise because this is a woodworking vise not a metalworking vise so I have created a small vise here as a temporary vise so I'm going to put this in the vise here now I have to file this down and this needs to be super tight so I need to go maybe even lower into the vise so it really grips this and then just a flat file here and I'm going along here if I go across listen it will cut but this way will cut a lot faster and a much bigger area and I just keep going on here until I've got my shape down you probably would find this a little bit difficult to cut with a hacksaw maybe not some hacksaws are better than others you can see it's going to clog here and when that builds up in there you just take a file card which is just like a steel brush and file out those areas inside like this just go with the the teeth of the file and just clean out those long teeth, I file this down till you get the shape you want, I'm taking the main long part of this off I've got this down and I've kind of curved this back in here now I have to work on the tip and this I'm going to just bring this corner off almost like a 45-degree here I guess and I'm going to get down to the tip eventually once I've gone down from here then I can start bringing this continuity I want around here and that's going to be close to the shape that I want I may take a little bit more off here because I don't like the thickness there now on this particular knife I may not like the thickness but on another knife I might want that so a bit more off the hump here and then the continuous stroke from the top here right down onto the very tip this would make a very nice layout knife here I'm just going to break the corners with the file to take that off now I want that I don't need this edge to be sharp from my particular knife I don't have to do anything here this will reach inside very nicely into the area that I want to reach to I could go with a sharper point if I wanted to this is going to be fine so all I've got left to do to this now is to make it work with a sharp edge so what I'm doing the knife edge is already beveled nicely for me so first of all I'm going to just take a fine file this is a fine file and I just file the bevel basically following the same bevel that's on the knife we're actually increasing it slightly just to give it a little extra strength now there is light reflecting off the edge which I expected because this is an old kitchen knife that was probably not sharpened in years same on this one here if it's flexing too much here just take almost anything and slip it under here drop as long as it's out of the way drop it down underneath here and that will stop it from bending piece of wood pencil almost anything and I'm keeping that bevel all the way to the edge can you see in there if you have the light reflecting off the bevel just slightly there so I go until the edge no longer has a shine see I can't cut myself on here it's just not even sharp so I'm going to keep going with the file another way you could do this is just make a platform here and you can file it on top of the bench top like this perfectly safely but keep working the bevel this is a fine file but it's not super fine so right now I'm just taking this down to get near to a cutting edge then I'm going to go with this one if you've got one of these if you don't have one of these you could just wrap a piece of sandpaper fine sandpaper maybe 400 grit start at 400 go to 600 and 800 if you want to and you can get right onto this edge and this one we're going to use just a circular motion here so it's cutting on the forward and the backward stroke because these are diamond particles this is a medium grit right now and I'm looking on the edge until I feel and then I feel on this side because I want a burr on one side this will put if I file this side it's going to put the burr on this side and I don't have it yet and usually I work both sides equally this one I'm going to work this way now some people say you have to work into the edges this way but we're not generating any heat so there's not really any real reason for that if you're working with a grinding wheel then it's a little bit different you want to push the edge into the stone and that reduces the amount of heat buildup but we're generating almost no heat buildup here I keep going until I get the burr I don't have a burr very much of it there anyway I don't really need to do back here but it would be handy to have one thing I did when I was breaking this I have a slight bend on the end to correct that I just put this in the vise wear safety glasses in case anything happens to the hammer I've never had it happen that's got that straight now am I sharp yet, it's getting there is very close to sharpness that I want a little bit more and then I'll go with a finer abrasive you can put water on this paddle as well on the diamond as that will stop it from clogging and it increases the cutting capacity of the tool keep going keep going don't give up yet I'm going to go with a final one here and then my last stage is to go on a strop which is just a piece of leather glued to a block of wood the strop will take off any burr and it will actually continue sharpening because I charge it with chromium oxide which is an abrasive impregnated into the surface of the strop just by rubbing onto the surface of the strop there now I have a burr all the way along this is my strop and I've charged this with chromium oxide which is just a buffing compound like this so I just charge the surface with this, here and then I pull this like this maybe 30 times 40 times along this back bevel keep it as low as you we're filing or honing out keep it very low in angle can you see how low that is so now I've got one side done I'm pulling now and I can see the burr is folding back and forth so you can only trail it you can't go in this direction because if you go in this you're going to cut the surface of your leather now this edge is getting very very sharp this is surgically sharp now so be very careful with it that's it clean off with another strop this has got no abrasive in it so you can clean off this bevel and that is your knife ready for using to create your knife walls for laying out your dovetails now I feel up binding in the cut so it's pulling in the cut but very nice crisp clean edge like this so I get this beautiful crisp clean cut with it and I can as I did before use this now to chip carve with if I want to cut the leaves for my saw handle or whatever else that's it handmade homemade get your knife into a layout you

Channel: Paul Sellers

Views: 251,399

Rating: 4.9433799 out of 5

Keywords: Woodworking, Hand Tools, Layout Knife, Upcycle, Re-purpose

Id: l_vHb1gMwIE

Length: 13min 41sec (821 seconds)

Published: Fri May 27 2016