Homemade Knife

Homemade Survival Knife

Home Made Hunting Knife
Before Shaping  Fiber Fix Handle 

 I've been wanting to make a new survival knife for everyday uses and preferably had a handle that was indestructible.. I decided to use an old file to make my blade mainly because they are made of very strong high carbon steel and they hold a very nice edge when completed.

Fiber Fix Tape
100x Stronger Than Duct Tape

 In order to use a file to make a homemade knife you need to take the brittleness out of the file first. To do this you need to heat the file up to a glowing red. I use my fireplace in my house to take the temper out of the files simply by throwing in the medal into the coals for 10 to 15 minutes or until the file in evenly glowing the same color. After the file starts glowing, the trick is letting the file cool down as slow as possible so you don't harden your homemade blade again. I just take the file out and set it on the fire place and let the fire go out.

After the file cooled I sketched the shape of knife I wanted to make and started grinding away. The main tool I use to cut the knife out is the angel grinder with a cut off blade. Sometimes I start cutting out the knife template I sketched when I see something else in the knife and end up shaping it totally different.

Shaping Handle for
Homemade Knife using Fiber Fix

The hardest part for me was picking out new material that would never break or fall apart on the knife handle. I seen this new material on Shark Tank Show that is called Fiber Fix that's 100 times stronger than Duct Tape and when dried is as hard as steel. This new tape hardens in five minutes when exposed to water and bonds with whatever it comes in contact with providing cast-like steel when dried. The best part is you can file it down and shape it in any way you want including making a nice custom handle for my new homemade knife.      

 The Fiber Fix is hard to the touch in about five minutes but takes up to 36 hours to fully cure and ready to be shaped. I bought a 3 roll kit including the 1", 2" and 4" roll which comes in different lengths. Once you expose FiberFix to water you must use up all the tape's roll because you can't save any unused portion. I used the 4" by 60" roll for my knife handle because it was exactly 4 inches.

 I then used a half round file to shape the finger groves in my homemade knife but made the mistake of filing the handle to soon before it was completely dried. As a result this ruined the file with the black resin that eventually hardened hardened inside the grooves making it completely useless for any future filing. So make sure the Fiber Fix Handle is 100% dry before you start shaping your knife handle.  

The finished Homemade  File Knife
 with a Custom Fiber Fix Handle

I have been using this knife like crazy after I finished it and it really is as tough as they claim. I have also been throwing this knife a lot because it's perfectly balanced and sticks with a lot of force. The handle turned out great and really impressed how easy it was to get the desired shape.

I made the tip of the home made knife really small to see how long it would last under extreme conditions and it's still as good as new after two weeks of heavy use.