Transcription
In today's video, I'm going to show you how to make this knife with some steel scale material called kiranite and carbon fiber pins.
To start the build, I'm going to be using a piece of eighth inch 1084 steel from New Jersey Steel Baron. And for handle material, I'm going to be using kiranite. This is an interesting material. I've only used it once before, but I kind of like it. It's very grippy and easy to work with for the most part, and it comes in some crazy colors.
I'm not usually one for flashy handle materials. However, if you've ever dropped a black knife on the forest floor at night, you'll know how hard it is to see. Something with bright colors is much easier to find again. It dropped, especially at night.
For pen material, I'm just using some quarter inch carbon fiber pins and carbon fiber lanyard tube.
Next, I'm just going to wipe down the steel with some alcohol to help degrease it. Then we're going to go ahead and spray it down with some layout dye. Then I'll trace my pattern onto the steel. I'd highly suggest making a dedicated pattern for your knives. It saves so much time marking pins and measuring. And here you can see just how nice those lines are using layout dye. I tried using spray paint and markers to lay out knives on steel, and neither of those work very well, really at all. It's so much easier having nice precise lines to work with. So layout dye is highly recommended.
Next, I'll do some rough cutting with the bandsaw. I don't spend too much time on the bandsaw getting super precise and close to the layout lines. I can actually profile a whole lot faster on the belt grinder than I can with the bandsaw. But in order to help save some belt material, I will cut out the bulk with the bandsaw.
Next, I'll finish up the profiling on a 36 grit belt on the 2x72. I'm changing the shape of this knife slightly, and that's another nice thing about making a pattern. You can still use a lot of the same design elements of your original pattern while still changing certain aspects of the design without doing any measuring.
Once profiling is complete, I'll square up all the edges. And this is a very important step. All of your edges need to be perfectly square for your bevels to line up properly. Don't skip this step, or you'll see it in your bevels.
Next, I'm just going to change the scratch pattern where my bevel center line will be, and we'll talk about this in a second. Next, I'm going to remove all of the mill scale from the flat and take the surface finish to 120 grit. You want to remove any deep scratches in your flats at this point, as they will be much, much harder to remove once the heat treating is complete. My next big purchase for knife making is definitely going to be a surface grinder. That would make this process so much easier.
Now I'm going to hit the center line with some more layout fluid. I'll talk about this again in a second. We'll mark our pin holes using our pattern again, no measuring. Lay the pattern on top of our knife and just, uh, give it a couple taps.
One to drilling the pin holes. This is one of those steps that seems simple, but can actually be quite complicated depending on the pin type that you choose. I'll talk more about this in a dedicated video. For now, I'll just drill the pin holes with no oil. A lot of the keyboard machinists asked why I never use oil when drilling. The reason is because oil gets everywhere. I use these drill presses for drilling scale material as well, and they don't want any oil contaminating my scales or the steel. Since I'm also epoxying everything together, and epoxy and oil do not mix, so I keep everything oil-free. As long as you have a sharp bit, you do not need oil for thin stock like this. I've used these same drill bits for years. I resharpened them, and they've drilled hundreds of holes and still going strong.
Here I'm drilling out these larger center lightning holes, and these are also epoxy through holes. These larger holes allow the epoxy to flow through the knife handle so that the scale is bonded to each other as well as the steel itself.
Now here's where we change the scratch pattern direction earlier and mark the center line with layout dye. I'm just going to use a drill bit the same width of the steel and scratch a center line down the middle of the knife. This line is going to be our bevel reference line, so that we grind our bevel directly in the center line of our knife. Now, what I'm doing is I'm marking one side and then flipping it and marking the other side. Sometimes you'll get two nice little lines, sometimes you won't, depending on how well you sharpened your drill bit. But in either case, if you flip the knife over on each side and mark each side, you should get a nice precise line down the center line of your knife that is going to be your reference line.
Next, I'll put on my carbide bevel guide. And I put this on in a very specific way that I could spend the whole video on, but I've gone back and forth on a bunch of different methods of grinding these candy grinds, and this one is always the one I come back to. It is the fastest and most consistent. It essentially involves a one, two, three block and a carbide bevel guide. I simply adjust the work rest to the bevel angle I want and then hold the bevel jig against the one, two, three block as it sits squarely on the work rest. This is something I could spend an entire video talking about. This method is super simple and it's repeatable, meaning I can always reference the exact same angle again, even if I remove the carbide guide. And that has a lot to do with how I set it up initially, which again, I'll have to leave for a dedicated video.
My belt progression for these initial bevels is 36 grit, 80 grit, 120 grit, and I'll typically grind this bevel pretty close to apexing. I don't have an exact measurement, but I don't leave it too thick behind the edge due to it being significantly harder to grind once heat treated. I want to get most of that material removed right now before the steel is hard. And make sure you honor that center line we made earlier. Try to keep the grinds as even as possible on both sides using that center line as your reference.
Now I'm going to again go back and touch up all the flats on a 120 grit to make sure that there are no deep scratches remaining in any of those flats. This is super, super important. You do not want any deep scratches in those flats after heat treating. You will absolutely hate life if there are. So take your time here, make sure that all of those deep scratches are removed. And here's what we're sort of working with here once we're done and ready to heat treat.
For heat treating, I'm using Laren's heat treat recipe from his book, Knife Engineering. And it's pretty simple: 14.75 soak for 10 minutes, quench and Parks 50, temper two two-hour cycles at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. If you have any questions about this heat treatment, I'd suggest picking up the book or asking Laren himself on his YouTube channel. Don't ask me, it's not my recipe. I don't have a doctorate degree in metallurgy. He does. So ask him. I know he's practically begging for subscribers at this point doing reaction videos, so go check out his channel.
Now, right out of the quench, we're going to grind through our scale buildup back down to bare steel again. And we'll put it on the hardness tester to see what our hardness is. Right out of the quench, 65 and a half, 65 and a half to 66 was the hardness right after quenching. And then onto the temper cycles again. It is two two-hour cycles, cooling down to room temperature between cycles. And after tempering, we're going to give it several more hardness tests. And it looks like we came out right around 60, which is exactly what I was expecting to see.
And next, we're going to be back to grinding flats. Yay. At this point, since the steel is hard, it's significantly harder to grind the flats. Yay. I'm using a fresh 120 grit belt to grind off the rest of the scale and making everything consistent. A quick tip when grinding flats: using a ceramic belt, you need a lot of pressure and belt speed in order to remove the material. You have a lot of surface area coming into contact with a belt, so pressure is needed to actually fracture the ceramic abrasive to continuously expose sharp abrasive, otherwise you'll grind forever and get nowhere. Keep the knife wet and use your bare fingers to make sure you're not overheating the steel. Your fingers will burn off well before you overheat the steel at this point and ruin its temper.
So now to finish grind the bevel. And like I said before, I can put this back to the exact same repeatable setup as before. First thing to do is to square up the work rest to the platen. Next, I'll zero my angle finder. And now I can move the work rest to any angle I want without messing up the zero. The angle I'm looking for is 14.1 degrees to be exact, and that is exactly the same angle that I had before. Now I'll reattach my carbide bevel guide. And I will simply square this bevel guide up to the spine of the knife in exactly the same manner that I did previously. And now I have the exact same setup that I had when I initially ground the bevel.
Now I'm going to use a 36 grit belt, apex that grind evenly on both sides, and then I'll go through my belt progression, which is 36 grit to start, 80 grit, 120 grit, 220 grit. Oh man, that's it. Um, 220 grit, 830 Trisect belt, X5 Norax belt. Uh, not a perfect belt progression, but I was missing some grits, so you gotta do what you gotta do sometimes. Now, there's still some residue on here from the water and whatnot, but this is sort of what we're looking like at this point. And we'll give it a couple passes on this strop.
At this point, the knife is sharp. Uh, we are dealing with a very, very sharp knife. And some of you may have problems with that going forward, since we're not completed the knife, and you may not want to be working with a knife this sharp as you're working with it. But I choose to sharpen at this point, and I'm sticking to it. So I'm just dropping on a 6 micron strop here. I'm also hitting the flat on the six micron strop just to clean them up and get some of that residue off.
So now, once the bevel is finished ground, I will go back and finish grind the flats. It may seem like I'm going back and forth here between the flats and the bevel, flats and the bevel, but I'm actually not. Initially, I ground all of the heat treating scale off of the flats so that everything would fit perfectly flat against my work rest and one, two, three block and bevel jig. And then I can go back and grind the bevel, and then come back and finish the flats. You sort of have to play this balancing game, if you will, between the bevel and the flats, making sure that all of the scratches go in the appropriate direction on each of those things, if that makes sense. So flat, so that everything sits flat, then bevel, then finish flat at the end.
Now that all of the exposed metal, meaning all of the metal that's not underneath the handle, is finished, I'm going to go ahead and wrap everything in electrical tape to keep everything protected. I like electrical tape over any other type of tape because it comes off easily. That's fairly thick tape, so it doesn't cut through super easily. I do a bunch of wraps around it, and it keeps the sharpened portion of the knife somewhat protected.
Now I'll go back and rough up the handle section of the knife with a 36 grit belt in preparation for epoxy.
Now I'm going to mark and cut out the scales. Now, again, we could make a whole video on drilling scale material, but basically what I've done here is clamped everything together with the knife on top, and then we're going to drill down through each one of the pin holes as well as the lanyard tube hole to drill everything all at the same time. This can get a little bit more complicated when we are dealing with liners attached to the scale material. The liners are going to have to be on the middle of the sandwich and not on the top. I've made that mistake before and ruined a set of scales doing that. So anyway, we can make a whole video on just that one subject, drilling scales, but essentially that's what we do. Stack everything and then drill it.
So now you're going to want to mark everything exactly how the scales go together inside and out so that you don't confuse which side is what. And we're going to trim off all of the excess scale material. Karen Knight really does machine very nicely. Aluminum oxide belts are the preferred belt material. They remove the keironite super quickly. It's just kind of a joy to work with. It's very expensive, but it is very nice to work with.
So after I've removed all of the excess material, I'll start shaping the front of the scales. You need to do this part now, and you need to finish the front of the scales now because it cannot be done after the knife scales are epoxied to the knife itself. So I'm just going to put a little bit of a radius on here as well as sort of a, I guess you could call it a chamfer back towards the, uh, the back of the knife. And then we're going to take this over and give it a quick hand sand with 600 grit after it 220 grit belt. And then I'm going to take this to a buffing wheel with green aluminum oxide. I'll talk a little bit more about buffing this stuff later, but just know that it is, it buffs nicely, but you can overbuff this stuff and burn it very, very quickly, in which case you're going to have to go back to the hand sanding stage. But this is basically what it looks like once we're done.
So now I'm going to rough up the inside of the scales with a very fresh 60 grit sandpaper. We want to make sure that this is super rough so the epoxy sticks to it. Also, we are going to rough up our pins. Don't forget the pins. Then clean everything with acetone. I do this a couple times, make sure there is zero dust on anything so that the epoxy sticks to it.
Then we'll mix up our G Flex epoxy. I'll put a link to this below if it's still available on Amazon, who knows, but I'll try and put links to all this stuff below, so check the description. We can epoxy everything together, making sure that we fill all of those epoxy through holes with epoxy, and make sure that we apply epoxy to all of our surfaces before we smash everything together.
Next, I'm going to clamp these scales on. I like to use spring clamps, not twist clamps, because for some reason, it seems like the epoxy tends to shrink a tiny bit when it dries. So a lot of times you'll put a twist clamp on, and then when you go to take it off, it almost just sort of falls off like it wasn't even tightened to begin with. So spring clamps seem like they provide good pressure throughout the entire drying process, and it just keeps pressure on that handle again throughout the drying process.
And then finally, we're wiping down the front of the scales where they meet the knife blade itself. We don't want any epoxy squeeze out in that area because it will be impossible to remove if you don't do that now. Also, make sure there is no epoxy inside your lanyard tube, because if there is, it will be impossible to remove it once it's dried and still have the lanyard tube look decent. You, uh, will basically not be able to get it out. Trust me.
All right, so a day later, and our handle is completely dry. All the epoxy is dry, and we're left with a blob of epoxy, kiranite, carbon fiber, and steel. And at this point, it's up to you to shape this, or up to me to shape this into something that resembles a knife handle. So back over to the 2 by 72 we go. We're just going to square everything up, sand those pins down completely flat, and make sure that everything is flat and square.
So now I need to bring down the thickness of the scales. You could do this before you glue everything together, and it'll probably be smarter to do it that way, but I actually forgot to do it, so now I have to do it with the scales on the knife. So you can see me here, I'm just measuring everything out, getting some hard lines on here so that I can sand down to those lines, and that'll give me the thickness that I need. And then I'm using an 80 grit aluminum oxide belt on the 4x36 inch belt sander to bring the thickness down. Caronite is very weird in how it shapes on sanding belts. It's almost like it doesn't seem like it's sanding super well, and then all of a sudden you apply a little bit more pressure, and you'll remove a whole bunch of material all at once. So you have to be really careful shaping this stuff. It does shape really nicely though, if you kind of get everything just right.
So then over to the router table to put the final radius on my handle scales. So just like a lot of the other things, we could spend the whole video on just setting up a router table to shape handle scales. I believe I'm using a quarter inch round over bit here to put the radius on the handle scales. And you need to make sure if you're going to do this, that you get the thickness of the scales exactly right and match it to the radius of the router bit that you're using. If you get this wrong, you have your router bit set too high, you'll end up gouging the steel with your router bit and ruining your router bit. You definitely don't want to do that. Those things are expensive, and it's also would be kind of dangerous.
And speaking of danger, I don't want to hear any safety comments about doing this with your fingers close to the table. We don't need Stumpy Nubs doing another safety video. Just know if you're doing this, there's a certain amount of risk involved in doing it.
So now the handle shape. We can go back to the 2x72 with a blue Scotch Brite belt, and we're just going to soften up all of the metal surfaces, or essentially refine the scratch pattern on all of the metal surfaces where the handle, or where the scale, has come in contact with the metal on the handle. And then I'll switch over to a 220 grit J Flex ceramic belt, and it just sort of softens all of the edges on the, uh, care Knight, and that'll give us a head start for the hand sanding.
Now, speaking of sanding, this stuff is super easy to sand. It finishes really nicely. I think I went right from a 220 grit J Flex belt to 600 grit and didn't have any problems sanding out those 220 grit scratches. I think I might have spent five minutes or so per grit for the entire handle. So basically 600 grit and then 1500 grit, and that's pretty much the entire hand sand process. Again, super, super easy to sand. I really like this stuff in terms of sanding. However, the fact that it is easy to sand means that it's also very easy to scratch. It gets scratches in it again, and I'll show you at the end here a little bit more about what I'm talking about.
Now I tried to buff this, put the final finish on this with a buffer, and I have not had any luck whatsoever buffing this stuff. I tried a slow speed, I have a variable speed buffer here, a slow, super slow speed, fast, uh, different compounds, a loose buffing wheel, hard buffing wheel. It just does not buff super well. Uh, it wants to, I don't know what the correct terminology is, but it almost like burns it. It like leaves little pull marks in it, and then sometimes it's, it's really easy to see. You'll buff it, and it'll look really good, then you'll buff it just a half a second longer, and it'll like pull out chunks of the material. It's very bizarre and how it works, but anyway, it just does not buff well, at least for me anyway.
So I actually found what works a whole lot better is actually just buffing it by hand with some metal polish. I'm just using some Mother's metal polish, and, uh, it took maybe two minutes to make it look like this. So I'm not even sure a buffer is really necessary, and the, uh, the result kind of speaks for itself. So this looks really nice. I mean, the handle is, in my opinion, it's perfect. There's zero scratches in it. I mean, it looks like it is wet almost. It, it's polished that well. Again, it's a 600 grit, 1500 grit, and then polished with a Mother's metal polish. And really, anything will polish this stuff. Any, any type of a polish. I actually even tried, just because I was curious, uh, stropping one micron strop compound, and that, that worked just as well as the polish did. So pretty much anything, any type of a metal polish will polish this stuff, and it'll look like this.
And if you're wondering if the handle is slippery being polished like this, it's really not. It's weird. Like, if you're holding it with a paper towel, it will slip out of the paper towel super easily and fall on the floor. Don't do that. That's not good for a finished knife. But as soon as you get it in your hand, it feels really nice. It's almost like sticks to your skin, if that makes sense. It's a fairly grippy material while looking pretty nice all polished up.
So now I'm just going to remove the tape, being very careful because it's an extremely sharp knife. And then I'll take it back to the 2x72 on a contact wheel and a 220 grit belt, ceramic belt, and just square off the spine of the knife to give it a nice sharp edge for striking a fire steel.
And here's the finished knife, and it looks pretty good. Keep in mind, though, that if you even look at this stuff the wrong way, you'll see scratches appear from seemingly nowhere on the karenite. This stuff scratches super easily. Just gently moving it around here, trying to get video of the finished plate. It starts to get micro scratches in it. It's just something you're going to have to live with with this material. The good news is is that you can literally buff them right back out with some metal polish and a paper towel. So you could really pound on this stuff, scratch it all up, and then in five minutes, bring it back to a nice shine and make it like new again.
So if you notice with this build, there was very little hand work, aside from the couple minutes of hand sanding the handle. My goal is to try to streamline the production and cut out any unnecessary steps that don't really add to the function of the finished product while still being something nice to look at. This knife is 1084 steel, 60 HRC at 14 degrees per side, and will make an awesome carving/bushcraft woods knife. And if taken care of, will probably last a lifetime.
Hopefully, this video was helpful in some way. I am currently looking into another build that will broaden my horizons in the knife making world. It's something I've never done before, but I am in desperate need of, and I'm looking forward to starting that project. But until then, thanks for watching. See you in the next video.