Custom vs Handmade

[teacher]

A production knife could be hand made right?

I don't worry about the labels so much as long as whatever is being made is good.:thumbup:

My head hurts... (or I need a mocha, or a coffee, or a ...)

I think these terms have to be understood between the customer and the person they get the knife from before the order is placed. (I'm going to hush now... )

I pretty much agree with these two guys............. :thumbup:
As long as it is quality and I know what I am getting up front I don't really care how they make it.

I am not really into "collecting" high end one of a kind knives anyway.
Now days with CNC. water jet, and a bunch of other things I probably don't even know about ......... semantics could get real confusing real fast.

Does it cut and will it hold up. That is what I want to know.

And as far as the Model 12 reference earlier. I happen to have a couple of "Model 12's" from a maker I know.
I don't know if one would call it a custom, a handmade, a production .... or what. And, I really don't care what words are used to describe it. It is one of the best knives I have ever owned.

It is about as close to perfection as I have seen in a knife. Fit and finish are 100%. And I know for a fact this gentleman spends hours getting the final appearence perfect.

All done by hand...... so who is to say.......

 

[jacqueeagonsr]

Good day, folks. I'm new to the forum - but - not new to knifemaking - been making knives for about 9 years. We are actually talking about two different things here. I think the disagreement comes in when a knifemaker uses a term to describe his product and trys to represent it as something that it is not. A good 'bad' example might be a fella who buys and puts together a kit knife and then tries to tell folks that it's 'custom-made' or 'hand-made'. Here's what Webster's New World Dictionary says about the two words.
custom-made - made to order, according to the customer's specifications.
hand-made - made by hand, not by machine; made by a process requiring manual skills.
So, a custom-made knife could be hand-made. Or, if the fire department orders 50 knives made to their specifications, you could have machine-made custom-made knives.
But a knife blade made by a CDC controlled mill could not, IMHO, be called hand-made. However, a knife blade made with a device, be it a file or a mill, that is manually controlled would be a hand-made blade. Sole-authorship vs. a collaboration is a different subject. If you do everything to change raw material into a knife - that's sole authorship. If someone else does your heat-treating, you've just collaborated.