Knifemaking Tuesdays Week 34 - lock face and shortening screws Media

This week Erik and I have almost finished the first batch of Norseman knives, it's very exciting and we're having tons of fun. Erik starts out by making a bunch of threaded titanium spacers on the Tormach set up as a lathe. We didn't go into too much detail about that in this video, but check out week 30 for more detailed video of that. Next up I started cutting the lock tang for each blade using a fixture that I made and a 2" facemill. The blades are already hardened before doing this step. Each blade will get specifically fit to a set of handles and they will stay together forever. That's the only way to ensure proper lockup every time. Once that was done I moved onto shortening all the screws that bolt the knife together. I'm using really nice stainless steel screws but they're way too long, so the last half of the video shows my trials and tribulations for shortening them. I go over 3 different kinds of taps, taper hand tap, thread form tap, and thread mill, along with how to use (and break) each one. Eventually I was able to make the form tap work great, and I tapped over 80 holes into 1/8" stainless steel. After threading a bunch of screws into the plate I used a 1/4" endmill to chop them all down to size, it was a lot of work but it will really pay off down the road.

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