Kitchen knife made from aluminum foil

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/26/kitchen-knife-made-from-alumin.html

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Very find craftsmanship on display here, shame it is for the production of an aluminum knife. It’s almost a troll video. Still, who am I to be the fun police.

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This will come in handy when I am in prison! Thank you, Youtube!

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I think this is a really cool concept and I’ve enjoyed some of the other videos, but this one doesn’t do it for me. It leaves me with a feeling of “not sure if being trolled”. I’m a hobbyist blacksmith, and I’ve made a fair number of knives, including some aluminum (non functional) reproductions for stage and reenactment. There are a lot of things here that just didn’t look right.

To the best of my knowledge, aluminum will not forge weld under any conditions, let alone room temperature. The surface oxide layers prevent fusion. Aluminum foil has a coating on one side that would prevent fusion. Aluminum is soft and bendy, but his billet is rigid. The treatment with the gas burner should leave the aluminum soft and it should sound dull when struck but his billet rings like a bell when tapped. The effort he put into the hacksawing was very high for a 1/8th inch thick aluminum sheet, and looked like something harder. There’s no point in going up to grits of multiple thousands with aluminum: it won’t sharpen to that extent, and will have a mirror polish long before you’re up to ten thousand grit japanese water stones.

Or, right after the roll of sandwich wrap was flattened and evenly marred up a similar sized strip of something else was substituted, and since they were both evenly hammer marked, it was unnoticeable.

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All you need is to smuggle in about 5 grand worth of high end whetstones.

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That and a tin foil hat and you have a nice set for a Xmas present.

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I thought the difficulty in cutting it was that his expensive diamond sawblade was getting gummed up with aluminum.

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meh, nothing those stones can do that you can’t do cheaper and faster with power tools.

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Well that’s allowed! Isn’t it? Just …stones?

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  1. Neat, but aluminum is a HORRIBLE knife material.

  2. Do you know why one side is shiny and one side is dull on aluminum foil? The final pass through the rollers to make it has the sheet doubled up, so the side passing through the rollers is shiny, and the inside sides touching each other is dull.

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I’m pretty sure they would be listed as “weapons making materials”.

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Considering there is a chocolate knife and a pasta knife from the same account/channel… indeed this is just for the pure can you do it rather than can it actually be useful.

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It looks like a regular coping saw blade. At 3:21 he does put some oil on it (I assume cutting oil), so he got that right. I’ve never tried to sharpen aluminum, but I hate to think what it does to expensive whetstones.

I respect his commitment to hand tools, but jeez, there’s a vise right there that would do the initial flattening of the billet a lot faster.

Also use a bigger hammer.

Also tape some cardboard over that razor sharp edge before installing the handle.

Also it’s easy to be a critic.

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I was thinking a bigger hammer would mushroom it out vs just compress it. I am still curious how well it forged together. I guess well enough?

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Well, he does split the blank down the middle with a wedge implying that the layer structure is still present.

Overall, I think this is just something to prove he can do it, given the fact that he spends so much time finishing a blade to mirrored polish, cuts five slices of cucumber, and then packages it back up.

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Does it keep its edge better than the serrated bit on the side of the foil carton?

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Given that the purpose of the serrated bit is to cut aluminum, i’m going to say no.

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HA! It couldn’t be much worse! I swear, I know people who are able to use that thing and it looks like magic. I do it and I end up with a new wad of foil for Pee-wee’s giant ball.

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Emphasis mine.
Not if but when?

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There’s something weird going on here but I don’t know what. The part where he makes stuff almost entirely by abrasion seems real, and I guess it might make sense if this is a profoundly autistic person or something? But then there’s the bit with the milk jugs, and filing off the screws, which makes me think it is maybe a comedy video in some way?

But the real wtf is welding the foil on a gas burner. Either there is some extraordinary metallurgical phenomenon going on or that’s straight-up fake. But the overall effect is so confusing that I don’t know which. Could it be some strange form of vacuum welding, where the heat drives gases off the surface and the gap is too small for air to get back in?

ETA I have a feeling I’m going to end up trying this myself just to see what happens. I’ll probably waste more than over 11 cubic pounds of my time confirming that the video is fake

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