Hey, I'm Bob, and I like to make stuff. Today, we're going to make a knife, out of wood.
Maybe it's not a real knife because it's made out of wood, but it's made to cut bread and cakes.
So, it works perfectly. The idea came about when I asked the people who follow me on Facebook and Twitter to give me some ideas
for a small woodworking project. There were tons of great ideas thrown out,
but Joshua showed me a picture of a cake knife that he had made and it was beautiful!
So, I decided to give it a shot. This one's really easy to make. You don't have to have any specific
tools to do it, and you can make it out of scrap wood, which is what I did. All right,
let me show you how I did it. For my blade,
I used a piece of maple, and this is a piece of wood that I can't really use for much else, because it has a
bunch of wormholes in it.
I sketched out the overall design for the knife,
and then just figured out how long the handle needed to be to be comfortable.
I used a bandsaw to cut out the rough shape for the knife,
and then I used a pencil to mark a line down to resaw this piece of wood into a thinner piece.
I just roughly followed this line. It doesn't have to be exact at this point. With this thinner piece,
I cut closer to the line. It's still going to have some more shaping later.
I've never made a knife before, so before I got too far,
I tested it just to make sure that it felt right. and it did.
To make the handle, I cut down a piece of mahogany that I had and resawed it down into two equal pieces.
I traced out the rough shape for the handle onto these pieces, and then cut them out.
I cut them individually. You could have cut them at the same time and then resawed them, and it would've worked the same way.
And then it was time to sand. In fact, the majority of this project is sanding and shaping.
First, I just flattened all the edges and all the faces.
Then, I actually started into the shaping, and for this, I made some marks where I thought the handle should end and where the bevel
should be on both sides of the blade.
These just gave me a point of reference, so I could try to keep the bevel symmetrical on both sides of the blade.
Once I got to where the line was being sanded off, I knew I needed to stop.
Of course this is just for cake, so it doesn't actually need to be sharp.
It's really just about the aesthetic of making it look like a knife blade.
The flat area of the belt sander was great for most of this,
but when it got down to actually shaping the bevel and flattening the surface, the end with the roller actually worked a lot better.
Then, it was time to glue on the handles, and for this,
I just spread some wood glue all over,
all the way to the edges of each one of the handle pieces, and then clamped them up to dry.
While the handle was drying,
I filled some of the worm holes in the blade piece. Now, if you don't have wormholes in yours, you won't have to worry about
this at all, but I just mixed some wood glue and sawdust to fill these holes.
Unfortunately, the sawdust was a mix of the light and Dark woods, so it actually didn't match very well.
But in the end, it doesn't really matter.
Then, it was time to start shaping the handle.
Now, of course you could have glued all three of these up as
rectangles, and then just cut them out at the same time, but that's not what I did. So here,
I just went back and cut off the excess of the handle pieces. This gets all three of these pieces roughly the same shape.
That'll just make it easier for sanding. But before the final sanding, I wanted to add some pins
just like a real kitchen knife would have. First, I drilled a quarter inch hole in a piece of steel.
Then, I cut down some of the maple into some small strips.
Then, I chucked up the piece of maple in my drill and used a knife to knock off the corners.
I had to knock them off a lot further back than I originally thought, but
eventually, I got it to where I could drive it through this hole and made a maple dowel.
Then, I just drilled two holes in the handle, using the same size drill bit and did a test fit with the dowels.
They fit really well, and then by adding glue, they got nice and tight.
I hammered these in to make sure that they protruded on the other side of the knife as well.
Once this dried, I used a flush cut saw just to cut off this excess. Then, it was time for sanding.
While I'm doing that let me quickly tell you about the sponsor for this video, "Audible", and
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I finished up the sanding with some 220 grit paper, and then wiped off all the dust before adding finish.
I used some finish that was given to me by Linn from "Darbin Orvar". It's a mixture of linseed oil and beeswax.
Basically, you could use any finish here that you would use on a cutting board.
As long as it's food safe, you're good to go.
I did two coats of this finish, and it was all done.
So that's all there is to it, and I know what you're thinking.
"Bob, there's no way that that will actually cut cake."
Well, I want to be scientific about it. So, we're just going to test it.
And you're probably also saying, "Bob, there's no way that that's food safe.
I mean, if you eat that piece of cake, it will probably kill you." And so, you know I have to prove you wrong.
All right, so what did we learn? This thing definitely cuts cake. In fact, it's actually cutting a strawberry as well.
And the cake is perfectly good to eat.
It'll probably also cut things like pies and doughnuts,
but I'll have to test those on my own time.
Big thanks to Joshua on Facebook for giving me the idea for this, and to my wife for making this beautiful cake.
If you don't follow me on the social networks, all those links are down in the description. Be sure to go give those a follow.
I've got lots of other project videos that you might be interested in, all sorts of different stuff,
not just stuff like this. And don't forget to subscribe.
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That's it for this one guys. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time.