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Knife Making , Material Reduction Knife Start to Finish Part 1

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http://www.selfrelianceoutfitters.com

http://astore.amazon.com/davecante-20

Dave Canterbury, David Canterbury, The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

evening guys I'm Dave Canterbury with self-reliance Outfitters in the Pathfinder school what I thought we'd do today is just take a piece of 1095 bar stock and we're going to make a simple bushcraft knife I'll show you the process it's pretty simple it does take a couple of specialized tools and again you know sometimes the investment is yes I have to buy a grinder that costs four or five hundred dollars but how many of these knives that are worth a hundred bucks can I make off that grinder and sell the people before that grinders paid for so sometimes you get what you pay for you may have to spend a little money to get the right equipment but I didn't start with this equipment either I started with bench grinders and I started making knives on bench grinders and with files and things like that and you can do that but I'm going to show you a couple tricks today that I'm going to use a stand up belt sander for I think you'll be interested to see them on how to get a good grind line on your blade get even drawing line where he's a stand-up sander for that but we're going to use a couple real common man tools in conjunction with that and we'll probably use a bandsaw to cut this out so I make sure that this thing is good and flat and that's important that this stock is flat and now we're just going to decide what we want our profile look like and cut it out on a bandsaw okay so I took this thing and just rented on a sander to make sure it was good and clean so that we can see lines drawn on it with a marker and we want this knife to have a five-inch blade

so if measure down five inches our blade length is going to go to about here give ourselves about an eighth of an inch of play there and then on top of that I want about a five-inch handle so one two three four five down to ten inches it gives us a handle about right there that gives us plenty of room to play with and then this is scrap now let's come up here to the blade and just kind of look at our profile I think I want something that looks kind of like this that comes down to a gentle curve here and going straight across

has a little bit of a drop point here but not too drastic not a spear point a drop point a spear point would come down to the middle of the stock a drop point is going to be about two-thirds of the way down that's going to be my blade profile and then this will be my the start of my handle grind line will be about right here something like this this doesn't have to be perfect right now we're just kind of spitballing things here and then I think I want to bring my blade up from there and make my handle something like this something in that fashion probably seat me pretty good that's going to be the initial parts of the stock that we need to remove that we can cut off with some type of a cutoff wheel on an angle grinder or a bandsaw anything that we can remove this material with will work so we'll get that cut out and get this material here here here and here removed then we'll look at it again okay that's a pretty close start that's a pretty close start to the profile I'm looking forward now I can take this over the belt sander and knock it down to my initial profile now we're going to have a bucket of water right here because we've got to keep this blade cool as we do this now we push up here against this Plattner this large metal plate before you remove a lot of metal on straight line three hard edges we come down here to the slack side of this belt and push in it's going to make things softer and then remove less material so to get our profile and then come up here for the hard flat and like go down through our grind line persecute me down through our pen lon and it's ablaze start to get too hot to hold on to and we're going to drop it in the water as far as got this bucket of water

through here go right down to my line on the bottom that radius right there got nice squared up it's a drop knock any burrs off real quick we like smooth so

that looks pretty good for a starter feels pretty good in the hand right now we're ready for the next step okay so we've got our knife profiled about the way we want it now the next step is to grind our initial bevel on the blade on both sides and we're going to go with the Scandinavian bevel and the easiest way I found to do that down-and-dirty if you don't have a lot of fixturing is to just make a wooden jig and this is the wooden jig that I've been using for a little while I'm going to flatten out the side of it because it's kind of beat-up but all it is a piece of 4x4 has been milled down and it has a 12 degree angle cut on the table saw on one side of the jig and that side of the jig lays down flat so when your blade is up you're pushing a 12 degree angle into the sanding belt as you drag it along you're cutting even 12 degree bevel on one side which gives you a 24 degree Scandinavian grind when you hit both sides so let's just straighten this up real quick and then we will show you how to set this thing up and show you how to get your initial girl ok so we have a flat platen on our grinder here and we can push against the flat surface and we want to make sure that that surface is plumb it's a little bit out of plumb so we will get that squared up first real quick by loosening up the bolts here and figuring out which way we need to go once we get that bubbled in we'll tighten that dude down so didn't go anywhere just like that and we're plumb now that part's right we can move to the next step and that is to set ourselves up a jig or a table for this grinding jig what I do with that is I just take a little frame it's made out of one by material I set it right up against here check it for level and it's dead nuts and then I put it right up to the plot just like that doesn't have to be square flat up against it just needs to be close and now I'm just going to plant this frame down this table so that it doesn't move it's like this that gives me a cheapy grinding platform in front of my grinder that I can set my jig on the top of okay now remember with this piece of block we cut an angle on the bottom of 12 degrees so it will sit like this which automatically puts this face at a 12 degree angle to the belt as we slide across this box now we can just take our knife mount it to that block we want to make sure that our knife is nice and flat when we do this lay it on the block what we'll do is we'll take a clamp this is just a cheap clamp for Menards but what I want to do is I want to clamp this blade

up and then I want to clamp it so that the ricasso of the blade is right on the edge of this clamp so this clamp is basically my stop on my ricasso to make sure that I don't go past my ricasso with my grinder and I can just tighten that up and manipulate things around a little bit now what I sometimes do to keep this knife in the exact spot is I'll take a small wood screw and put it right in here at the bottom and just screw it in that keeps this knife of dropping because your belt is moving in this direction so it wants to pull that blade down as you go across if you just put a stop screw in there you can alleviate that from happening so again if I take a small wood screw here and put it right here at the base it is blade just like that and that be driven all the way in just need to stop that blade from dropping down now I'm ready to grind this side make sure you've got that thing a little bit out of your way here your clamp when you do this you're just going to gently put the knife into the jig

we grind across last week you give you your initial profile or you children and you should go slow with this in the beginning to see what you get now you're doing this if you see an area of your grind line this looks really nice right here and I've got a little bit of an area here that's low compared to the rest of the grinding angle that means I need to spend a little more time in that area but you've got to be really careful not to overheat the blade when you're doing this well now you can just another trick that you can do is you can paint the edge of this blade with a marker and then take a drill bit the same diameter as the blade it's scratch a centerline on here on a flat surface and that will tell you give you kind of a stop to grind line there all right eyeball that most of the time but it's a good idea especially when you're first starting out to have all the guys in place you can have to kind of tell you where it stops or when you've done enough now Myra cops are starting to drop a little bit the rest of my growing lines nice and even right there again this is a take your time thing not something that you have to hurry you the good thing about this is you can pull this thing right off the belt push it back in well I really like this picture because of that it's really simple stupid now you really want to keep this blade nice and cool while you're doing this so you've got to be careful as that as well it's about 25 degrees out here bag so I'm not having too much problem keeping a cool cuz I'm stopping off and look and see what I'm doing but that could be a problem

generally you'll have one side that groans easier for you than the other and I rent the left and right hand to thing or what but the opposite side usually grinds easier for me this side you leave my harder side to join the other thing I like about this jig is that this doesn't so much matter because it's always held with that 25 degree angle to the belt so if I want to terminate just a little bit against the flat like that to really eat off the material where I'm a little bit low I can do that or where I'm a little bit hot I can do that easy enough that's out of my line draw now you can see what that looks like put it pretty good and let it cool down now give it a break for a minute and we'll come back to get after the year okay I'm pretty happy with that so now we're going to turn the blade over and do the other side okay if we go to the other side always going to turn the knife around we've got a mark on the blade for our ricasso line for some reason this easily my good side the knife grinds much smoother for me on this side than the other side see one yet now joining your other side you want to pay attention to the center line on your blade make sure that you are not going past the center line and make sure your bevels are even I also like about it that you slide one area of the blade into the belt we've got a spot this high you're not going to change that angle because it's set on a picture it really allows you to get a nice

even grind long okay what you really try to do here you're not trying to take this thing down in Con Ed you're trying to get this thing down to about half the thickness of a dime before you heat treat it you get it to thin you get that thing down to a wire edge before heat treat you're going to make this blade edge brittle you're getting it up not to chipped out of it later on so once we get that done let's hold off this jig let's take a look and make sure that our drawings where we want our typically one look at this angle here we'll look at our ricasso on both sides to make sure it's barely even in our drawing line to make sure it's fairly even on both sides everything looks really good on that so far now we're going to drill our handle holes in here while this thing is still soft before heat-treat

About the Author

wildernessoutfitters

wildernessoutfitters

From the lore of bushcraft to all things related to self-sustainability, the Pathfinder vision is to pass on the knowledge of outdoor self-reliance. Providing basic to advanced self-reliance training and survival gear, our goal is to offer both practical knowledge and survival gear that will stand the test of time. From emergency preparedness to sustainability, the Pathfinder way is to share and educate.

Here you can explore the world of survival knives, survival kits and simple tips on outdoor self-reliance. We are always learning and enjoy passing on the knowledge we acquire.

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