i'm Kerry Stagmer and we are the blacksmiths of Baltimore knife and sword
we're going to be building some of your favorite
things and fantastic objects you've never seen before this is Man at Arms Reforged
Today on man at arms we're going to be showing you how we build a kukri knife
it's a historic build something that actually has been requested quite a bit and we're going
to show you every process from forging it the way that we do it to simple fabrication work and
then when we get out to the testing we'll show you what an amazing cutter this knife can be
we're going to be forging this blade from railroad track we set this up on our table and cut the end
off what we call the cap rail with the plasma torch this is going to give us the amount of
material that we need actually a fair amount of material but it will forge out very cleanly
it's the equivalent of a 1070 steel so we'll harden very well once we reach forging
temperatures which in this case get us up in the 2000 degree Fahrenheit range we'll take it to
the hammer and begin breaking it down basically making a bar before we begin making the knife
we're going to take this material to the sander now that we have it in bar form
and just grind the surface to inspect it make sure we don't have any surface
cracking or overlaps from the forging it looks pretty good to me we're going to move forward
with this material back up to temperature we begin forming the blade
we don't need quite as much heat as we did when we were reducing the size down to create the bar
now we have to start being careful as the blade begins to take form
one of the nicest things about having a shop full of skilled workers is there's always another set
of hands here to help you out Kevin brings in someone to perform this basically do striking
although he's doing the form work as Kevin directs
then he'll take it back to the hammer re-flatten and get back to work
so
as we work this form there's a couple of ways to do it and we certainly could stop with a
basic profile and grind it to shape but we're forging so it's very nice to forge those edges
and get them fairly close to where we want to go before we begin the grind
sometimes we need a little bit more oomph to get something dead flat
so back to the nasal it goes we use the big flat dies on the hammer it gets the sections that we
hand forged driven back down it actually has a lot of control so we can get that shape we need
so in this episode we actually get to make a kukri this is something we just talked about in the shop
we've always wanted to do a cookery just when we're gonna do it when's the right time kind of
like when chainsaw come up so the kukri comes from around India and Nepal also the Burmese used them
as well they've been around since about the 7th century and still pretty much used to this day
they're also considered a great utility farming tool since we've been building this a couple of us
brought in examples of them so when we actually got into making them we had some older ones to
look at along with some pictures here's a nice blueprint of the mark iii kukri it was really nice
to have this around the shop since we're building them gave us an actual reference on some points
i actually have two of these horn handles they're still very sharp we guessed these
they were about mid-1800s to early 1900s most of the ones you see us make most of the ones
you see around today are a bit larger you know it was nice to actually get out forge one and then
make something off and original and i'm actually looking forward to use it and see what it does
the kookari really is one of bill's favorite weapons and we've kitted
each other for a long time because he he kind of learned the forms with this
and thinks of it as a sword and i've always called it a knife so we kind of we've kind of gone back
and forth over the years but it really is his favorite weapon and they're a huge array of sizes
what we tend to make is fairly large we probably make about 100 of these a year
after getting a nice soaking heat at about 1550 degrees decker's going to take this and
quench it into oil what we're trying to do is transition the temperature of this blade
from the 1550 down to under 400 as fast as possible we'll be using parks 50 oil to do this
once we've tempered the bleed for two hours at 400 degrees we've made sure it's straight
it'll be ready for grinding we've got to get some more form we'll show you what's about to happen
i go to the gorton milling machine just to create a slot that's still going to have to be fitted
very closely to the finished blade but to get the basic hole through we can do it many different
ways we're making a lot of them typically so the mill is almost always the answer for us
so now we're getting ready to make the handle for this cookery
what i'll do is i'll take the template that we have of this put it on a piece of wood and
draw the outline where we're going to cut it off with the band saw to get it closed
smoothing the transitions in these fours is actually
really done easier with hand sanding so we use a little block and some flexible fine grit sandpaper
and just go in there and get those floors nice and clean it'll take away any transitions that
were created as we were doing the sanding using the hard wheels on the grinders
foreign
so
i've drilled a hole in our wooden handle to accommodate the tang of the
kukri um next step is i'm going to have to widen it out a little bit more and get it a
little bit truer to form so what we're going to do is we're going to heat up the tang and i'm
going to burn it into the handle what that's going to allow is the shape of the tang to fit exactly
into the hole without having to remove too much material it's going to kind of form fitted
and this is also a traditional technique that the Nepalese use when they're constructing a kukri
rick's going to be creating the basic form for this handle directly on the contact wheel of one
of our bader sanders we've got that fan set up behind it it actually evacuates the dust
out of the room while we're working i think he's actually wearing some protection as well because
walnut can affect you it can even cause rashes on your hands and things like that
certain woods are things you have to be very careful with and some woods are fairly inert maple
and things like that but walnut is definitely like that and the exotics that we use as well
so we have to make sure that we're moving the dust out of the air and protecting ourselves
using the big sanders saves us time but it really doesn't give us the complete form that we need
we want something that's very traditional and the way you get a traditional look is by doing
traditional work so rick is going to go in and start carving and finish this out by hand he might
jump back to the sanders for some soft finishing on some of the slack belts but a lot of this is
going to be carving work and he'll do it with a small knife and just work through the whole piece
pretty amazing how to finish just from a big chunk of wood cut from a walnut tree in my backyard
now that we have the wood handle for the cougar fully to shape
i traced out a pattern on the outside of the piece of material we're going to use for the guard
next step is go into the sander here and removing some material to get it to shape
we're going to be using a cold blowing compound to basically kind of give a
little more of an antique finish to this piece i just thought that with the walnut
handle which is a traditional material that we would have something that would
you know give us a really nice shape and would reflect the light very nicely if we antiqued it so
we're going to get at that and then this piece is going to start to come together
it was really nice to make something that was a little more reasonable in size here on man
at arms we've worked essentially from found materials you put it all together
add a lot of skill and here we go the finished cookery
so
oh
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