MAGPUL's new knives.

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jbmonkey said:
this knife design, size and the mim doesnt do anything for me..but add in the price point .....I got zero interest. other than to see how the mim blade holds up to actual use over years......
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This particular knife does not excite me at all .

But the MIM process sorta does !

Being able to use a mold , makes weird shapes easy and potentially cheap .

Opens a lot of new design possibilities for pivots , locks , etc . :cool:
 
DocJD said:
This particular knife does not excite me at all .

But the MIM process sorta does !

Being able to use a mold , makes weird shapes easy and potentially cheap .

Opens a lot of new design possibilities for pivots , locks , etc . :cool:
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Does it? What blade shapes can be made via MIM that cannot be done with CNC machining?


And how will these new blade shapes facilitate new lock and pivot designs?
 
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The True North said:
Does it? What blade shapes can be made via MIM that cannot be done with CNC machining?


And how will these new blade shapes facilitate new lock and pivot designs?
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Much quicker and cheaper to use MIM, the CNC can make any shape with enough axis but a 5-axis is much more expensive to use so normally equals a larger cost to produce.

Edit: sorry, when I reread your post you were talking specifically about blade shapes. This shouldn't matter as a three-axis should be all you need.
 
Yo Mama said:
Much quicker and cheaper to use MIM, the CNC can make any shape with enough axis but a 5-axis is much more expensive to use so normally equals a larger cost to produce.
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I understand that part of it, of course.

But what he said, was that this would facilitate new lock and pivot designs, not that it would be cheaper to manufacture existing ones.

I'm interested in hearing how that might be.
 
MIM is still faster than CNC if you are making many pieces. Time is money and fewer machine steps equals less time spent on each piece. It still might end up being good for manufacturers and consumers, but only time will tell.
 
Honestly, theses things will sell like hotcakes to the gun crowd. Brand recognition is huge in the gun community. They may not know a damn thing about blade steel, but they'll see that Magpul is making it through some "revolutionary new process" and just assume it's great. There's a pretty big overlap of the gun and knife world, but the people who are highly knowledgeable in both are few and far between. It's usually just gimmicky or sub-par products marketed from one industry to the other. Hogue is the only company I can think of that's actually managed to make great products on both sides.
 
Gun people know about mim. It’s trash. Bought a vickers Glock 19 gen 3. Gen 3 had a good reputation but this model had some gen 4 parts which were mim. Gun wasn’t cycling properly. Finally tracked the problem to the mim gen 4 ejector. Had to change multiple parts to get it working. Avoid.
 
Ozmose said:
Honestly, theses things will sell like hotcakes to the gun crowd. Brand recognition is huge in the gun community. They may not know a damn thing about blade steel, but they'll see that Magpul is making it through some "revolutionary new process" and just assume it's great. There's a pretty big overlap of the gun and knife world, but the people who are highly knowledgeable in both are few and far between. It's usually just gimmicky or sub-par products marketed from one industry to the other. Hogue is the only company I can think of that's actually managed to make great products on both sides.
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As mentioned.. mim isnt new to gun people. Its cheap trash for guns, itll be cheap trash for knives.
 
rizza32 said:
Gun people know about mim. It’s trash. Bought a vickers Glock 19 gen 3. Gen 3 had a good reputation but this model had some gen 4 parts which were mim. Gun wasn’t cycling properly. Finally tracked the problem to the mim gen 4 ejector. Had to change multiple parts to get it working. Avoid.
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Some gun people know about MIM. The overwhelming majority does not. People who actually know the ins and outs are the outliers. You can say the same of the knife world. They're churning out millions of gas station knives in China for a reason. People are buying them. I imagine there's a lot more people with display pieces from a Bud K catalog than people with a shelf of mid-techs and customs, and I'm sure they consider themselves just as serious a collector as any of us.
 
IDK anything about the technicalities of making parts by CNC or MIM.but . . .

I own a lot of firearms -- semi auto pistols (mostly Glocks), rifles & shotguns.

The only working parts that I've ever purchased & installed for any of them were for my Glocks & AFAIK none of those parts were MIM made.

On the other hand, I own a lot of injection molded polymer parts (grips, stocks, bipods & sights) made by Magpul that I've put on my AR variants & an 870 shotgun which were relatively cheap & functionally "good enough" for my needs.

IDK how that experience translates to making knives by means of MIM but it just seems like a cheap way of making knives in volume that should translate to lower pricing but IMO you almost always get what you pay for.

As a knife & gun nut, I have no interest in buying any knife made by Magpul but I'd like to know how Magpul's MIM made blades perform based on the testing of their hardness, strength & durability, as compared with blades made by other methods.

Maybe that's something Larrin or someone else could do sometime in the future.
 
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rizza32 said:
Gun people know about mim. It’s trash. Bought a vickers Glock 19 gen 3. Gen 3 had a good reputation but this model had some gen 4 parts which were mim. Gun wasn’t cycling properly. Finally tracked the problem to the mim gen 4 ejector. Had to change multiple parts to get it working. Avoid.
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I agree with this, I have not had good luck with MIM parts in guns. I have not experienced breakages of these parts but have heard of it alot. The thing that really bothers me though is that many firearms makers jumped on it to reduce costs. My fear is that if there is any degree of success with these knives, other makers will jump on this Bandwagon as well, like what happened in the firearm industry.
 
Plenty of gun parts are just fine being MIM. Maybe not everyone does it well, but there are lots of successful examples. That's not the issue here. The issue is whether or not knives should be MIM (they should not).
 
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MIM has come a LONG way and the "MIM=bad" people who dealt with a broken hammer/sear/safety on their 1911 that one time are just spreading fudd lore. I've been around and tested MIM parts that showed strength and durability that was hard to believe for any piece of metal.

It's an interesting take by Magpul and I trust that they've put in the time and R&D to put out a quality product. The reality is that injection mold tooling is extremely expensive, and metal injection molds require a lot of maintenance. For what it likely cost them to make the mold(s) and what it will cost to maintain them, they could have purchased multiple CNC mills and the required tooling and fixturing to make the blades more traditionally. Obviously they plan to make a ton of these knives, and they will eventually reach a point where they're molding the blades cheaper than they could be machining them, but that doesn't seem to be priced in and who knows if it ever will be.
 
MIM really works up the crowd, doesn't it? Like any manufacturing process, there is good implementation and poor implementation. There is likely a lot of MIM parts in items around you right now that you never think about because they just work. When forged and machined parts fail, do you just exclaim that "it's failed because it was forged!" or "It failed because it was machined!" or "forging and machining is junk!". Nope. If MIM is done well and process fits the need, it will be fine. That said, I'm not convinced that blades made with MIM make sense, but we will have to see how they perform to really know.

Additive metal printing is here now, so that will be the next bugbear to rant about.
 
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