Alrighty then. If you were wondering why the detent hole was drilled so huge it's because I used a set screw instead of a bearing. The detent hole was tapped for a 4-40 thread and a 1/8" set screw was filed round on the end and polished with 1500 grit paper. I cheated at this point and hit it on the buffer real quick. Don't tell anyone
I Plan on making some bronze set screw to try someday but for now the steel ones seem to work pretty good.
Tighten the set screw until the lock bar is flush with the rest of the handle.
Open and close the knife a few times to see where the detent falls on the blade.
center punch and spot drill just past the end of the arc left by the detent. I use a 1/8" bit and drill just a tiny bit then check and keep doing that until the outer edge of the hole gets to just the right spot to suck the blade closed that last little bit. Adjust the set screw in further to increase the holding tension when closed if desired. I file a tiny ramp with a round needle file where the arc goes off the back of the tang to make closing the knife smoother.
Figure out where you want the plunges to be then mark the blade on one side.
Sharpie the edge then use a screw or drill bit clamped to a board to scribe a center line from both sides. Try to get the two lines about a dime thickness apart.
Use a chainsaw file to cut the plunge. Take it down just to the center line and up to wherever you want the top of teh grind to be. I like to go all the way to the spine but be really careful not to cut into the spine. When the cut starts to get close to both lines, sharpie the cut to make sure that you are filing flat. Any bit of convex will be really hard to get out later so make sure the plunge is nice and flat on the bottom from end to end. The marker will show if you are only cutting from one end at a time. Ideally you should be able to remove most of the marker evenly in one stroke. This pic shows that my plunge was still a little convex and needs more removed from the middle.
Flip it over and carefully file the other side to match.
Now file a 45 degree bevel down to the line on both sides. Use a clamp to protect the plunges from the file.
Once again use a big round file to cut grooves as close together as you can. The bottoms of these grooves represent the finished bevels. Towards the tip the grooves will go through the spine. How much determines what kind of distal taper the blade will have. Groove both sides of the blade.
Sharpie the whole blade at this point. Use a big mill file to file down to the bottoms of the grooves. The ink lines will show if the angle is correct. As long as the ink lines are mostly parallel you are filing at the right angle and flat. The raw steel sections will be all over the place because the grooves were filed perpendicular to the curved edge.
You can see here that I've got a little bit of convex in the middle of the blade at this point, but it's pretty close.
File at an angle to get rid of the last of the lines then drawfile to get it perfectly flat and smooth. I was using the edge of the file to make sure the file marks would show in a 2"x2" picture so it looks pretty gnarly but drawfiling with the flats of the file will leave it a lot smoother than shown here.
Sand the file marks out with 220 and a sanding stick. Start by sanding at an angle about 30 degrees off from the file marks.
Once all the file marks are gone sand the blade lengthwise with 400 grit. I only went to 400 because I was in a hurry? Ha! I would normally go to 1500 or two thousand grit. for the final finish, start with the edge of the sandpaper down in the plunge and draw straight towards yourself, lowering the rest of the width of the sandpaper as you pull. Pull straight all the way off the tip. Use your knuckles against the board to keep the lines perfectly straight and parallel. Lock your arms in place and move from the waist. I use water for lube when hand sanding except for the final full length passes.
Use sandpaper to soften every edge on the handle and blade including the blade edge.
Go back through and sand everything to whatever grit you want to go to. I sanded this knife to 400 all over but I will probably take it up to 2000 later just for fun.
Assemble and check that everything fits perfect and that the blade is centered perfectly when closed. After heat treat these things are a bitch to fix. Of course if the blade warps during heat treating you'll have to fix it then anyway
Heat treat, assemble and enjoy your new knife. You've earned it
I wish I could take as long as Nick does to finish a WIP so I could get extra pageviews
but I had to have this knife done in a weekend so unfortunately you guys get the whole thing almost all at once.
This knife took me about 30 hours to get to this point. This includes the time to take over 500 photos while making it so you should be able to get it done a bit quicker than I did.
I trashed one new 12inch mill file, one 14 inch magicut file and about half killed a 10 inch rat tail file. I used 5 sheets of 220 grit paper and half a sheet of 400. About the same cost as the grinding belts I'd have used doing this the easy way.
Thanks everybody for checking out my little how to, I hope everybody is able to learn something from it. Even if it's how not to do things
I'll update this thread in a few weeks after heat treating and final finishing with some (hopefully) better pics.
