Name: Knifemaking Tutorial- How To Make a Knife With Basic Tools
Uploaded: 2017-04-07T00:28:01.000Z
Duration: 29 min 3 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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Hello everyone, in this video I'm going to show you how to make a knife using only very

So if you're someone who wants to get into knifemaking but you don't have the forge or

anvil or grinder or anything like that, I just wanted to show you that it can be done

So here are the materials we're going to use for our knife.

This is a bar of 1080 steel, 1/8 inch thick by 1 1/4 inch wide.

If you want to use something like O1 or 5160 that's just as good, 1080 is easy to heat

For the handle I have a piece of walnut I had laying around.

And some 1/8 inch brass rod for the pins.

And I'll also be showing you how to make a knife sheath, so get some vegetable tanned

So these are all the tools we're going to use to make the knife.

First of these are some files for shaping the metal and wood.

The most important of these is probably going to be this flat bastard file for shaping steel.

And a word of advice, make sure your file is sharp, if you use a dull file to shape

your metal you're going to spend hours and hours filing and in the end your product is

going to look worse because you can't get as accurate of a cut.

So if you haven't already, treat yourself to a good file before you start.

Secondly are some saws, a wood saw and a hacksaw for cutting metal, and again make sure make

sure you have sharp blades, otherwise you'll spend hours.

We'll also need some clamps for clamping the material down while we work with it.

Also a vise is very handy if you have one, but not strictly necessary.

A cordless drill for drilling holes, and a sharpening stone.

And if you're going to make a sheath you'll need some needles for sewing it together.

You'll also need some sandpaper of various grits, 2-part epoxy for gluing the knife together,

some vegetable oil for hardening the knife, and heat treating it.

And some boiled linseed oil or other wood finish for finishing the handle.

So we have the basic shape cut out, and now we'll just file the rest of it to shape.

Now we have to mark out where we want to grind the steel.

So I want my grind to be about here, and about here.

And we also want to scribe a center line down here so our bevel is straight.

So a trick to do that is to color in the edge with a Sharpie.

Or use layout dye, if you're fancy and you have layout dye.

This is 1/8 inch steel so 1/8 inch drill bit, lay it on its side and-

And I don't know if this drill bit is centered so I'll flip it over halfway and mark another

Then we have a nice little center line that we can file to.

And now we're just going to file the bevel in.

There are jigs for this where it keeps the file at a certain angle but I'm just going

It shouldn't be too bad as long as you keep the file straight and even as you file.

Alright, so I'm going to lay out where I want the pins to be in my handle.

I'm going to center punch these holes prior to drilling them.

If you have a center punch I'd highly recommend doing this.

But if you don't, just try to be accurate.

Okay, so here I'm going to drill the holes.

Notice how I have it on a pretty low surface so I can bear down on the drill and sight

You don't want the pins to be at an angle.

So here's our knife blank, you can see it has all the holes drilled in it.

You can see there I drilled the hole in the wrong spot so we're going to use that one.

And in order to do that we need to heat it up to critical temperature, which is a bright

red heat, and quench it in oil in order to harden it.

So if you have some method of heating it up, if you have a propane torch or an oxy-acetylene

torch that would be great, but if you don't, let me show you: how to make your own forge

We'll want to normalize the metal, which means heat it up to critical temperature like this,

and then let it cool off slowly in the air.

This will reduce the stress in the metal so it won't crack or have any deformities when

So while the knife is cooling off I'm just going to heat up this piece of rod and quench

Alright, so you can actually see how hot this is, this is like forge welding temperature.

So you could actually use this forge for pretty much anything.

It gets really hot, and this actually pretty similar to iron age forges, like would be

used in the Middle Ages or by the Vikings.

So we're just going to warm the oil up a little bit.

A good way to check for critical temperature in these steels is by using a magnet.

In 1080 and steels like that, by the time it gets to critical temperature it will no

So you can use that to confirm your temperature.

We want to check for any warping after we harden it.

This steel looks pretty straight, so I think we're good.

Alright, so I've just tempered the knife, and you can see it's got the entire thing

And I've just hit the back with a blowtorch, just to soften the spine of it a little bit.

Again, if you don't have a blowtorch this shouldn't be a problem.

So now I'm going to clean the knife up by giving it a good wire brush, and then putting

it in here with a bit of vinegar to dissolve the scale off of it.

Bit of vinegar, leave it for about an hour, should be cleaned up nicely.

I'm just going again with the 150 grit until we get a sharp edge on it, then I'll go to

I've rounded slightly the edge which is going to go on here.

Just because it will be hard to finish this area when it's clamped together.

It's just going to go together like that, and like that.

Now we'll cut some pieces of brass rod for the pins in the handle.

Just measure measure it out right there like so.

And pro tip, if you have some acetone, it's useful just to- or even rubbing alcohol would

work- just de-grease and get all the dirt off of your knife and pieces of wood you're

Just to make sure there's nothing getting in the way of the glue.

This is it so far, and we'll just use a bit of linseed oil to finish the handle, seal