My primitive way to cast aluminium or how I made a knife guard out of scrap aluminium. Part two.
In this post I will talk about shaping the billet into knife guard. There are plenty article and video clips about it on the net, so I will just talk about it briefly to show that ‘yes we can’.
First thing you do is to grind the billet on one side (in this case, is one of the long face of the bar. Then use that side as a guide grind the right angle side. That will enable you to grind both long faces of the billet parallel to each other.
Paint the surface of the billet with metal marking ink, and mark the centre of the billet on the X & Y axis. Lay the guard template the you made beforehand , and trace the counter with metal scriber.
Use the tongue of the blade as template, mark the location of the hole for the tongue. Make sure you do that on the exposed side of the guard and not on the side of the handle. it is very important as you need the hole from the exposed side to be DEAD ACCURATE.
My guard design asked for two deferent template , one for each side. I use the marking for the X & Y centres to marked them accurately.
Now it’s the time to make the hole for the tongue (before you actually shape the guard). As I wrote at the beginning, you don’t need me for that part. Below is three links to good video clips.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6RZHnBhYhQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAe1JqXfR04
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFFXq4vtDjY
Providing all is well, and with little bit of hammering, your billet will fit snugly on the blade.
The last part in the process is to some degree unexplainable. The billet shaping onto being a guard is basically a sculpturing job. In my case I use the belt sander (make sure you design the guar in accordance with the dimensions and radiuses that your sander can provide), I also used my Dremel tool and handheld metal files. If you don’t have belt sander or Dremel tool, you can improvise some drum sanders. I did a post about it in the past.
Any way here is the end result. I know it is rough and i still need to polish it, but for that you don’t need my instruction.
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