Dan Gray said:
what do you mean ... had one of the guys in the shop get it?
He doesn't make the Sebenzas, he has people who work for him that do it.
if I had you make my knives would they still be Gray knives
If you had me make them it would be even money if you could call it a knife. Now if you had someone who knew how to grind to your specifications and they did it, it would not be any different than a knife you ground personally.
Now as for you calling it a Gray knife, that would probably mislead people, you could use something like "Gray Made". As for it being a custom or not, well that depends on your defination. I don't call a knife I buy a custom unless I influenced the design.
A large segment of the industry however uses the label to apply to knives made by one maker, outside of issues like plating, heat treating, forging, etc. . The line gets kind of blurry at that point though, even from that viewpoint.
Les Roberston argued for the performance of custom vs production for a long time based on one man vs shop, but that arguement falls apart when the shop is small and the workers skilled. If you have shops like Reeve and Dozier where the guys are actually "custom" makers in their own right, it is kind of illogical to argue that the knives they collaborate on to produce is inferior.
There is also a huge bias because when two custom makers do combine publically on one-of knives everyone calls it a custom, but if they do it in a shop it becomes production. But if they do it alone in a shop and chunk out huge runs of the exact same model it is still called custom. The defination is full of contradictions in how it is applied.
-Cliff
,, your saying as long as you had the specifications and someone else did the work, you would call the knife made by you?