K
knifedonk
,
As a “designer”, are you just an artist, or are you an artist
and an engineer? What’s your knife making experience?
Folders are engineering, not just stylised product design. CAD can do artistic design but its great strength is in parametric precision, you can adjust the position of a pin by 0.25mm, then again by 0.01. Every hole, point and surface can be adjusted just as precisely. The price of that precision and control though is pedantry. It is slow to build a realistic model. On paper a pleasing curve is just a French curve and pencil stroke away. In CAD it’s a spline curve with multiple points to be selected, tangency constraints to be applied, and possibly curve analysis to check the spline is free of minute but sudden slope changes.
One of the great challenges for an amateur designer is how to translate their CAD model into a real functioning object. Let’s say you draw on paper, then you make a prototype from your drawing, then you create a 3D CAD model…now you need to get the model back into the real world to check that your model matches your original prototype. Not too bad for handle shapes, you can get 3D prints, but if you are designing a folder, does your mechanism work? If you cannot get your model made with enough precision, you cannot know whether the model is right.
When I had a design made by a major manufacturer, they offered to pay me a percentage of the wholesale value of each knife sold. Another chap I talked to said he negotiated to be a reseller, and he made more selling the knives than he would on royalties.
I think the most incredible thing about having a knife manufactured, based on my prototype, was that the manufacturer took the risk in the first place! It was only because I was working on behalf of a website that had a name and expertise on tap that it happened. It was nerve racking to realise that many tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars was being invested on the basis that my design was good. Sure, years of work and market testing was done by the manufacturer between my sending them the prototype and the knife going into production, but you still feel the weight of responsibility.
I was asked, and it was a fair question, why should the manufacturer take on the design I had? They usually work with established makers who have recognised Names in the industry. What makes you or your design worth the time, money and risk? If a production run is a 1000 units, and there is $100 of tooling, materials, process and labor in each one…what makes your design worth a $100,000 gamble?
I wish you the best of luck!
Chris
