Main Discussion Area > HowTo's and Build-a-longs
Guthook build-a-long
madcrow:
This will be a knife build-a-long of sorts. This will take a few days for me to complete because of my work schedule. I will be using old saw blades for the metal. If you work with wood, you probably have a few of these laying around. If you don't have any, they should be fairly easy to get. The big blade is a 24" from a sawmill and the triangular piece is a support from a single wide mobile home. I will cut into those later. The smaller 7 1/4" blades can be used for fillet knives, trade points, broadheads, stuff that would need a thinner blade.
Now pick one out and go to work.
Most of the blades have a Rockwell hardness of 35 so they will need to be heat treated and tempered to hold an edge. Most industrial grade blades are hard enough and do not need to be treated. If it is too hard, it will not sharpen easily. The first thing you need to do is set down with a pencil and paper and draw out the pattern that you want. When the pattern has been decided on, cut it out and trace it onto a stiffer paper. Some use cardboard, but I prefer to use file folders. I could not get all of my patterns in the picture, so here a few of them.
Once that has been cut out, trace it onto the sawblade. I use a dremel tool with the carbon fiber heavey duty disks to cut it out. The light duty will work, but I go though a half a pack of them cutting out one blade. A better option is to use the reinforced disks. They cost more but are well worth it. I can cut 4 or 5 blades with just 1 of these cutting disks. These sawblades are almost impossible to drill through so to drill the holes for pins, I heat the handle red hot and let it cool down on its own. I also drill a few holes in the handle to help balance the knife out more.
After one side is cut, I cut about half way into the blade and use channel loc pliers to pry that cut apart. It just speeds up the process.
Don't throw away those left over chunks of steel. Some just need to be cleaned up and they can be used for scrapers, and you can never have enough of those.
After it has been removed, I clean it up on the bench grinder, and since this is a guthook, I use a chainsaw file to get the shape of the gut hook cleaned up.
I hit it with a little 120 grit and an orbital sander to get the rust and scratches removed.
No, your'e not experiencing double vision. Everytime I make a knife, my son wants me to make him one, so this time I am making a matching set of father - son knives. I cheated some here. I have already started the buffing process on his.
That is all I have for know. Tomorrow I will heat treat and temper and do some filework down the backbone to spruce things up a bit and maybe pick out the handle material.
Pat B:
This is gonna be great. Can't hardly wait! Pat
Gordon:
This is awesome. I've always wanted to know how to make a knife. Thank you!
BigWapiti:
This is great - thank you!
DanaM:
Looks good so far madcrow and thanks for the build along.
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