Diy knife project 2

I recently fell in love with nakiri knives.

I realized I have all the equipment necessary to sharpen and set decent quality steel knife blanks and handles purchased online. Not shown is my sharpening setup. That'll come in a later post.

This is the second round of testing a proof of concept. You'll see the first later.

We're going to use a 440 stainless alloy blank... Stainless, rather than carbon, because I'm probably going to give this to family; I want a daily driver with zero upkeep.

Mark a dot on both the full tang knife inset, and the handle for your support. Most online handles just use epoxy to set, but I prefer to reinforce with a bolt, for a much better end product.

Punch through using the proper drill bits for the proper material. Cobalt tips and lubrication is important to get through high carbon stainless.

Find an M4 Bolt, approximately the same length as the handle cross section. We're going to use that as handle support.

Countersink your hole.

Use a hammer to knock the Tang (the end protrusion, that goes into your handle, of your knife blank) as deep as possible into the handle, you should be able to see light through both of your holes if you measured properly.

Unfortunately the process of hammering the knife into the handle caused a little bit of cracking, but since we're going to use epoxy as part of the finishing step, it's not the end of the world. These cracks are tiny and wouldn't affect the durability of the end product.

I did fill those cracks with a high quality CA glue before moving on to the epoxy set step... Just for Peace of mind.

At the end of the day this is cookware, we don't want any possibility for bacteria to collect in enclosed spaces, so filling cracks is important.

Let's mix up your favorite epoxy.

This is some weird Asian epoxy that you can purchase on aliexpress. I don't know the composition, nor do I understand the labeling on the package. However, you can definitely glue anything you want, to just about anything else, using this product. Even better, the numbers on the package seem to correlate to either the setting time or the hardness of the resulting Bond, so you can min-max the product.

Your guess is as good as mine as to what any of the markings mean... But this is damn good epoxy. Period.

Coat the Tang. Insert it and remove it repeatedly.

You want to force as much epoxy into the handle void as you can. Keep covering the tang every single time you insert. The goal is to push as much of your epoxy into the handle void as possible.

Before it sets, because you will definitely have overflow outside of the areas you want it to go into, use acetone to clean it up. Acetone stops the epoxy polymerization process, hell, it stops a whole lot of processes considering how polar it is as a solvent.

Insert your M4 Bolt. Use some form of percussion maintenance to get it in. Here I'm using a tap, and my jewelry hammer to knock the bolt through the piece.

I do recommend covering the threads with the same grey epoxy mentioned before.

Let the internal epoxy set for 24 hours.

But there's definitely going to be voids around the M4 screw that you used to reinforce the handle. How can we fix that?

Well, obviously more epoxy.

(also, as alluded to earlier, intro: The first knife. The top Nakiri, carbon blade and an epoxy handle, unfortunately I used the wrong setting epoxy to adhere the blade before bolting the handle on properly. I'm sure it's fine for a few uses, but certainly not for daily use in a professional enviro.)

Mix up about 10 mL of a good hardness epoxy. For this part, use a food safe epoxy, usually water-based, with at least a Mohs hardness rating of 8.

Use a torch to get rid of your bubbles.

Draw it up into a sacrificial syringe. This will destroy the syringe when it fully sets.

You can get 15, 10 ml glass syringes for under $10 on AliExpress.

Cover the holes you want to fill in a tape that's easily removable, you could possibly use painters tape... But I prefer kapton.

You can see in the Mark 1 knife, the wrong epoxy filling the holes. It was a putty composition, and it's nowhere near hard enough for daily use. Nonetheless, we can cover it with a harder, stronger clear epoxy to give it some life in the kitchen.

Now you're picking up what I'm putting down.

Press the syringe into the hole. Push Hard.

Wear gloves, btw. Epoxy is awful on your skin.

Allow the epoxy to absorb into the void around the M4 bolt.

Allow for some overflow.

Slowly feed the epoxy into the handle.

Allow it to overflow a little bit.

Epoxy has extremely high surface tension, so after about 20 minutes, use whatever excess you have to cover the handle.

The void will absorb a lot of your sealing epoxy, keep adding more drop by drop.

As soon as your filling epoxy begins to gel hard, get a gloved hand and run it over the wooden surfaces of your handle. Smooth it out. You're going to have to sand it later, at least 800 Grit, but the smoother you get it now, the less work you got to do later to sand and polish the handle.

Bon service, chefs.