Without our cash reserve, vertical integration, and decades of experience as a manufacturer, the K18 would have bankrupted us. Even with our considerable manufacturing background and experience we still lost over 100 Grand on that project which would have buried a lot of small folks.
People making machine tool payments and paying rent on a facility would have had a real problem, but we were (and are) a debt-free company, which paid a real dividend in this time frame.
Covid-19 was a distillation process. It's important that things like that come along from time to time, it weeds out the weak. And then the strong can feast on their corpses. We picked up an enormous amount of manufacturing capacity in the years that followed, just due to all of the delicious tasty auctions.
Covid-19 and the K18 were difficult at the time but has made us a much stronger manufacturer in the long run.
The first round of the K20 was intentionally small. It was another potentially ruinous project.
We don't own the oven those are heat treated in. To be clear, we have three heat treat ovens and two tempering ovens, we are fully capable of heat treat at a small commercial level here, but we utilize a specific oven at Peter's heat treat for our protocol. It is simply the best setup for our process.
The same oven holds hundreds, even a thousand knife blade blanks when other makers utilize it but it is only able to hold 32 swords at a time, with our spacing and fixturing.
This kind of saved the day a little bit because, our process is not standard (the swords doubly so) and there was a hiccup during one of the batches where the blades were exposed to oxygen during a part of the process where you don't want that. This is where the ninja swords came from, they were reworked decarburized blades. We surface ground the flats, hand ground the primaries, set the edges back .030", and used acid to reduce the decarborized material in areas that were past the point in the process that they could be re-machined such as the fullers and the spine.
There was enough room in the oven for the hole batch, but fortunately our small loads prevented the entire run from being messed up.
So then we decide to do another run of swords. Despite a poor batting average. I was very clear in the pre-order that, they ship when they ship. No promises.
I already had material but I was surprised by the turnout and I ended up needing to have more material made.
We are not buying off the shelf 3V. It is made to our specifications. The swords, specifically, get an unusual amount of cross roll bias.
About this time frame we also started the Choppers. I had material for the Light Choppers, but we decided to add the Standard Chopper as a last minute option. And I'm glad we did. There was a hiccup getting that material made which pushed it back a little, and they both required our largest automatic grinder to deck it due to the sheet size, this was a log jam.
We also decided to add the Fat Bastard to the tail end of the field knife production. This became a log jam on that machining center, which pushed back the production of the swords.
I offer no apology for this, the swords are disruptive in this process, we shouldn't even be making swords, so it just is what it is.
We are finishing up the very last of the choppers. The Standard Choppers. We ran the Behemoth Choppers through at the tail end, but we had a few plates of steel of the standard material that gave some problems grinding. These last few plates of material need to be ground so they can be machined so that machine, our Mori Seiki GV-503, can start the final trim out on our sword blade blanks.
The status right now is, 100% of the sword sheets have been decked. 50% of those sheets have been fully processed into "sword-shaped objects", trimmed out, with fullers. They are waiting to go on to the GV-503 but the last few plates of Chopper material still need to be ground before a changeover and our large automatic grinder has finally died.
We run large Chevalier surface grinders that have been modified to grind these materials without inducing heat or distortion that would make the blades warp in processing. It's actually difficult to surface grind a large thin sheet like this, but we have a process for it.
We have several automatic grinders but the large sheets can only be run on our big grinder. It is such an integral part of our manufacturing process that we keep a spare on hand. We got five or six years out of this grinder which is the most we've ever gotten, that grinder doesn't owe me any money. We pulled it out and put the spare in. There was a significant amount of work, there's more to it than just moving a 4 ton grinder, it runs at a different voltage, we needed to install some different dust collectors, and there was an issue that required rewiring a significant part of the electronics so this was a big project.
I keep an eye out for these grinders at the auctions and, coincidentally a good candidate came up and we went up to Ohio and got it. Which is good because now we still have a spare. And we might end up pressing into production because we're having an issue with the grinder we just installed. These big grinders do not come up every day, I'm glad we had a spare and I'm glad we are able to find a replacement for that spare.
Anyways, I've been working nights and weekends trying to get everything put back together and everything back into production. And this week is blade show week, so now I'm trying to make delicious tasty knives from Mark's grinding for all spring, for this blade show coming up this Friday.
Anyways, long story short. I'm still not able to grind the sheets for the gv-503 how I want them, so I can't take the chopper setup down yet, so I can't finish the trim outs on these sword blanks, which means I can't start beveling them yet.
Any other pattern, I can move it around from one machine to another or slip it into one part of production or another, but these swords are disruptive. They require modifications to the machines and significant changes during the changeovers. They are not perfectly compatible with our manufacturing process so they create log jams. And get jammed up themselves.
I had hoped to turn these around quickly because I already knew how to make them and I already have material on hand. However the size of the turnout dictated acquiring more material, which is not a standard offering, which messed up its placement in our manufacturing process and two different patterns landed in front of it. The alternative was to wait and keep the swords in place in the production queue and I had already decided before I even began the sword project that I was not going to let it screw up the rest of our production. That kind of thinking leads to ruination, and would prevent me from even attempting another sword project.
This is the problem with making swords.
I worry for any small maker attempting to undergo a large sword run. Any manufacturer anywhere making anything is only a few miscalculations and a small run of bad luck away from being ruined, and things like swords (real swords) introduce a lot of variables that a person experiencing the Dunning Kruger effect might underestimate. Making real swords is not like making knives.
) and I am deeply grateful that you decided to take it on again! I am waiting patiently and know you’ll get them done when they are ready to be done.
