Random Thought Thread

SolarStorm50 said:
This is just my experience, but from managing global IT teams I have tried different marketing ideas.

I am finding that financial success in this business is ½ marketing and ½ making. the "Friday's Funny" was an attempt at creating something that would make people come to the website once a week as part of a reading list. I found out its the wrong demographic for this type of marketing, I tried and it was put in the failed column. However I cant help myself when I see or think of something that may make someone smile. I did it religiously for about 1.5 years to give it an honest effort, but like I said it failed. Now its just something fun to post and make people smile when the world definitely needs more smiles.

honestly, I have found youtube has been the best for sales. People like to see people work. BUT I live in a country that has draconian laws regarding tools that can be used with ill intent. So they like to ban/regulate the tools instead of dealing with the intent.

Youtube, creates views, views click on my weblink, people then use my chat bot or contact page to reach out.

Facebook I find to be a double edged sword (pun intended). I published a picture of a knife and a rifle for an active duty member of our armed forces. Facebook branded me as evil and banned me for 30 days. then youtube got on the band wagon since creating a combat tool for a soldier was the first step to radicalization. Youtube was reasonable after I contacted them, but the algorithms initially tagged me.

Would love to hear how others are marketing their stuff. I cant do a show because I have no stock have orders for the next 6 months prepaid.

Not sure how many more custom orders I am going to do because I am also not able to work on the pieces I want to create. I need to find some balance here. maybe like 3 days on orders, 2 days for myself type of schedule.

Sorry probably more than what you asked, this has just been my experience.
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Keep em coming i was just giving you a hard time
 
surfkiev said:
Can you post a couple pictures here or on the Fat Bastard thread? I've got one on the way and dying to see how they turned out.
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The fat bastard has been a little bit a process here. Lol

I was going to have them for sale here in October at our Outlaw cut (they were done) but there was something about the heat treat response that wasn't 100% so we did a full spheroidized anneal and ran them again. That's twice this year we've done that. Dirty little secret in the knife industry, sometimes things aren't completely perfect. I feel that we are unusual because we are looking for problems and finding them and fixing them. But anyways, all of the fat bastards have had 15 specific heat processes before you get them. 15 is bigger than average.

I did not want to start sharpening them until we had sheaths in numbers. I'm not blaming the sheath maker for us being slow (I AM SLOW AND I WILL TELL ANYONE AND EVERYONE THAT WILL LISTEN TO ME. I AM SLOW), but I have been putting off finishing the process until we actually had a bunch of sheaths here in stock because a lot of sharp knives with nowhere to go is a problem.

The knife is CNC sharpened with a CBN cutting tool grinding wheel used to make things like endmills. I like to CNC sharpen when I can because the resulting geometry conforms to the design intent perfectly. This is being performed on a ten ton, low hour, high performance Mori Seiki machining center. And the cycle time on this particular process is 45 freaking minutes. Which is way way way more than normal. That's a lot of spindle time. This is not a good looking process from an efficiency point of view from where I'm sitting but there's a lot of material to remove on these fat bastards and, even under 10 GPM flood coolant, there is the risk of overheating the edge if I'm too aggressive so we're just dusting it off in fine increments until we get to the burr. The alternative is to have Bo sharpen these. Bo sharpens thousands of knives for us here but these are a little different, this is almost a bevel and that's a little outside of his comfort zone, but the alternative is me or Mark sharpening these and we already have our hands full doing our regular jobs. I'm not really sure the answer here. It'll probably end up being a mix.

But anyway, these ridiculous fat bastards are coming together now. I thought we were going to ship months ago but, we're going to start to ship this week.
 
Nathan the Machinist said:
View attachment 3053420View attachment 3053421View attachment 3053422View attachment 3053423View attachment 3053424View attachment 3053425


The fat bastard has been a little bit a process here. Lol

I was going to have them for sale here in October at our Outlaw cut (they were done) but there was something about the heat treat response that wasn't 100% so we did a full spheroidized anneal and ran them again. That's twice this year we've done that. Dirty little secret in the knife industry, sometimes things aren't completely perfect. I feel that we are unusual because we are looking for problems and finding them and fixing them. But anyways, all of the fat bastards have had 15 specific heat processes before you get them. 15 is bigger than average.

I did not want to start sharpening them until we had sheaths in numbers. I'm not blaming the sheath maker for us being slow (I AM SLOW AND I WILL TELL ANYONE AND EVERYONE THAT WILL LISTEN TO ME. I AM SLOW), but I have been putting off finishing the process until we actually had a bunch of sheaths here in stock because a lot of sharp knives with nowhere to go is a problem.

The knife is CNC sharpened with a CBN cutting tool grinding wheel used to make things like endmills. I like to CNC sharpen when I can because the resulting geometry conforms to the design intent perfectly. This is being performed on a ten ton, low hour, high performance Mori Seiki machining center. And the cycle time on this particular process is 45 freaking minutes. Which is way way way more than normal. That's a lot of spindle time. This is not a good looking process from an efficiency point of view from where I'm sitting but there's a lot of material to remove on these fat bastards and, even under 10 GPM flood coolant, there is the risk of overheating the edge if I'm too aggressive so we're just dusting it off in fine increments until we get to the burr. The alternative is to have Bo sharpen these. Bo sharpens thousands of knives for us here but these are a little different, this is almost a bevel and that's a little outside of his comfort zone, but the alternative is me or Mark sharpening these and we already have our hands full doing our regular jobs. I'm not really sure the answer here. It'll probably end up being a mix.

But anyway, these ridiculous fat bastards are coming together now. I thought we were going to ship months ago but, we're going to start to ship this week.
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DAMN!
 
Nathan the Machinist said:
View attachment 3053420View attachment 3053421View attachment 3053422View attachment 3053423View attachment 3053424View attachment 3053425


The fat bastard has been a little bit a process here. Lol

I was going to have them for sale here in October at our Outlaw cut (they were done) but there was something about the heat treat response that wasn't 100% so we did a full spheroidized anneal and ran them again. That's twice this year we've done that. Dirty little secret in the knife industry, sometimes things aren't completely perfect. I feel that we are unusual because we are looking for problems and finding them and fixing them. But anyways, all of the fat bastards have had 15 specific heat processes before you get them. 15 is bigger than average.

I did not want to start sharpening them until we had sheaths in numbers. I'm not blaming the sheath maker for us being slow (I AM SLOW AND I WILL TELL ANYONE AND EVERYONE THAT WILL LISTEN TO ME. I AM SLOW), but I have been putting off finishing the process until we actually had a bunch of sheaths here in stock because a lot of sharp knives with nowhere to go is a problem.

The knife is CNC sharpened with a CBN cutting tool grinding wheel used to make things like endmills. I like to CNC sharpen when I can because the resulting geometry conforms to the design intent perfectly. This is being performed on a ten ton, low hour, high performance Mori Seiki machining center. And the cycle time on this particular process is 45 freaking minutes. Which is way way way more than normal. That's a lot of spindle time. This is not a good looking process from an efficiency point of view from where I'm sitting but there's a lot of material to remove on these fat bastards and, even under 10 GPM flood coolant, there is the risk of overheating the edge if I'm too aggressive so we're just dusting it off in fine increments until we get to the burr. The alternative is to have Bo sharpen these. Bo sharpens thousands of knives for us here but these are a little different, this is almost a bevel and that's a little outside of his comfort zone, but the alternative is me or Mark sharpening these and we already have our hands full doing our regular jobs. I'm not really sure the answer here. It'll probably end up being a mix.

But anyway, these ridiculous fat bastards are coming together now. I thought we were going to ship months ago but, we're going to start to ship this week.
Click to expand...
Should’ve….
 
Murphjd25 said:
Well this is looking like the worst winter ever. At this point I’m not sure I’ll even get to ride my snowmobile this year. 😡😔
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If it makes you feel any better, we started Nov with snow…then rain and sub zero temps, and now record cold with no snow. Only a few inches on the ground (with ice covering) here and at the cabin. Craziest Dec I have seen.

Your buddy near Healy has been having really cold weather.
 
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