Without One Of These... Are You Even A Knife Maker?

yeah this is a handmade custom chef's knife generally kitchen knives are mass produced and come in a Nifty block straight from an overseas Factory but this one here I made by hand in my garage over the course of the last several weekends and it's easily the sharpest knife that I've ever had in a kitchen I mean look at what it can do to this tomato when making this knife I was forced to try techniques that I haven't tried before like heat treating stainless steel and constructing a stacked handle but let's not get too far ahead of ourselves and start from the beginning I was sitting at my desk one day and realized that while I am a Custom Knife maker I don't have any of my own knives in the kitchen and that is where I arguably use a knife the most so with that painful realization I decided it's time to remedy the situation as you all saw I started off by drawing out my chef's knife on paper which I then scanned into my computer and imported into Fusion 360. this allows me to trace out the drawing infusion export the sketch as a dxf file and then finally import it into light burn so that I can cut out a template on my X tool laser foreign [Music] out templates on the X tool has been really handy especially when I want to save the design for future use for this knife I'll be using a piece of 100 000 thick aebl stainless steel I start off by getting the Tang cut out on the bandsaw and then grinding my choil with a small wheel attachment on my 2x72 before I profile the blade I want to Mill in my shoulders so I square up the ends of the bar with the disc grinder in order to clamp it nicely into the Mill Vise thank you [Music] as I mentioned in the intro this is the first time that I'll be heat treating aedl stainless steel and to do so I'll be using some general guidelines I found on Alpha knife supplies website step one is to wrap your blade in stainless steel foil like a taco don't rush like I did and make sure that you get all the folds nice and crisp to prevent oxygen from contacting the blade I'm going to be using my hydraulic press to do a plate quench so I laid out some leather to protect my blocks of aluminum from the steel dies I preheated my DIY Heat Treating oven to 1560 degrees Fahrenheit then inserted the taco once the temperature equalize I ramp the oven to 1940 degrees Fahrenheit and then held it there for 15 minutes then finally I ramped up to 1975 degrees and held for 5 minutes while the distance from my oven to the hydraulic press isn't ideal I did my best to clear the path and practice the route beforehand I took the 1975 degree blade Taco out of the oven and as quickly as I safely could transferred it to the aluminum plates for air quenching [Music] foreign [Music] cooled down I cut off the foil to see how the blade turned out you can see I had some oxygen enter the packet at the top of the spine but I think I can fix that in the finishing process I threw it in the freezer for a few hours to get some extra hardness which isn't as good as cryogenically treating the blade but better than nothing for tempering I meant to run two two hour Cycles at 200 degrees Fahrenheit for an approximately 61 Rockwell hardness blade however I just noticed in the editing process that my oven was running at 205 degrees Celsius by mistake which is around 400 degrees Fahrenheit while with this realization I'm pretty darn disappointed I'm hoping that the blade being around the 58 rock wall hardness is a decent performer in my kitchen and only time will tell with the knife heat treated I want to flatten it on my DIY surface grinder but before I do it's time to do some maintenance to the machine over time I guess the wheel wears and the bearings wear maybe some other things shipped I don't know for sure but it causes the belt to not be 100 square to the Chuck thankfully this is an easy fix with a three inch wide 120 grit belt and some patience foreign [Music] I was watching some videos from the UK blade show channel the other day and came across a grinding jig used by Tobias hangler on his chef knives so I figured I'd try to make a prototype for my machine out of a scrap piece of aluminum it basically allows the user to have a set angle and protect against over grinding up the spine I'll put his video into cards at the top right of your screen for reference while I'm Machining my chunk of aluminum and asking y'all to click around already it seems like a good time to gently show my own channel if you're getting value out of this video and enjoy learning new knife making techniques along with me please consider subscribing to the channel so that YouTube recommends Redbeard Ops content to your feed not only does this result in y'all seeing more cool stuff frequently but by helping grow the channel it will distribute these learnings to a larger group of knife makers which after all is my mission [Music] [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Music] in a nutshell this fixture provides a thin ledge on the front of your work rest to act as a fence for the spine of your knife while grinding the distance between the work rest and the flatten will set the angle of your primary bevel since I already like using a work rest grinding method with a push stick for most of my knives nowadays this fixture is right up my alley for a thin kitchen knife like this one that is already heat treated I find that the water Mister does a great job keeping everything cool and allowing me to stay on the Belt longer I got this Mister as part of the sharpening kit sold by Brian house on his website housemaiden.us and I found that to be very versatile [Music] all right [Music] foreign the ledge I made on this jig ended up being too thick which restricted the height of my primary bevel I threw it back into the mill and took the ledge down the 68 thousands which to be honest ended up still being too thick I talked with Mr Tobias on Instagram and he recommended using a one to two millimeter thick piece of sheet metal bent at a 90 degree angle for The Jig he then grinds down the center of his jig to around one half to three quarters of a millimeter thick which turns out to be around Thirty thousandths of an inch I plan on trying this method again in the future with a newly modified jig [Music] to get some slight convexing and a smooth finish on the bevels I took another page out of Mr tobias's book and made a leather backer for my platen in combination with the jflex belt this worked pretty darn good [Music] foreign sanded the blade up to a dirty 600 grit finish before using it in my recent Wicked Edge gen 3 Pro sharpener review in about 32 minutes I brought the blade up from no Edge at all to a very sharp edge which came in at about 135 grams on the edge out tester note that in this case I stopped my stone progression at 1000 grit then lapped and dropped the edge thank you foreign sharpener test I removed the edge so that I could safely finish out the blade with hand sanding and finish out the handle [Music] since this will be my own kitchen knife and I am sentimental I decided to make the handle out of scrap pieces of wood from previous knives the front block will be made from Ebony and I will slot it here with a 3 32nd of an inch End Mill about a quarter of an inch into the block [Music] [Music] on the back end of the block I'm drilling a one half of an inch hole to accept a wooden dowel which will run through all the blocks I first learned about this wooden dowel kitchen knife handling technique from Jeremy at simple little life on YouTube and have found it to work very good for my needs foreign with a slot made in the wood I took down my Tang on the 2x72 and fitted into the slot it just so happens that the three thirty seconds of an inch was a perfect size for my Ting which is great since otherwise I would have had to order some oddly dimensioned end mills online for this project next I squared up the block starting with the Purple Heart then moved to the green dyed Birch the Ironwood and lastly a piece of bloodwood okay this piece of G10 will be a spacer towards the front of the handle I drilled a half of an inch hole into it along with half of an inch holes in the other pieces to accommodate the doll on the bloodwood Block I board a hole about 840 thousands in after measuring a dowel I'll be using for the assembly foreign [Music] before gluing up the stack I used my rotary burnt and microscope to remove some material at the top and bottom of the slot to enhance the fit of my ebony bolster like I mentioned earlier I got this handling method from the simple little Life channel it consists of the user gluing up the whole assembly with a fast or semi-fast setting epoxy and continuously checking its hang in the slot until the epoxy is hard enough to hold its shape at which point you can fully remove the tank this process is called bedding the tang and allows the user to work on the handle off the knife but then return the handle to the knife in a repeatable fashion foreign after the Tang is out I leveled the block on my 2x72 and then burn the Tang into the handle for a snug fit this is required since I'm guessing some of the epoxy does fall into the slot a bit during the rest of the curing process with the blade inserted into the handle block I saw that it was slightly canted luckily I have enough material here to fix the mistake on the mill by re-leveling at the front of the block to fit the Blade's orientation [Music] now that the blade is sitting Square to the handle block I use the ricasso as a reference plane and Mark my block to get everything nice and parallel on the grinder taking two three two one blocks and connecting them at a 90 degree angle allowed me to clamp the blade upright and Scribe in some lines on the top and bottom of the handle [Music] this once again showed how out of parallel my assembly was and made me thankful for having a large block to start off with I then marked some lines on the front and rear faces of my block to lay out the corner angles and then ground them in with my 2x72 I also found that my disc grinder did an awesome job at finishing out these Flats by working up from a 320 grit to a 1000 grit paper I was able to completely finish the handle on this disc grinder without ever needing to go to the hand sanding bench foreign [Music] [Music] all that's left to do before sharpening is to etch in my Maker's Mark do some fishing hand sanding on the blade Notch the tang and glue up the handle with g-flex epoxy [Music] oh foreign [Music] gen 3 review testing on this blade I recorded the position it sat in on the Vise this allowed me to get the knife right back into the appropriate spot and start sharpening quickly this time around I'm not going to be stopping at 1000 grit I started with 400 grit stones to get the edge back on the blade then worked all the way through the stones to my 3000 grit Diamond Stones after 3000 I used the glass platens and the three Micron lapping films followed by a one-half degree angle reduction and some four Micron pastes applied to the leather straps for the first time I also went to the two Micron paste afterwards here's how the edge turned out I tested it on the edge up Pro and got an impressive reading of 90 grams which is the lowest reading I've been able to achieve on the machine this places the edges sharpness between that of the utility razor and a double edged shaving razor so what they all think make sure to drop some comments Down Below on what I did right and wrong in this video along with any tips you may have for my next chef's knife with that I'll catch y'all on the flip side thank you [Music]

Channel: Red Beard Ops

Views: 16,388

Keywords: red beard ops, knife maker, knife making, how to make a chef's knife, how to make a chef knife, how to make a kitchen knife, how to make kitchen knife sharp, how to make a chef knife at home, how to make a chef knife handle, wa handle making, wa handle, stainless steel chef knife, heat treating stainless steel, heat treating aebl, heat treating aeb-l steel, aeb-l knife, aeb-l chef knife, aeb-l steel, how to make a knife, best kitchen knife, best chefs knife, Javanese knife

Id: YQKTA_qjuSU

Length: 20min 4sec (1204 seconds)

Published: Fri May 26 2023