Making A Damascus Chef Knife

In this video I am

making

a western style

chef

's

knife

. My name is Jeff Royer. I'm Kyle's dad and I've been

making

knives for about four years. Well here we go, we are cutting tiles to make a tile towel weld. Welded Damascus Billet, this Billet of this particular pattern was already made for another project for a totally different style

knife

, so I had a little piece of this lying around and thought I would make some nice kitchen cutlery with it now. I'm going to cut myself a piece of I don't know what gauge, which is pretty thin, 14 gauge, I think it's a sheet of metal and I'm going to place the mosaic on the back of that and I'm going to sandwich the tile between two sheets of that steel and we will weld around it to create a zero atmosphere welding environment.

It is important to get the proper pressure on the propane so that you can get a constant temperature inside the forge. cool and I like to stick the billets in there when I'm getting ready to do my initial Forge weld when the forge is just fired up so it heats up evenly and slowly and doesn't put a lot of stress on it because those welds are brittle at first so I go Heat it and let it soak. I have a few stops set up here on the press. I just want to press this a little at a time.

I don't want any hard aggressive pushes on the initial welds, nice soft firm pressures, even pressures here. I'm starting to work polishing that sheet metal to get it off the outside. Most of it is out of there. The pattern is starting to appear. A little of that is going to be decarburized. so you might leave some steel in there so it can be decarburized and remove that soft sheet metal on the outside. What little residue is left, mosaic can be a little temperamental to solder, so when I'm forging a Towel Mosaic Damascus I I usually keep my temperatures a little higher, especially as a single carbon steel is prone to cracking. on those welds, so keep a close eye on them to keep my temps up.

Don't work it too cold. Working that cold can simply break you. Let's take those welds out, we'll put it here and normalize it and take the stress out of it by normalizing it to 1600, 1500 and 1400. You know, that's normalized, let's take control and start fine-tuning it. My rough profile and blade bevels started to look great. Now I'll put it in the cooling tank at 15:25 and bring it down to room temperature in just a few seconds and see what it looks like from there. hardness, thank you. I'm getting ready to put in my final bevels and I put these little blocks of wood here.

When I started making knives I got frustrated because I was polishing too much in the ricasso area, glue these wood blocks are just pine wood blocks and they are in the same place on both sides. It's just a tough spot for the blocks to rub against the belt sander so it doesn't grind the foreign ricasso too much. I have My Grind All In and I'm getting ready to put the convex on the edge of the blade. I left the edge at this point about 20,000 sticks to the bottom. I'll take the convex to nothing or maybe just leave several thousandths on the sheet.

Edge after it comes back, so I've got it where I want it now and I'm going to take it to the wide back sharpener and run it through a series of belts and put a really nice, slick Edge on there so we can do this test. I'm looking for warping on the edge of the blade, either chipping or bending. I'm putting an S sharpening here. What I like most about the S sharpening is that it takes the weight off and makes the knife very, very fast, that's a lot of blade. I like a thicker one. spine but I think my sharpening goes all the way to the edge of the blade so they are pretty thin at the edge of the blade but this sharpening just takes a lot of the weight off and makes it very front end.

Fast forward IMG that's where we get our templates from and they work great. It is a system of chemicals that we use for electrolytes in the neutralizer. If you want to know how my son went from chasing goats to making knives, sign up for our newsletter. I will also read how I started working with my son about five years ago. Subscribe to the newsletter today. The link is in the description. I'm getting ready to do my routine on the Ricasso, where the protection or cushion I bought fits. this in the mill and is a precision cut.

I'm going to ease it out about nine thousand on each side right on the ricasso and then I'm going to take it to the surface grinder and remove the rest of the tang into a taper shape. it's my custom copper alloy billet side poured and it has a beautiful color uh it doesn't have a copper look it doesn't have a brass look it has this beautiful rose bronze look and I really like it okay I roughed out the slot on my tank with carbide mill. I drilled and milled and now I finish it with the file and I'm taking it down little by little because I only have several thousand on each side of the ricasso where the tank reaches, so I have to be really covered, no. to polish too much now we are getting ready to place the tang on the handle so i have the tang placed on the block where it will go.

I start drilling and I want to use the comfort fit and this is not going to be a takedown, but all my takedowns I'm actually going to bet on epoxy even if you know they fit well because I want 100 contact with the tang all the way through the handle, I don't want hot spots on the blade where it may vibrate or feel tingling, but in this one, we're going to put it in epoxy and we're going to put a copper bronze alloy pin in anyway to remove the handle and then shape it, an ergonomic handle, comfortable and nice in a western style knife.

It's really nice to have a grip and then we'll put it on. coffee to darken it, gently polish the coffee, etch gently just to get the reflections in the steel. I put the handle in there just to see where the hole will be, so I'll mark it on the tang just roughly. idea because it's only going to be a 16 inch pin, but I'll mill a 3 16 or a quarter inch hole or sometimes even an eighth inch hole and put a piece of copper in there. I have some bezels. I have a little piece of uh, you use copper, aluminum or brass, this little piece of brass on the whole penis that's there, then grind it down and it's going to be beautifully flush and that's like that, when I go back and put my handle on after everything is done, everything will be stuck.

I get up and come back the next day. I can drill through that brass, copper, aluminum or bronze instead of having to take out the carbide bit and drill through a hardened shank. This will not be a flush pen, it will be a dome. pin, so I have these shims that help me hold it at the right height, so it's just a very smooth domed pin, you barely notice it's there, but it looks really nice. Thank you, it is a very nice knife, it is fast. big, it will do, it will make big cuts and you can choke with it, you can get really delicate cuts and then you can also get big guts, it's very, very fast and this blade will handle it. a little bit of bone too for the way I built this knife thanks for watching May the forge be with you goodbye the algorithm thinks you'll like this video I think you'll like this video where I make a shotgun inspired knife