Already all welcome back to the shop and today's video we are going to be making a knife from a file. Now there are lots of ways to make knives from files but the method that I will be employing today does not require a heat treatment oven or a forge. I felt like this was a more accessible project especially for those of you who are looking to make your first knife. The first step of the process will be cutting the profile of your knife out of the file. I will be using a template that I made and cut out on my laser engraver called the Lions Tooth. If you are interested in this template go ahead and check out the description below and you can download it for free in a PDF format. Since this file is hardened steel you are going to need to use something along the lines of an angle grinder or a belt grinder to get this profile into the steel. A file or a bandsaw just won't cut it. In my case I will probably use a combination of the cut off wheel and angle grinder and my 2x72 belt grinder but know that you can get a cheap one by 30 from establishments like harbafrey. When you are cutting the profile out of this file make sure not to get the file too hot because if you do you will ruin the heat treatment of the file and you will end up with a soft knife. So make sure to periodically dip the file in water and take your time with the grinding of the profile. So with those details in mind let's get started. And you'll just saw I dispatched the ends of my file with the cut off wheel on my angle grinder. I cut fairly close to the tang side since I wasn't worried about overheating this section. When it comes to the blade I stood off from my scribe line by about 3-8 of an inch. This isn't necessary but I know that I have more control over temperature with my belt grinder so I decided to air on the side of caution and use the belt grinder to get closer to the line. If all you have is an angle grinder just take your time coming up to the scribe lines while being cognizant of the heat you're generating and cooling the blade frequently. You basically need to ensure that the blade isn't getting above the temperature that will be tempering at later in the build which is around 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Now you can do all of your grinding post tempering however I want to do a little bit of grinding pre temper so that you can see the colors generated during the tempering process. I marked my center line with a height scribe but note that you can use a drill bit with the same thickness as the file to replicate this step. Using my work rest at an aggressive angle in an 8-inch contact wheel I ground in my clip starting with a 36 grit belt and I worked up to a 120 grit belt finish. I also got started on my main edge bevels with a 36 grit belt. At this point I clamped the blade between two pieces of angle iron to keep anything from moving around during tempering and placed the assembly in my toaster oven at around 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Note that the clamping isn't necessary and that you can use a standard preheated home oven for this step. I ran two tempering cycles that were each two hours in cold room temperature via water plunge between cycles to speed up the process. This is how our knife turned out after tempering. Now one of the reasons I wanted to do a little bit of grinding before the tempering process was so that I can show you all this nice pretty straw color after tempering on these ground edge bevels. We've now toughened up this blade a little bit with tempering. We've taken some of the hardness out so that it won't just shatter on us when we try to use the knife. The next step is going to be finishing out these edge bevels and to do that I'm going to go with hollow grind. Now the reason I'm going with a hollow grind on my eight inch contact wheel is because this is a pretty thick file or was a pretty thick file and I feel like a hollow grind will perform better as a cutting instrument. So that's what I'm going to go for it. This is only my second hollow ground knife so we'll see how it turns out. I am for sure not a veteran hollow grinder and I employed my full flat grind work rest grinding method with the wheel. This seems to have worked out okay. However, I think that I need to raise my work rest up further towards the center line of the wheel if I do this again. I'm pretty sure the geometry of the hollow changes as you go from the punch to the tip with this method which cause a fairly large variance in my secondary bevel during the sharpening later on. If anyone has some tips on work rest hollow grinding please drop them in the comment section below. With the hollows ground I cleaned up the clip with some 320 grit sandpaper and then moved to a 220 grit J Flex Belt to start rounding over my tamed corners. On this knife I won't be adding handle scales so I want to make sure that the tang is comfortable to hold. I used a 1 inch scalloped J Flex Belt to get into the finger groove area of this knife. Once everything was rounded over I used a Scotch pry belt to clean up my main bevels. I found that these Scotch pry belts really smoothed out the scratches. Speaking of Scotch Brite I also wanted to clean up the grooves on the flats of the blade. I'm using my 220 grit Scotch Brite wheel on my buffer for this operation. If you're going to be going down this path make sure that you maintain a very firm grip on the blade while on the wheel. Since I'll likely be giving this knife to one of my friends I went ahead and made a Kitex Sheet for it. It's been a long time since I've done Kitex work so I actually went back and watched one of my own tutorials to remember the details. If you're interested in these details check out the cards above for the Kitex tutorial. The last thing to do here is sharpen the blade. I'm going to be using my Wynn water cool sharpening system which has been a solid performer. When it comes to sharpening there are a ton of methods and opinions. I'm actually looking for a new sharpener to test on the channel so if you have one that you want to see me review specifically let me know in the comments section below. As you all can see this knife is plenty sharp for general cutting task opening boxes cutting pair cord things like that. I'm going to go over just my general thoughts on making a file knife and then maybe some things I like and don't like about this knife specifically. First of all I feel like making in this style of file knife that is without the use of a forge is a very accessible project the most. All you really need is an angle grinder or a 1x30 belt center which are very cheap and maybe some sandpaper wrapped around files and you can make yourself a file knife if you have patience and you don't overheat it during the grinding process. I hope that gets the gears turning in some of your minds especially those who are on the sidelines looking to make their first knife maybe this is the route you go. Now some things that I like about this blade is it feels really good in the hand with this file texture on the side. You know if you don't have handle scales on the knife sometimes they can feel kind of loose in the hand but this one register is really nicely with the leftover filing cuts on the side. So I like the way it feels in the hand. I like the way it looks this shark tooth design is pretty slick in my opinion. It's kind of a narrow blade but it feels very very agile for a knife. I also really like the hollow grind in this knife. You know it's pretty thick I think it's about 200,000s or so thick. So with a short blade like this or a short height and a 200,000s thick blade, flat grind probably would have been okay but the hollow grind just gives me a little bit more of a slicey edge by removing some more material on the sides. So a couple things I don't like the first thing being probably my sheath. This is more of a cover than a sheath. There's no really not a lot to register on. There's just a little bit to register on right here and I probably could have done better. I would have brought this up a little higher if I had to remake this Kitex sheet. It does hold the blade in here just fine and it's not going anywhere but I don't know I feel like I could have came up a little bit higher maybe done better with a thumb ramp here although it does work pretty good so maybe I need to stop complaining. Other than that I for what it is I really like it and I'll probably end up giving this away to a friend or in a white elephant or something like that and it'd be a great knife. So I really hope you all got something out of this video especially if you're looking to make your first knife. If you did enjoy the video please hit that like button down below and consider subscribing to the channel. Until next time I'll catch y'all on the flip side. you