best place for grinding "semi production" blades

rustyrazor

rustyrazor

Joined
Oct 13, 2011
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I have been making my fully hand finished knives for years and i have 2 designs almost to the point where they are alost "there". The problem is that I have a full time job still and my production cannot possibly keep up with demand at this point which leads me to having to put guys on a long waiting list or recomend them a different knife to meet their needs if they want one within 6 montsh. That being the case i am looking into getting into CNC... but i have a LOT to learn before i can even dream of getting my head around that so i was thinking about having my blade grinding outsourced to someone else and run these as a marked "semi production" run to fill in my gap for the mean time. Does anyone have any recommendations on who or what company can do this for me or any experience with this type of production?

cheers

Royce
 
I had a few test pieces run for the same reasons as you. I wanted to speed up profiling basically. Water jet may be cheaper but I didn't have a final design and only wanted to run a few as a proof of concept idea and the cost was very high for only few blades. Fortunately a buddy has a cnc machine shop. They of course had to transfer the design to a vector type file (I believe they ran mine in Solidworks but don't recall). There was a cost of shop time to build fixtures as well but the machinist and owner both told me it was "super easy work." That leads me to believe if you are doing any quantity a local shop would be glad to have the work if they aren't too busy. Mine were run in "spare time" to keep the cost down but it happened pretty quick.

They also ran a couple where the tool traced paths along the bevel and roughed out quite a bit of material making my hand ground bevels go much quicker, I thought that was a cool idea. I realize my experience may not help much but mainly I want to tag this to see what others have had success with.
 
You can also try Halpern Titanium, Millit Knives and Larkin Precision Knife. You can also try a search for shops with Berger CNC capabilities.
 
Larkin Precision. They do an excellent job and have great prices. The only catch is you have to order 200 blades at a time.
 
yeah. I looked into larkin and Halpern. I'm not ready to put in an order for 200 pieces just yet, but if I get to that point it would be great to get that many sitting on my shelf ready to finish up. I'd be looking more at the neighbourhood of 20 - 50 pieces so I have em on hand and can keep up. Anyone have Jantz do these type of smaller orders before and any experience with how they turn out or even any experience positive or negative?
 
You used to be able to get folks like Lamson & Goodnow to do smaller 100 blade runs, but I think they went to 200 like Larkin. The initial setup cost for CNC work can be pricey because you have to build the fixtures and do the programming. Even subsequent runs of the same piece have setup labor costs, albeit a lot less. Halpern, Millit and others may have a higher minimum for some of their jobs because they are building finished mid-tech folders and they would have to do a bunch of fixture making and programming for those.
 
Oh, I get it and it totally makes sense but I was just checking if anyone knew of an alternative. I will be ready to do a run of 200 at some point I suppose, just wanted to fill a gap in the mean time or maybe find someone that was bored that had some machining skills and wanted to play around.
 
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