Wharncliffe Knife & Sheath Build | Knife Making

all righty guys welcome back to the shop today we're gonna be making a warren cliff style knife it looks very similar to one of the boat knives i've made in the past and it has that distinctive flat edge with a drooping tip there so we'll be making this knife and we're also gonna be making a leather sheath at the end first thing i do is i cut out my template and glue it onto a piece of 1084 steel i drilled a 3 16 of an inch hole where my sharpening coil will go so that i can cut to that hole and not have to file it in or mill it in i've done it a few different ways here they all work the file sometimes you can have problems keeping everything nice and square the mill the setup takes a while to mill it in and the drill seemed to work pretty good i'm getting my spine up to a 220 grit finish here i like getting the spine and the knife to a fairly high finish before i heat treat and temper it just makes my life easier down the road after the heat ring process to not have to go back and get out large 60 grit scratches so i'll be using a checkering file to put in some jimping and what you saw me do before this was cleaning up that sharpening choil that i drilled in just with a drill a file and some sandpaper so i'll be marking off where i'll put my holes i'll have two number 13 holes for my corby fasteners and then a center eighth of an inch hole for a straight pin that center pin is more decorative than anything you can see that i'm using some cutting fluid here just to extend the life of my bits i buy my twist bits in bulk mostly from either ebay or amazon in sets of 10 just because i go through a lot of the same size bits especially the number 13s the quarter inches and the eighth of an inch bits to get the forge going i put my muffle pipe in there and we start heating the blade up what i don't show here is that i did two normalizing cycles on this blade uh before the quench here in parks 50. before the blade is allowed to cool i will put it into my straightening plates and clamp down this ensures the blade cools flat we'll then get it clamped up between two pieces of angle iron for our tempering process i'll be running two tempering cycles at around 211 degrees celsius for two hours a piece in between cycles you can cool at the room temperature quickly in water and then put it back in for your second cycle this does not negatively affect any of the properties of the blade after the heat treating process i get all of the spine and the edge areas back to a 220 grit finish i do this before i surface grind the flats i'm spending some extra time here making sure that i get my sharpening soil nice and clean and then the small little flat section on the ricasso of this blade nice and clean as well i'll be taking the surface finish on the sides of the blade or the flats of the blade up to a 400 grit finish i start with a 220 grit belt then i move to a 360 grit gator belt and finally after that i'll move to the 400 grit cork belt that has been loaded with green rouge these cork belts are pretty cool they can be slightly grabby at times but they require a little bit of a breaking process meaning that you buy a brand new belt you load it up with the compound and then you would push a bar of steel into it for an extended period of time maybe 10 or 15 minutes to knock down the peaks of that cork belt so this is the final result so it's nice blade finish there to get started grinding our bevels i put a little bit of marking fluid on the edge and then i use my height scribe here to mark my center line this will be the target that we'll be grinding our edge to when you start grinding you want to come into the belt at a very aggressive angle somewhere around 45 degrees and you want to be using an older belt in order to preserve the abrasives on your new belts just because this sharp edge can knock a lot of that abrasive off so you'll come in at an aggressive angle and you'll get both sides down to that center line and then you'll slowly start working that bevel back what you may have just seen me do is also apply a little bit of wd-40 onto the bevel that i'm not currently grinding i'll be dunking this blade into water to keep it cool the whole time and i don't want any rust accumulating it's probably not a big deal but i just do that for peace of mind so i get it up to a 60 grit finish and then we move on to the j flex belts i like the j-flex belts because you can run them off the side of your platen and allows you to get into the plunge area with a nice smooth radius so i start off with a 120 grit j-flex and then i moved to a 220 grit j flex and actually hit it with a scotch brite belt after that the etching process for this blade was as follows i hit it with 12 one second cycles at dc and then three one second cycles at ac power to make sure it's nice and dark then i went back to the belt sander and did two or three more passes with the scotch brite belt to clean it all up before we are going to etch this blade i like to clean it with soap and water make sure it's nice and clean and then we'll get it into the etch it every two minutes or so i'll take it out and scrub it down with a piece of steel wool and then put it back in and i'll do this probably for about 10 minutes using this diy tumbler here in connection with my 2 by 72 belt sander we will tumble this blade in rocks for about 15 minutes there's nothing special about the rocks that i'm using if you have access to tumbling media that's ceramic tumbling minute i'm sure that may work better or just as good but the rocks seem to do a good job i'll be using two pieces of orange and black g10 they were fairly flat already but i just went and made sure that they're super flat and we will be drilling our holes through our blade and into this g10 you know the workshop can be a fairly precarious place at times and my panasonic g7 camera found that out quickly today i was going to cut the profile of this knife scale and i tipped over the tripod and my camera went for a ride luckily nothing was broken there and we were able to get back to business so we'll roughly cut out these handles on the bandsaw and then head over to the belt sander to sure everything up close to the line i've been getting closer and closer to my scribed lines just to reduce the amount of sanding i have to do post glue up i built this little angle jig for my last project my damascus knife which had bevels along the entire handle scale but it also works extremely well for beveling the front of your handle scales as a side note here i really like working with g10 i feel like it grinds nice and easy compared to some other handle material and you also don't get any blow through with your drill bits when you're drilling through it well like all handle materials you don't want to breathe this stuff in it's terrible for you but other than that i really like the way it looks and i like the way it grinds i guess another negative could be that it's a little bit heavy but other than those a few negatives it's a pretty robust handle material so using my counter bore from pop's knife supply i go in about 3 16 of an inch into both handle scales in each one of those holes and that gives me a target of a corby fastener that has a head-to-head distance of about 0.28 inches so they come stock at about 0.3 0.34 and we need to modify the length of the corby fasteners to fit our project so i normally go a little bit less than what i calculate so i'm getting these to about a point two seven and then we're going to take down our eighth of an inch center pin so we have a nice snug fit in our center hole using some g flex epoxy we'll get it nice and mixed up i think i normally mix up about 1.6 grams of each of each each container there and that's more than enough to glue up a knife i put a little bit of epoxy into the corby holes first coat the flat of the scale put the corby fasteners in do that on both scales and then put the epoxy onto the knife itself making sure to fill up all of the epoxy holes that we put in there in the tang get my corby fastener started and then pop that eighth of an inch pin in there before tightening down i like to have that eighth of an inch pin in there first just so that when i'm squeezing these scales with the corby fasteners that epoxy can go all around that pin and all the voids inside of the handle so our epoxy was able to dry for about 24 hours here we cut off the heads of the corby fasteners and the pin and then flattened everything on the belt sander with a 60 grit aluminum oxide belt once i get the sides flattened and the handle scales ground down to the tang i will be tapering at this knife from the front to the back a little bit just because these scales are a little thicker than i wanted for this knife they're around .29.28 thickness each so i want to thin them down towards the front of the knife so here i'm still getting everything down to the spine i get all that up to a 220 grit finish and then back to the 60 grit belt here you can see that i'm putting some aggressive pressure towards the front of the handle scales i get a nice constant line from the front to the back as an angle and then i will start rotating the knife so that i can round it along the length axis of the knife once i have a nice radius there i will use my new slack belt attachment i kind of threw this thing together and it's been working okay it's a little more flimsy than i would like it to be i used a quarter inch piece of plate where i really should have used a larger piece for that arm there but you know it's getting the job done i don't think it's going to break on me so i'll be keep using it and i will report back on how it does but i use the slack belt portion here with a scalloped one-inch belt and i get into all the nooks and crannies and round everything over so this is what it looks like off the grinder with a 220 grit one inch scalloped belt i move on to the hand sanding we'll start with a 320 grit paper making sure not to dome over these pins you know we use a hard backing on the sandpaper during most of the hand sanding in order to keep those pins from doming over just because if you don't do that you'll take away the g10 faster than the metal on the pins and you'll have a dome shaped pin and you'll actually be able to feel those in your hand so we start with a 320 then we move up to a 600 grit paper and finally to a 1000 grit paper to finish this off once the handle is done we'll sharpen a blade using the wind water cooled sharpening system here i set my edge angle to about a 19 degree angle there i ground this edge super thin so this is going to be more of a slicer than a chopper for sure but it came out razor sharp hit it with the leather strap that i have a little bit of green compound on cuts paper and shaves with no problem so now for all intensive purposes the knife is done so we're going to make a sheath so i've been learning a lot on the sheath making process after the last video the comment section was excellent i learned even more so i took some of those learnings and put them in the practice of this blade so the first thing i did was i laid the blade down on the center line and rolled it over and then i start drawing the sheath around it on one side i'm going to have a one inch belt loop there my belt loop from the center line is about 5 16 of an inch away from the center line and then i draw a nice gradual curve and then on this one i'm going to have a half inch welt so you can see i go back and forth a little bit on the outside curvature of the sheath just so i can get that welt at the appropriate distance from the blade i'll be doing a butterfly sheath design here so i'll have a little bit of welt come up on the back end of the spine so i fold it over i make some cuts and then i finish it off with an exacto knife in the corners to transfer it onto the leather i'll just use a pencil and then get it cut out with an x-acto knife here so this leather like i mentioned in my leather sheath video recently is wicked and cragged leather and it is super nice it is a seven to eight ounce leather and the grain on the back lays really flat which is uh definitely a time saver so the first thing i'll address will be the top i will make sure that all my edges at the top have been sanded down and burnished i'm using some quick slick here a major tip that i got on my first video was that i need to put the quick slick onto the edge before sanding i thought it was just a burnishing agent but in reality if you put it on there before sanding it it makes everything nice and smooth so i put the quick slick on the edge i sanded it to 320 and then i put some more quick slick on it sand it to 600 and then i'll burnish these edges i also quick slicked and burnished the outside of the belt loop that will be riding against your pants using a washer i marked out where my stitch line will be on the belt loop and then using some pricking irons i laid out where i will be puncturing the holes before folding the blade i'll take a little bit of material out of the center where the blade will lie this makes the fold a little bit more natural on the sheet i'm going to use some contact cement to get the belt loop laid down and then we'll be putting our maker's mark into the sheath i case the leather gently with some water and then using my arbor press put a little bit of pressure onto this plastic leather stamp and it came out great so normally i use a finishing nail turning in my drill press but this time around i just wanted to puncture these holes by just pressing down with the weight of the drill press and a larger needle and this seemed to work out pretty good i need to play around with a different different needle sizes and see what works for me but this was a little bit of a tighter uh hole for this one millimeter thread and i like that better so we get this saddle stitch going all the way around and i back stitched one half and then i used a soldering iron to melt the tips ideally i'd have a hole punch here when i was cutting out my pattern but i wanted to have a radius at the bottom of my butterfly so i just used a piece of sandpaper wrapped around the file so we get this welt glued in hammered down and then we're going to be folding over this sheath now i don't think i have footage of the fold but i just know that the fold is a precarious scenario and you got to line up all the edges so after i got it folded up i went to the belt center to smooth up all the edges and get them all nice and flat with each other all three of those edges i laid a light groove line down as a target and then i made a second pass with more pressure this groover can get away from me sometimes i didn't want to slip using the pricking irons i set out where i'll be laying my stitches and then i edged the outside and the back of the sheath so i went back to my finishing nail method on the three layer section of the sheath um you know i think i could have used the press method with those smaller needles but it would have been a little more cumbersome to get my needles through during my saddle stitch but i think i have found a smaller needle that i can actually put in the drill press instead of a finishing nail that's going to be the best of both worlds so stay tuned you'll see that on the next one so you can see there i started off in the second hole backstitched through the first hole and i just feel like that's a little stronger right there in that spot there's a lot of force on that spot on the sheath and i wanted to make sure it was nice and tough so we're using some white one millimeter thread here and some john james needles as i was working through this project i really like the way that this butterfly sheath was turning out and i think i'll do more of this type of design of sheath in the future i just think it looks cleaner and i like that there's a welt coming around the tip so you can see i do one back stitch here i think i actually do one and a half back stitches yeah one and a half so once i do my one and a half back stitches i will cut the thread fairly close to the sheath and then use my soldering iron again to heat up those ends and mushroom out a little bit so this is what it looks like before we finish the edge using some quick slick and some 320 grit sandpaper i sand the edge i end up moving up to a 600 grit sandpaper trying to keep all my sanding going in one direction and then i will burnish this edge now before i burnish the edge i am going to dye it if i had black dye i would use that i actually have some on order but i don't have any on hand so i went with the medium brown dye that i had on hand just to darken up that edge a little bit before i burnish it put a little bit of beeswax on the edge and then head over to the power dremel burnisher here and this edge came out nice and slick so the methods that i got by all the users in the comments section especially from diomedes industries really really helped me out here i hold this guy down with a little bit of neat's foot oil and put the knife in it fits nice i'm going to be pressing on it for a little bit here with the with the neats foot oil to try to do like a very light molding but it fits just fine with the friction fit and this is how it turned out so as always i hope you guys really enjoyed this build and maybe got something out of it if you did hit that like button down below and please consider subscribing to the channel until next time i'll catch y'all on the flip side [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Red Beard Ops

Views: 62,180

Rating: 4.9335704 out of 5

Keywords: red beard ops, knifemaker, knifemaking, knife maker, knife making, how to make a knife, wharncliffe knives, wharncliffe knife blade, wharncliffe, wharncliffe knife uses, knife and sheath, making a knife and sheath, how to make a leather sheath, wharncliffe blades, edc wharncliffe, barbershop customs, wharncliffe knife, edc knife, sheepsfoot knife, sheepsfoot knife uses, edc sheepsfoot, how to make an edc knife, custom knife, simple little life, leather knife sheath, knife

Id: HAE9V5wu5qA

Length: 20min 50sec (1250 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 21 2020