Making a Bushcraft Knife Part 3

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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

okay so while our blade is being tempered in the oven we can begin to work on our handle I've got a stub in here of a piece of walnut that we use from the knife shop Indianapolis it's got a crack in it here and here but I don't need that much of it I only need about that much to make my handle I'm gonna cut an inch and a half by inch and a half square out of this thing to start off with okay so I want to end trim 3/4 off of both sides just to get myself closer to what I want so I could hand shape the handle instead of lathe turning it

all right so we ended up born in a hole off-center a little bit because the Shuksan lay just wouldn't adjust right but that's not a big deal because I could cut the off-center portion off of this as I still have plenty of handle here to shape the important thing is they're gonna pass through a hole that's in a straight line and not off on an angle okay so the next step in the puzzle here is we've got our hole drilled through and now we need to widen it out a little bit so that that v-shape will fit down inside there so we get seated all the way down to the edge of that ricasso with our tank sticking out the back end so we need to open this up a little bit there's a lot of different ways you could do that you can burn that in if you want to which is not my preferred method or you can just take a smaller drill bit and start to kind of ease a recession in that on both sides and wallow it out a little bit and then take a hand file and get it the rest of the way and that's the way I prefer to do it so that's what we're gonna do now okay now there's a couple things we want to look at here first of all we want to make sure that we're straight in the handle we want to make sure that we're deep enough in the handle and we can go a little bit deeper than this because we're gonna pop it on there just a little bit harder seat it well and we only need enough tang sticking out the peen over so now we need to think about first of all going ahead and doing our final grind that we're going to do on this blade before we do our final sharpening then we're going to tape this blade up and we'll work on getting the handle on and everything else and then once we get the handle shaped in we can pull the tape off and do the final Horner blade so this is what we're at right now okay so what we want to do now is we want to take the blade out of our handle material and we want to do the final grind on our blade edge here that's going to bring it to the point where all we want to do is hit it on the buffer and it's going to be razor sharp so we're going to put it right back on the jig and we're going to be very cognizant of the pressure we put on it obviously but we've also changed to a very tight green or a very fine grain belt at the same time and it's also worn down quite a bit so it's not gonna chew much off all we're really trying to do now is polish that edge up a little bit and take that block off of from the forging process because we had it pretty well down to that wire edge before we even heat treated it so here we go it's pretty simple

again we're gonna go over to one side of the other depending on which start our ricasso is on and I'm just going to kinda see Mars on everything at the same time here

and I'm making really really light passes on that thing really really like that if they clean it up

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put that dude over to the other side now get that done again we'll move the belt over to the other side now you're always gonna have one side that you seem to grind better on and then the other side just seems to be inherent that way and if you've got just a little bit of dark haze on there but you still got your wire edge don't worry about that but you're just gonna come up in the buffing process anyway in the end okay once we get to that point you see we're at like I said that gray haze can be knocked off very easily with the buffer so don't worry about that if you've got your wire edge now all I'm gonna do is come up here and I'm going to cover this blade with tape so I don't do any damage to the blade while I'm working on the handle and at the same time I don't do any damage to myself while I'm working on shaping the handle and things like that so I'm just wrapping tape around it fairly loose all the way at the blade this blue painting style tape works really really well for this I usually do a double a double wrap on there just like that and then tear it off and then I'll get that off later on after I'm done with everything else but that protects us and the blade for the remainder of this process until ready to final sharpen our blade okay so we've pushed our handle back on to our blade we don't have it seated all the way down yet and we've also got a washer that I've put right over the top of that's just a steel washer and what I really want to happen is I'm going to cut enough of this Tang off so that this will actually seat down to the bottom and in the end we can paint it over so it looks like a more finished tool and you can see the Tang all the way through the back of the handle when we're done so we're just double-checking everything as we go making sure we've got plenty of handle before we go too far make sure it's plenty big enough for our hands and then we're going to start shaping our handle after we glue it up okay so to get this thing right now and get this down where we need it first of all we need to reduce this tang a little bit more and then we need to cut it off a little bit as well before we get everything epoxy can see it in permanently so what I'm going to do is I'm going to do that with the handle on it so I can kind of see where I'm at then I'm going to pull the handle off and

the reduction that I need to get that washer over the top so we can eventually peen it over in the end and I'm gonna put the heavy belt back on the grinder for that because I need mass material removal now if I give myself a little excess that's okay cuz I kind of went round it off after the fact and then I'm going to pull the handle off and I'm going to do the reduction on the tang and I need to do to make sure that I can get that water on there and he had having a suede paid-up is what makes it safe to do this [Music]

okay I'm gonna use a two-part epoxy on this and I'm gonna use a gorilla brand epoxy that sets in five minutes that I'm going to give it quite a bit more time than that but the five minutes is a good rule of how much time you got to mess around getting this done before you have to use it and we can just use the epoxy wrapper itself to mix this on so it's real simple it's two parts you just push this plug out of the center which gives you something that you can seal it back up with after use you pop this plug off the bottom and that opens it up you squeeze equal parts of it onto the surface and then I tend to wipe the excess off real quick and shove the cap back into it just to seal it up and then you need to mix this really really well and it starts to turn like a snot color that's what you want now you can come over here and begin to coat the tang really well first of all what I'd like to do and I generally will take this thing and set it off to the side for a minute where it's not going to drip on anything and I'll take a lot of this and I'll try to push it down into the hole itself to work and drip down in there and I saved myself just a little bit in the end to cap it off with I'll show you what I mean by cap it off here in just a minute we're gonna shove that down inside there get it seated really well now what we're going to do with this to cap it off what I mean by cap it off is I want a little bit of epoxy right here on the outside just to make sure that I've got that space closed in and just don't maybe a little hair of a bubble over the top of it and we'll grind that off later anyway but it doesn't hurt anything to have it on there while it's drying so I take any excess I've got and that's where I put it and then I just let it drip out the bottom and I don't worry about that part and now we'll put this on a vise and we'll let it set up