Why Forging Damascus Steel Knives Takes Years to Master — Handmade

the craft of knife making is meditative in a sense you're concentrating fully and making sure that it fits the end user very well instead of using just a mono steel or just one type of steel i decided to do damascus damascus is welding two types of steel together and a forge and so i decided to use 1095 and 15 and 20 because when i do the etching one turn darker and the other one stays light so you give it that contrast we're going to alternate the layers and make sure that it's clean there are three rules in welding clean clean clean so what i'm going to do now i'm getting ready to weld these up so they can stick together safety safety safety getting ready to weld let's get this done the way that i would describe knife making is taking nothing and to make something my style is almost japanese a little bit but i take bits from the japanese culture and the european culture and kind of blend it together to make my own since we welded this together i'm going to weld a handle to it and we'll put in the forge [Applause] [Music] the knife we're making today is called a bunker it is basically a blend between a nakiri and a chef knife it's called a punch cut is instead of rocking it it's more straight down it's more of a japanese style and it's a little bit more precise forge welding is basically getting the steel up to a temperature where it fuses to itself i don't have a meter on my my forge so i need to go by color the color that i'm looking for is if you think about the sun if the sun is at 12 o'clock in this highest point it's almost like a yellowish orange that's the same color that i'm looking for that's inside the forge and that's how i know that it's around 2300 degrees since this is an open forge i need to kind of close it off so that he can kind of stay in so this is ceramic wool and it's not going to catch a fire what i'm gonna do now is set it and forget it and after we heat up the billet to 2300 degrees we use the hydraulic press to elongate the billet and allow it to adhere to one another yep we're there [Music] so i have the flat part of my dies where i'm slightly touching it so i'm kind of making sure that it's stuck together and i have the rounded part of my dies right here so i'm kneading it to push it out to make it longer the reason why i got into knife making is my boy's love of making a sword because i fell in love with uh conan the barbarian star wars he-man so i would take a tubing off my swing set and flatten it on a cinder block and chase my brothers around the yard like ah i'm he-man and that's where the passion and love of swords or knives or the adventure that's where it started i need to straighten it out so i'm going to whack it a few times to make it straight so everything will line up real nice when i cut it so we already got the the length that i want so now we're going to try to get the pattern it's basically like teeth that i'm going to is going to chomp inside of it and basically it's called a ladder pattern you'll see where it really reveals itself at the end when i'm grinding the the knife [Music] the next process is normalizing normalizing is allowing the steel to rest and let it heat up and then cool down very slowly so in the end we won't have any cracks or anything like that forging is only one third of knife making it's a lot of people romanticize it it's saying like oh you have to forge but it's truly a very small piece the real important part about knife making is the heat treating and the grinding so that's what makes a knife great so next what we're getting ready to do is uh grind the profile of the knife so i'm going to grind away the excess on the billet so right now it is kind of fragile i do have to be a little careful i can't just bang it on the ground i do have to take care and pay attention to the steel so this part right here i'm getting ready to put myself into the knife geometry is very important because i need to work well i need to be able to rock well early on i watched an executive chef named craig diehl i spent a lot of time in this kitchen watching him move and and how he perform in his kitchen so that's how i kind of figure out what the knife needs to do basically the most important part of knife making is the heat treating and that's i have to know the type of steel i'm using i need to heat it up to its critical temperature where if you think about the the crystals inside the steel it needs to realign and kind of mesh together but the only way that they can do that if it's getting to their critical temperature and the critical temperature for 1095 and 15 and 20 is around 1500 degrees [Music] i want the the grain structure to stay this way so that's when i would take it out of the forge and stick it in oil and that's called quenching so taking it from 1500 degrees and cooling it down to around maybe 700 degrees within seconds that shocks it but it's really brittle it's really hard but it's real brittle like cast iron i can take a hammer and hit it and it will shatter the next process is tempering that's heating it up to a lower temperature around 400 degrees but at a longer span of time just like if you're doing dough you need to allow the dough to rest and to rise so that's what i'm doing with the steel when it's in the kiln that softens the steel a little bit so you have a blend between hard and soft i wanted i wanted to be hard to hold an edge but i wanted to be soft enough to re-sharpen and flex a little bit i used to work in a local mall and i was selling cigars knives swords and my mentor jason knight he came in he bought this cool sword and he just said oh yeah i make knives for a living and to a 17 year old like i'm like oh can you teach me that's how i really got into knife making basically what i'm looking for in this step is the 50 grit it grinds the the bevels then after that i need to get the scratches out so that's the progression of the belts basically after i grind with the 50 grit i'm polishing after that [Music] i started making hunting knives bowie knives swords until um i had a dream man basically the holy spirit was telling me make chef knives i made a few knives and i took it to a few chefs everybody looking oh this is cool this is awesome and every last one of them put it back down after everybody left the the executive chef told me said like hey these knives are cool but they're too thick they're too heavy they're too clunky [Music] so he gave me some parameters to kind of go by and watch how he moves in his kitchen that allowed me to become the chef knife maker that i am now i want to make the the grain pop because we went through the whole process of using two types of steel so i used ferric chloride this is basically a developer and it will attack the high carbon steel that's the 1095 then the 15 and 20 it has more nickel in it so it's going to stay brighter so you'll see the contrast and uh the steel this little shank is my very first i guess knife you could say i made this when i was seven but um this one has a little bit more sentimental value my dad passed away in 2007 and when i was younger i remember he took this after i made it he threw it on top of the china cabinet and maybe 20 years later i just wanted to reach up there i just wanted to see if it was still there and sure enough it was there and my dad was the last one that touched it so i guess man oh this is very i get i get emotional about it because i love my dad i'm going to tape up the blade so i can protect it from other elements like scratching and so we get ready for the handle each knife that i make has his own personality so it's basically like trying to figure out what the knife wants to wear the design of the handle is very very important when you grab it it's very bulby in the center so it just feels very comfortable so now that we forged and we grind um the knife and in this bevels and we've ground the profile of the handle material so now we're going to combine them we're going to use some glue so one part is this is the resin and the other part is a hardener so it's just like peanut butter and jelly i'm just spreading on on both of the handle material and now we're going to add the screws i'm going real slow with i don't want to crack it so yeah we just set it let it dry [Music] so there are two types of material that i use i use this secret sauce but this is basically a great sealer and it seals the wood and allows it to look really nice you know and the second product i use is a wax you're going to see the pattern and this wood really junk as soon as i apply this on it a lot of knife making sure this is their favorite part the next step is once we buff the handle now it's time for me to sharpen it [Music] the thing that gives it its quality is the details paying attention on temperature the grinding process handle material instead of doing thousands at a time i'm doing one knife at a time i'm paying attention to the small details the little things that comes from my 18 years of making knives my experiences my mistakes i'm putting everything inside that knife each and every nap i make it looks awesome it looks really cool but now the thing that keeps my clients is that it performs well so that's why i think my knives are kick-ass [Music] i think the the bunker is a little bit more for a professional chef really where the tip is it allows you to have a little bit more precise cuts and is straight to the point and versus a chef knife to give you that rock and this one is right to it and it just works well from vegetables to protein but when i make that knife and i'm finished and i'm looking at the the end product i'm thinking like wow this is an awesome piece of knife but i'm not just thinking of the right now gratification i'm thinking about the years that took me to get to the point that i am now the 18 years of learning how to make the knives and the mistakes so every time i finish a knife that comes to mind yeah it's my heart it's my love it's my soul i'm putting that inside each night for me

Channel: Eater

Views: 1,519,966

Keywords: knife making, making knives, handmade knives, forging, forging knives, welding, welding knives, handmade knife making, handmade knife, bladesmithing, making a knife, how to make a knife, knife maker, best handmade knives, custom knife, custom knives, middleton made knives, quintin middleton, made in america, knives, forging knives tips, bladesmith, eater, eater.com, food, restaurant, dining, dish, foodie, chef, food show, Damascus steel, damascus steel knife, damascus steel forging

Id: 6fsuvc8sl04

Length: 14min 24sec (864 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 03 2021