Balisong #2 WIP

[Erin Burke]

Good morning folks (or at least it's morning here as I type this). I have been taking a bunch of photos of my most recent project, and it has been a while since I posted a WIP thread over here, so I figure it is about time.

This knife is only my second balisong effort - the first sits in my right pocket as my EDC - and will be only my 16th completed knife... assuming everything goes well. I tell you this so you understand that I am very much on the steep part of the learning curve when it comes to making balisongs (and knives in general). I'm a newbie, so take my methods with a grain of salt.

As with all my knives, this one started out as a pencil sketch on a piece of paper. With balisongs, however, this design ends up quickly getting tweaked in CAD to ensure that everything works. This first photo shows the original CAD print-out (stains and all) that I used in conjunction with the DROs on my mill to put all the holes where I wanted them.

Yep... those are all X&Y coordinates as calculated in CAD.
For the handles I will use a 4" X 2-1/4" piece of 0.13" 6AL-4V titanium. The blade will come from short piece of 3/16" 1095 which I will mill down to about 0.1" (because I don't have any thinner 1095). You can see from the photo that the plan is to have inserts in these handles.

This photo shows the Ti plate from which I cut the handle sheet. Sorry I didn't get a photo while I was cutting it, but I was too busy dodging teeth from my band-saw blade. I am going to have to figure out the whole "friction cutting" method, because the way I do things is REALLY hard on blades. Ti is mean.

In the following photo I am drilling holes in the corner of the Ti plate to mount it in the mill. Not much else to say about that.

Here I am using a face mill to make a nice FLAT spot on a scrap piece of purpleheart to mount the plate. Flat is good. :thumbup:

And finally, here is the Ti plate screwed-down and roughly squared to the X&Y axes. Now we're ready to start making swiss cheese of this thing.

 

[Erin Burke]

This photo shows the milled slots for the inserts. These were milled using a 3/16" 4-flute HSS end mill. When I laid the handles out in CAD, I made sure that these were oriented along the X-axis to make for easy milling on my non-CNC mill. The rest of the handle features are just simple XY coordinate holes, so it doesn't really matter how they were oriented. I hope that makes sense.

In the following photo, I am actually milling some "through-slots" to aid in epoxy bonding. They will also help me to pop the inserts back out of the holes as I test-fit them... before final epoxy. I still have to mill the holes in the outside slots.

Here all of the pivot, stop, spacer & latch holes have been drilled, counterbored and reamed. Still don't look much like balisong handles huh?

In this photo I am torturing my band-saw blade some more. I just removed the plate from the mill (though I did skip photographing the step where I counterbore some of the holes in the back sides of the handles) and I have aligned and glued the handle plans to the handle blank with Duro spray adhesive. Next time I'll use my 3M 77 spray adhesive as I think it give me a better bond for this type of application.

Anyway, the pattern helps me being cutting out the handles.

Here I have the handles rough-cut and I am pinning them together for grinding to shape on my KMG.

Sadly, I didn't get any photos of the actual grinding. For the most part, I used my 8" contact wheel, with a bit of work on a 1-1/4" small wheel. One interesting side note for those who have never worked with Ti is that I shoots hot sparks like a MF when ground with a 50-grit blaze belt running balls-out. What is really neat is when these hot sparks hit the steel dust that is floating on top of the water in your grinding bucket.

This photo shows the handles after some quality time with the grinder.

Need bust out the old toothbrush to clean the nasties out of the holes.

 

[R. Mark Lee]

Looks like a great start to me, can't wait to see how it turns out. Keep the pics coming.

 

[Salem Straub]

Yeah TI is ROUGH to cut and grind, those handle profiles must have taken a while. I'll bet you were glad to step away from the grinder.

Looking good so far Erin, I prophesy it's going to be a kick-ass balisong.

Keep 'em coming...

 

[Erin Burke]

Perhaps calling this a WIP is not exactly correct for several reasons:

1. The knife is actually fairly far along. These early photos are from several weeks back. I'll try to get post all of the photos today to get caught-up to the way things sit today.
2. Most of the photos don't actually show me working. They are mostly just progress snapshots of the pieces and parts. I find it can be difficult to photograph myself actually performing some of these tasks. This will become very apparent when you see how many photos are missing from the blade grinding process.

Oh well...

Back in the first post I mentioned that I milled the 1095 for the blade down from 3/16" to about 0.1". This photo show that blade after milling. If you look closely at the picture in the background you may get some idea of what I am actually doing here.

That is a 1/4" reamer in the photo. I will eventually have to lap the holes a bit more as the pivot bushings are slightly oversized.

This photo shows the blade after it has been cut from the surrounding metal on the band saw and after the profile has been cleaned up a bit on the grinder.

The reading on the plastic calipers is the measured thickness of the blade at this point.

At this point, I missed photographing a bunch of steps:

• Rough-grinding the bevels - which were flat-ground.
• Heat treat.
• Cleaning up bevels and flats after HT.
• Initial lapping of the blade pivot holes.

But this next photo shows the blade after all that.

After the photo above I did a little more blade polishing and etching. Then, I took some time to work on the pocket clip. Again, I didn't take any photos of this process but it involved:

1. Cutting a ~1/4" strip of 0.05" Ti from a sheet.
2. Drilling holes through the strip to match up with the screw-holes in the handle.
3. Bending the clip to shape using a mapp torch for heat and some pliers & vise-grips for the bending. Thinner sections of Ti can be bent without heat... but I find that the 0.05" thick stuff I use can tear or wrinkle without the application of heat during bending.
4. Clean-up and shaping of the clip using both my flat-platen and a 1/2" small wheel on my grinder.
5. Milling a recess in the pocket-clip handle in which the top of the clip will mount.

This photo gives you a rough idea of what this project looked like after all of that work.

Note: You can see the beginning of the hamon on the blade. :thumbup:

 

[Erin Burke]

Now I had been putting off this next step for awhile... but it was finally time to choose an inlay material. I have considered everything from stabilized katalox wood (scraps from my last knife) to faux ivory. My two finalists ended up being some margarita/ghost jade G11 from James Todd or a free sample scale from Masecraft labeled "sample bone". I went with the bone for not other reason than it was close to the correct size/thickness and I would never likely find another use for it.

I dug around and found this old photo of the "sample bone" scale from Masecraft. The only items that I ordered were the large chunk of faux ivory and the set of black scales... the rest was all free sample stuff. The thin single scale standing on edge at the left is what I'm using for this knife.

Now I'm not sure what kind of bone this is, but it is definitely real bone... one touch to the grinder was all it took to figure that out. :barf: Bone stinks. I think this stuff may have been stabilized (it reminds me of some stabilized giraffe bone that I have used in the past) but I don't know for sure.

So I printed out paper copies of the inserts and glued them to the bottom of the scale. I then cut them out on the band saw and sanded them to the correct width on my disc grinder. The rounded ends were CAREFULLY shaped on sandpaper glued to one of my granite surface plates. Again, I did not get any photos of this.

But I did get photos of the handles with inserts installed and epoxy drying.
Back side.

Front side.

Note that the inserts have not been sanded flush, nor has the epoxy been cleaned up.

Next comes a bunch of sanding... much of it by hand. Then comes the very first dry-fit of parts.

And THIS, my friends, is how this balisong looks today.

So what's left to do? Well several things:

1. Fit Ti spacers in both handles. I am currently waiting for some 2-56 thread-forming taps so I can tap these spacers.
2. Finish filing in the slots in the blade for the zen pins. Right now the handles do not open or close to the extent that they should.
3. Perform light touch-up lapping of the pivot holes. The fit is currently very tight between the bushings and the blade.
4. Install latch pin and build a spring-latch fro the safe handle.
5. Perform final polishing and etching of the blade... including etching my mark.
6. Decent photos.

And that's about it. I'm hoping that my taps show up today so I can make some progress over the weekend. We'll see. I'll keep you posted.

 

[Mike Davis]

That's awesome! I like the blade design. Unusual, which is nice Looking good, can't wait to see it finished.

 

[Erin Burke]

Salem... yeah, Ti can be a pain to work with. I've pretty much figured out drilling and milling... or at least it goes fairly smoothly (without broken bits) now that I have my speeds figured out. Cutting and grinding does suck. I use old belts when working Ti... or else I'd just end up turning a new belt to an old belt REAL QUICK. The Ti gets hot fast, but this just means a lot of dipping in water.

Mike... glad you like the blade. I think you'll be seeing the finished product sooner rather than later.

The first thing I thought I'd show in this post are my old and new fixtures for lapping bushings, spacers and various other things.

The bottom plate is my work-horse. Its a piece of 1/8" hardened 1080 with three holes drilled/reamed into it: 1/8", 3/16" & 1/4". I use this bad-boy for everything. My 1/4" pivot bushings get roughed to dimension in the 1/4" hole. My 3/16" pivots get ground to length in the middle-sized hole. I use the 1/8" hole for spacers & stop pins. It is also useful for controlling 2-56 screws as I grind them to length. This totally useful for bali construction.
Pictured above this plate is my new pivot/bushing lap from usaknifemaker.com. I used this for fine-tuning my bushings and spacers on 1200-2000 grit paper.

I'll be jumping all over the place with my pictures today. I'm feeling a bit scatter-brained.

But before I get to more photos... here's a video. Remember how I was waiting for some 2-56 taps from ebay?... well, they got here. What you are about to see is only the third hole that I've ever tapped using my Tapmatic. Forgive my poor oratory skills... obviously I did not rehearse.
[youtube]zg89bIxwhYE[/youtube]
So um, that is a uh thread-forming tap running at about 500rpm through um titanium. Uh... no broken taps.

Today I started making my latch. I can't remember where I picked this up, but I start with a stainless cap-screw. In this first photo I have ground the head flat on my grinder.

Next I chuck the screw in my mill and clean up the head with some 280-800 grit paper.

Here is the screw after I finish with the paper.

At this point, the screw is too big around to fit between my handles (which are spaced about 0.124" apart) so I need to narrow it down a bit. Here I am milling the latch shaft to about 0.118" thick which gives me room for comfortable movement.

After this, I drill a #30 hole for the 1/8" latch pivot and a super-tiny hole (I don't remember the size) behind that to attach the end of the spring. Sorry, no photos of this. After that, I did a bit more milling to tweak the shape of the latch and reduce the weight. Finally, I cut of the threads and shape the back of the latch... again, no photos.

And this last photo shows all the pieces and parts sitting in a pink cupcake plate ready for assembly. The plate is courtesy of my two little girls.

This is my last progress photo. Final photos can be found HERE.