How to Make a Knife From a Bandsaw Blade

Hey fellow backyard boyers, Nick here. Thank you so much for all the great response I had on my last video. So today I'm going to make another knife with you guys. I'm starting with an old bandsaw blade. It's about an inch wide but it's really thin, a little under a sixteenth of an inch. So I'm limited as to what design I can choose for this knife. So we're going to be making something like this. This is a really small knife, something of a bird and trout or paring knife and it's got a three inch blade. I sketched out the knife design I want to follow and used it as a template to cut my steel to length. I'm just using a pair of tin snips. What you want to do is cut from the back of the blade and once you reach the cutting teeth just snap it because those are harder than the rest of the steel. I'm using a propane torch to bring it up to about 14 to 1500 degrees and then putting it in a bucket with perlite so that it'll cool down slowly. After a couple of hours pull the steel out of the perlite once it's fully cooled. After tracing the template onto the steel I can start grinding and shaping with the grinder. Before I grind the edge I'm going to be drilling my eighth inch pin holes and my quarter inch lanyard hole. Before heat treating I'm just roughing in the bevels with the grinder. To harden the blade I'm going to heat it up with my torch until it gets to the point where it's no longer sticking to a magnet. I'm going to take it just a little bit hotter than that and then I'm going to quench it in oil. Once it's quenched in oil and fully hard I'm going to clean off the scale with a wire brush just so that I'll be able to see the tempering colors. Then I'll throw it into the oven for about an hour or until I get the desired color which for a small blade like this will be sort of around the dark straw sort of a darker yellow color. Now that the knife is heat treated it's time to work on the handle. For the scales on this knife I decided to use a solid surface material. This is light corian but it's a different brand and this particular piece is really nice. It's semi-transparent which is really cool. It's kind of got a sort of like a beach glass quality to it. This was actually given to me as a gift so I'm really excited to see how this turns out. So once I buff up the blade so it's all finished I trace the outline of the handle on the slab so I know where to cut. Now that the scales are cut out I use clamps to hold it in place while I drill my holes and then I can take my pins put them in as locators and then I can drill out the other handle slab one pin at a time. That way everything stays together the fit is really good and I don't have to do as much guesswork. Now that the pin holes are drilled I'm going to pin the handle together so that I can grind and shape it to rough it out in preparation for gluing it onto the handle. Another thing that I'm going to do is finish up the front edge of the handle because that's going to be one of the hardest things to reach once I have the handle epoxied Now that the front of the handle scales are finished it's time to put everything together. I'm going to be using a two-part epoxy to glue the handle scales onto the tang of the knife and then I'm going to coat the pins and the brass tube and put them in. The pins are one-eighth inch and the brass tube is a quarter inch. Once I have it cladded up I'll let it cure once it's fully cured we can finish the knife up. Now that the epoxy is cured I'm going to go ahead and trim down the pins until they're about an eighth of an inch high. That way I can then take them and gently with a hammer sort of peen over the pins so that they expand and not only do I have the epoxy holding the handle together the pins can also hold it together. Then using an archery field point I'll flare out the brass tube just a little bit so that it's a nice fit and it holds together well. Now that the handle is shaped the way I want it I'm just going to sand until I get to about an 800 grit and then I'll be able to finish the handle. I just run up the grits on a diamond stone and the knife is finished. Here's the finished knife. Let me know in the comments below if you guys like this video and you like the way I did it. Here it is. There's another knife except this one has a white corian handle. Here they are. Thanks for watching. I'll see you guys next time. Bye.