(dramatic music)
- The craft of knifemaking is meditative in a sense,
you're concentrating fully and making sure
that it fits the end-user very well.
Instead of using just a mono steel,
or just one type of steel, I decided to do Damascus.
Damascus is welding two types of
steel together in a forge, and so I decided
to use 10 95 and 15 and 20.
When I do the etching, one turned darker
and other ones stays light, so you give it that contrast.
We're gonna alternate the layers
and make sure that it's clean.
There are three rules in welding, clean, clean, clean.
So what I'm going to do now, I'm getting ready to weld these
up so they can stick together.
Safety, safety, safety.
We're getting ready to weld, let's get this done.
(dramatic rock music)
The way that I would describe knife making
is taking nothing, and to make something.
My style is almost Japanese a little bit,
but I take bits from the Japanese culture
and the European culture and kind of
blend it together to make my own.
Since we welded this together, I'm going to weld a handle
to it and we gonna put it in the forge.
The knife we're making today is called a Bunka.
It is basically a blend between
a Nakiri and a chef knife.
It's called a punch cut, instead of rocking it,
it's more straight down, it's more of a Japanese style,
and it's a little bit more precise.
Forge welding is basically getting the steel
up to a temperature where it fuses to itself
I don't have a meter on my forge, so I need to go by color.
The color that I'm looking for is,
if you think about the sun,
and the sun is at 12 o'clock, at it's highest point,
it's almost like a yellowish orange.
That's the same color that I'm looking
for that's inside the forge.
And that's how I know that is around 2300 degrees.
Since this is a open forge, I need to kind of close it
off so the heat can kind of stay in.
So this is ceramic wool, and it's not gonna catch on fire.
What I'm going to do now is set it and forget it.
(laughing)
After we heat up the billet to 2300 degrees,
we use the hydraulic press to elongate the billet,
and allow it to adhere to one another.
Yep, we there, whew!
(upbeat rock music)
So I have there flat part of my die
where I'm lightly touching it.
So don't kind of making sure that it's stuck together,
and I have the rounded part of my die right here.
So I'm kneading it, to push it out to make it longer.
The reason why I got into knife making is a boyish love
of making a sword, because I fell in love with Conan
the Barbarian, Star Wars, He-Man.
So I would take a tubing off my swing set and flatten it
on a cinder block and chase my brothers around the yard.
Like, ah, I'm He-Man, and that's where the passion
and love of swords or knives or the adventure.
That's where it started.
I need to straighten it out, so I'm going to
whack it a few times to make it straight.
(dramatic techno music)
So everything will line up real nice when I cut it.
So we already got the length that I want.
So now we're going to try to get the patterns, now.
It's basically like teeth that I'm going to
it's going to chomp the side of it,
and basically it's called a ladder pattern.
You'll see where it really reveals itself at the end
when I'm grinding the knife.
The next process, normalizing.
Normalizing is allowing the steel to rest,
and let it heat up and then cool down very slowly.
So in the end, we won't have
any cracks or anything like that.
Forging is only one third of knife
making, a lot of people romanticize it,
and they're saying like, oh, you have to forge,
but it's truly a very small piece.
The real important part about knife making
is the heat treating and the grinding.
So that's what makes a knife great.
(dramatic music)
So next, what we're getting ready to do is grind a profile,
of the knife, so I'm going to grind
away the excess on the billet.
It is kind of fragile, I do have to be a little careful.
I can't just bang it on the ground.
I do have to take care and pay attention to the steel.
So this part right here, I'm getting
ready to put myself into the knife.
Geometry is very important because I need it to work well.
I need it to be able to rock well.
Early on, I watched an executive chef named Craig Deihl.
I spent a lot of time in his kitchen watching him move and
how he performed in his kitchen.
So that's how I kind of figured what
the knife needs to do, basically.
The most important part of
knife making is the heat treating.
And that's, I have to know what type of steel I'm using.
I need to heat it up to is critical temperature,
where if you think about the crystals inside the steel,
it needs to realign and kind of mesh together.
But the only way that they can do that, if it's getting
to that critical temperature, and the critical temperature
of 1095 and 15 and 20 is around 1500 degrees.
I want the grain structure to stay this way.
So that's when I would take it
out of the forge and stick it in oil.
And that's called quenching.
So taking it from 1500 degrees and cooling it down to
around maybe 700 degrees within seconds, that's shocks it,
but it's really brittle, it's really hard,
but it's real brittle like cast iron.
I can take a hammer and hit it, and it would shatter.
The next process is tempering.
That's heating it up to a lower temperature,
around 400 degrees, but at a longer span of time, just like
if you're doing dough, you need to
allow the dough to rest and to rise.
So that's what I'm doing with the steel
when it's in the kiln,
that softens the steel a little bit.
So you have a blend between hard and soft.
I want it to be hard to hold an edge, but I want it to
be a soft enough to resharpen and flex a little bit.
(inspirational music)
I used to work in a local mall, and I was selling cigars,
knives, swords, and my mentor, Jason Knight.
He came in, he bought this cool sword and he just said, oh
yeah, I make knives for a living.
And to a 17 year old, like, I'm like, can you teach me?
That's how I really got it to knife making.
Basically, what I'm looking for in this step is the 50 grit.
It grinds the bevels, and then after that,
I need to get the scratches out.
So that's the progression of the belts.
Basically, after I grind with the
50 grit, I'm polishing after that.
I started making hunting knives, Bowie knives, swords,
until I had a dream, man, basically the Holy Spirit
was telling me, make chef knives.
I've made a few knives and I took it to a few chefs.
Everybody looking at it, oh, this is cool, this is awesome!
And every last one, I'm going to put it back down.
After everybody left, the, the executive chef told me
he said like, hey, these knives are cool,
but they're too thick, they're
too heavy, they're too clunky.
So he gave me some parameters to kinda go by,
and watch how he moves in this kitchen.
That allowed me to become a chef knife maker than I am now
I want to make the green pop, because we went
through the whole process of using two types of steel.
So I used a ferric chloride.
(upbeat techno music)
This is basically a developer, and it
would attack the high carbon steel,
That's the 10 95, then the 15 and 20th,
it has more nickel in it.
So it's going to stay brighter.
So you will see the contrast in the steel.
This little shank is my very first,
I guess, knife, you could say.
I made this when I was seven,
but this one has a little bit more sentimental value.
My dad passed away in 2007.
And when I was young, I remember he took,
after I made it, he threw it on top of the China cabinet,
and maybe 20 years later, I just wanted to reach up there.
I just wanted to see if it was still there,
and sure enough it was there, and my dad
was the last one that touched it.
So I guess, man, I get emotional about it 'cause
I love my dad.
(emotional music)
I'm going to tape up the blade,
so I can protect it from other elements, like scratching.
And so we get ready for the handle.
(upbeat techno music)
Each knife that I make has his own personality.
So it was basically like trying to figure
out what the knife wants to wear.
The design of the hand was very, very important.
When you grab it, it's very bulby in the center.
So it just feel very comfortable.
So now that we forged, maybe grind the knife
and it's bevels, and we've round the profile
of the handle material, so now we're
going to combine them, so we're gonna use some glue.
So one part is this is the resin,
and the other part is a hardener.
So it's just like peanut butter and jelly.
I'm just spreading on, on both of the handle material.
And now we're going to add the screws.
I'm going real slow with it, I don't want to crack it.
So yeah, we just set it and let it dry.
So there are two types of material that I use,
I use this secret sauce.
Well, this is basically a great sealer and
it seals the wood and allows it to look really nice.
And the second product I use is a wax.
You're gonna see the pattern.
And this wood really jump, as soon as I apply this on.
A lot of knife makers said this is their favorite part.
The next step is once we buff the handle,
now it's time for me to sharpen it.
(dramatic music)
The thing that gives it it's quality is the details.
Paying attention on temperature,
the grinding process, handle material,
instead of doing thousands at a time,
I'm doing one knife at a time.
I'm paying attention to the small details.
The little things that come
from my 18 years of making knives.
My experiences my mistakes, I'm putting
everything inside that knife, each and every knife I make.
If it looks awesome, it looks really cool.
But now the thing that keeps my
clients is that it performs well.
So that's why I think my knives are kick ass.
(laughter)
(dramatic techno music)
I think the Bunka is a little bit more
for a professional chef, really.
Where the tip is, it allows you to
have a little bit more precise cuts,
and is straight to the point,
versus a chef knife to give you that rock,
and this one is right to it.
And it just works well from vegetables to protein.
When I make that knife and I'm finished,
and I'm looking at the end product, I'm thinking like, wow
this is an awesome piece of knife,
but I'm not just thinking of the right now gratification.
I'm thinking about the years that it took me to get
to the point that I am now, the 18 years of learning
how to make the knives, and the mistakes.
So every time I finish a knife, that comes to mind.
It's my heart, it's my love, it's my soul.
I'm putting that inside each knife I make.