Transcription
What's going on guys? So, in this video, I want to do a voiceover version of the last video. I've had a couple of requests to do so, and that kind of brings us to where we are right now, which is essentially some recycled footage from the last video on me talking over it.
Most of you guys have seen a lot of this stuff before, like kind of stenciling out the knife flank here and cutting that out on the bandsaw. But there are a couple of things with this knife that are different from a lot of the other knives that I've done so far, which is, well, one of them is the steel. This is CPM 3V. And one of the things that I noticed right off the bat with CPM 3V is it's kind of difficult to work with. It doesn't cut super well on the bandsaw, and it is noticeably more difficult to profile and grind on the grinder.
A question that I got in the last video was why I was using the contact wheel for my profiling. And the answer to that is that the contact wheel is a lot more efficient at removing material. There's a lot less heat buildup, and it makes your belt last a lot longer. And that's a lot of a lot. And then I'll just kind of clean everything up on the flat platen and square everything up.
So I decided to try and use my 4 by 36 to do the flats on this knife. I started with, I think, an AV grit belt and went up to 150 grit belt, and that kind of left a semi-decent finish on here. I'll talk a little bit more about this in a second. And then we're just using a pair of junk calipers to mark out the pinhole locations. These are like $20 calipers from Home Depot, nothing special. They're not $300 calipers or anything like that. That's why I'm using them as scribes as well.
So it's time to drill out the holes now. Quick secret here, I actually started this knife about, if I remember correctly, maybe two and a half months ago. So the footage that you're seeing now is at this point almost three months old. And I, I kind of semi-finished the knife halfway and then went and finished it a week or so ago. But I ended up drilling the wrong size holes because I was thinking that I was gonna put different handles on it at this point. So later on in the video, the the pinholes that you see or the pins that I used were carbon fiber, and I ended up having to take those carbon fiber pins down to the holes that I, the sides, the holes that I originally drilled because at this point the blade was heat-treated and, well, there's nothing I could do about it.
So then we ended up doing our lightening holes in the tang. And I'm just using an old countersink bit here to kind of connect all the holes to make the filing a little bit easier. I kind of stumbled on this solution. I was just trying to figure out a way to enlarge the holes from the largest bit that my drill press would take. I put the countersink bit in there and just kind of stumbled on the fact that the countersink bit wouldn't chatter around to give me all kinds of problems when connecting the holes that way. It's much easier to file out.
And here we're just kind of filing all this excess material away. To tell you the truth, this isn't worth it. We might lose an eighth of an ounce at this point by following this material away. Really, where the weight savings comes into play is the actual stock thickness. The extra little bit that we're filing away here, again, might add up to an eighth of an ounce. Not much. And we're just saving grams here at this point. I mean, why not, right?
And it is time for the heat treating. Yeah, this took a long time to heat treat this steel. The first thing we have to do is make a little pouch out of this stainless tool wrap. This is not aluminum foil. Aluminum foil will melt at the temperatures that we're talking about here. This stuff is like ridiculously expensive. It might as well be made of gold. Now, this tool wrap actually helped prevent decarburization. I do know that some guys will put a little piece of paper in there, and the idea behind that is that the paper will catch on fire and use up all the oxygen inside the pouch. But what I have found is that when you put paper in there, it actually puffs to pack it up. And when the packet is all puffed up like a balloon, when you go to plate quench it, it makes it a lot more difficult. You actually have to like pop the pouch before you plate quench it. If you skip the paper, as you'll see in a second, the foil kind of sucks itself in and around the blade itself, and there's no air that's in there. It's about as air-free of an environment as you possibly get.
So for the actual heat treating recipe, we austenitize this at 2050 degrees for 20 minutes, and then plate quench this between two zero-degree Fahrenheit plates. The plates were just in the freezer at zero degrees, nothing special. And that just kind of helps pull as much heat out as possible, as quickly as possible. I've seen a lot of guys use an air compressor between the plates to blow out a lot of the heat. I tried to do that, but I didn't have a third hand available. And believe it or not, this blade cooled off in May, 20 seconds to the touch. So from 2050 degrees to maybe like 60 degrees in a matter of seconds. So these plates actually cool really well, especially when they're frozen.
So here we're using my hard-use folder to unwrap this blade, and hopefully you can tell how well that foil sucked itself in and around that blade. It's almost like it was vacuum sealed in there, and you can see there's no decarburization going on. I actually think I might have gotten a small pinhole back towards the handle, but that didn't seem to affect the blade area in any way, so I'm not worried about it.
So the blade was straight when it came out of the heat treating process. You can kind of see it wobbling back and forth on the granite there, but there was actually a small piece of dirt on the opposite side of the knife that was causing that. But I just, to be sure that we didn't get any warps in tempering, I decided to do a clamp temper. We just clamped it between two pieces of angle iron, and it ended up coming out nice and straight. This angle iron also adds mass to the inside of the oven and helps stabilize the temperature.
So into the oven it goes for three, two-hour temper cycles at a thousand degrees. The heat treating on this is ridiculous. That's six hours total tempering time. And then it took at least probably a little over two hours for my oven to come up to the 2050 degrees that we initially quenched the steel at. And then it took another two hours for the oven to cool back down to a thousand degrees so that I could temper. So all in all, you're looking at a very full day of heat treating.
So we're finally done with the heat treating. We'll go back and get that junk calipers and scribe a centerline for the bevels. Couldn't think what I was going to say there. And then we'll get the grind in. I'm using the old White Bone Knives bevel jig here again. I really like this jig. It's much better than using a piece of angle iron or angle aluminum or whatever have you. Really liked this thing, and I'm gonna keep using it.
So grinding 3V post-heat treatment is a pain in the butt. This took a very, very long time to grind. 3V is no joke. The the wear resistance on this steel has to be extremely high, and I can tell that immediately the second I put it on the grinder. Significantly, significantly harder to grind than 1084, we'll put it that way.
So one thing I cut out of the last video, and we're being honest here, is I tried to put a hand-sanded finish on this knife, and I, I failed miserably. I probably sanded for two hours and then realized that I wasn't really getting anywhere. And so I just kind of threw it back on the grinder with a Norax belt and put a semi-decent grinder finish on here because I was getting nowhere with sandpaper on this. So word to the wise, do all of your finishing before you heat treat 3V because it's extremely difficult if you wait.
And here we are just cutting out some 1/8 inch G10 and drilling some pinholes, the correct size this time. Somebody asked in the last video why I wasn't using carbon fiber. And to tell you the truth, it's funny because I have some carbon fiber, but I didn't use it on this knife because after weighing a slab of G10 and the same size slab of carbon fiber, the carbon fiber is basically not any lighter. I mean, it might be a few grams lighter, but literally a few grams per set of scales. So it's really not worth the extra cost of carbon fiber. You know, if we're talking about weight here. Looks on the other hand might be a completely different thing. And the reason I didn't use it on this knife is because, well, I didn't get the finish on this knife that I really was after in the beginning because I didn't, you know, I didn't do my finishing before heat treatment. So it's kind of stuck with a lower quality finish than I'd like. So I used kind of a lower quality scales.
So here we're just doing the epoxy surface prep on the tang of the knife, just standing in a crosshatch pattern here to give the the most available bite for the epoxy. And then kind of doing the same thing for the scale, sanding in a crosshatch pattern or a figure 8, whatever, to flatten the scales and provide a nice rough surface for the epoxy to adhere to. So then we'll just go ahead and clean all of the surfaces that the epoxy is gonna come in contact with with some rubbing alcohol. You want to make sure that all of these surfaces are as clean as humanly possible, that way you get the the best adhesion with your epoxy.
And then again, probably the most asked question that again on these knife-making videos is what epoxy I'm using because sometimes I don't show you the bottles. But I'm using the West Systems G-Flex epoxy. I'll leave a link to that and some other stuff below if you're interested. G-Flex is used by a lot of well-known makers. It's some of the toughest stuff that I've tested so far. And I'm not saying that it is the absolute best, but out of all the stuff that I've tested so far, this stuff is definitely the strongest.
And we're just making 100% sure that we got all of the squeeze out off of the ricasso area of the knife because it's really, really, really, really a pain in the butt when you leave epoxy to sit there and dry. You're basically gonna hate your life later on. So we let it dry overnight, and now we'll just kind of clean up all that excess that we left hanging off of there.
So one thing to point out here is if you use your bandsaw to cut G10, you're gonna go through tons of blades. I don't know what it is in G10, I guess it's the glass fiber in G10, but it wears out bandsaw blades like crazy. Then we'll go ahead and just finish cleaning up a lot of the excess on the handle on the flat platen on the grinder. Not much to say about this process, just a matter of bringing all that excess material down to the steel on the knife. And in case you're wondering here, the belt that I'm using is a 220 grit ceramic belt from Combat Abrasives. As far as I know, they're one of the only belt manufacturers that actually makes a fine grit 220 grit belt out of ceramic. I actually really liked these belts for doing the initial finish on this blade. These are probably so my most used belts. The only thing that I don't really like them for is grinding bevels because they have a relatively large seam on the belt, and the belt itself is fairly thin. I believe it's a J-flex belt, which means it's really flexible, and the seam causes problems when you're when you're grinding. But for doing a, you know, cleaning up the spine and doing around the spine of the knife on the handle and things like that, they're really good, and they leave a decent finish, and you can definitely move on and do a finer finish off of this belt. This is not sponsored, by the way. They just happen to like these.
So then again, I'm using the 220 grit J-flex ceramic belt to do the texturing on the handle. I wasn't real sure how this was gonna work out. I've done it a couple times before, and I seem to get better at at each time. This one so far has turned out, it's the best one that I've done. I still need a little bit of work at it, but, you know, for practice, for a practice knife, I think it turned out okay. I like you gonna find her belt for doing handles and stuff like this because if you use a coarse belt, a lot of times it will leave super, super deep scratches in the handle material, and it can be a heck of a time getting those things out later on. At least if you're doing relatively detailed stuff like this. If you're doing large stock removal, you're gonna want a nice gritty belt. But for finer stuff like this, you know, a fine belt is definitely what you want. You do have to make sure that with the fine belts, you're using a nice fresh belt, otherwise you'll burn the material.
And then we're just cleaning up a lot of the sharp edges with some sandpaper. Then I just used a a teak oil finish on this handle. After a while, it'll absorb into the handle and kind of dry, and it leaves a nice grippy surface. Seems like everybody has a different way to finish G10. I really don't know what's the best way. And in a lot of ways, actually kind of like G10 unfinished completely. It gives the most grip in my opinion.
So now it's on the sharpening. And here's another instance where I like these 220 grit J-flex ceramic belts. These are great for doing your initial secondary bevel. And in fact, you can strop directly off of these belts, and you can have a hair-whittling finish directly off of these belts with a little bit of stropping. So they do a really good job. So now I'm just going through an Norax belt progression after I crowned in my secondary bevel. I'll leave links to the belts that I'm using and this kind of stuff below. Then we're on to the good old DIY green compound strop. This job actually has a little secret. It has some diamond spray on it. I don't know why I decided to do that, just kind of an experiment I've been messing around with, but it seems to be working pretty well. So it's getting kind of late in the day, and I just put a fairly decent edge on it. This is not a super special edge, but it works.
And then lastly, what does it weigh? So this is the original prototype that I made at 3.85 ounces or 109 grams. Now let's see what the new blade weighs. 2.8 ounces or 80 grams for those of you in the rest of the world. So 2.8 ounces, I'm happy with that. And I believe that we picked up most of that weight savings from the initial prototype with the thinner steel stock, which we went from 125 thousandths down to 93 thousandths. Hopefully I'm correct on that. Anyway, thank you guys for watching. Please subscribe and hit the like button. They've really helped out the channel. Check out the links below, and again, thank you for watching. We'll see in the next video.