time management

S

sidecutter

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Nov 28, 2008
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how do you "professional" knife makers schedule your knife making? work on 1 knife til finished? maybe 10 knives at once in different stages? appx. how many finished /wk/mo.?? just curious. thanks. paul
 
I am absolutely not a professional, but I work on four or five at a time, taking them through stages in groups. There's profiling/bevel grinding, then heat treat, then handles.
 
It's a huge, giant mess where I have about umpteen projects going on at once and none of them are "that close" to being done....

That's the honest answer....

I used to question how makers could have so many knife blanks sitting around all the time and not just finish them out...now I know....

I generally do all my grinding, then HT, then more grinding, then handle prep, glue handles/pin, sand handles, re-pin, then finish work. I try to do as many at one time as I can to maximize time allotment etc...

It's much easier to have one thing going on than 50....



MT
 
Ok
I'm a full timer, but I make more damascus than knives. When I do make knives I generally profile and bevel several knives and heat treating them in a batch. I hate having to fire up the kiln for only one blade. Besides for me this step goes pretty quick. I can generally do 4-6 blades in the time it takes the oven to come up to temp. I generally belt finish the blades in the same batch, and then I hand finish each knife individually from there.
Del
 
I will typically make 3-6 at one time and have some special projects going just for fun. It really is a time saver to work on multiple knives. An important aspect is to plan your next knives before you finish your current work since you may have to order steel, handles and supplies such as belts. About every 3 months I get all the projects done and regroup before starting any new. That way I done have a bunch of unfinished projects laying around.
 
Right now, I have 4 already heat treated (ones that I didn't finish before the Gembloux show in November) 5 that have been forged and rough ground to 60 grit so far, 2 JS test blade candidates forged and annealed, a third test blade partially forged and 20 inches of W2 flat stock that I forged down from 7/8 round bar for three fighters. Standing in the on deck circle, I have an 11 inch round bar of 3/4" W2 for some hunters, a 1 inch round bar that will become an ST24 type blade and something else and a 1 1/4 round bar for a couple of more big bowies. Assuming that I past my performance test with Bailey Bradshaw in late January, I anticipate having at least 15 knives in addition to the 4 already heat treated and the test blades so that i will be able to come up with at least 5 if not 7-8 good ones for Blade. One of the rough ground blades is for an order. The rest are just "works in progress." This will be the most that I have ever had going at any one time, but it is really just a more frenetic version of the way that I typically operate.
 
I always profile all I have in mind and the orders. I'm a slow person so it doesn't make any difference for me to HT a batch or one. But cutting them all and profiling does seem to reduce the stock I use and time. I finish one at a time, when I worked on multiple knives at a time I always messed up with some and it is really waste of money and time, but it's just me; I can finish only 2-3 knives in a week at max...
 
I have knives in various stages on my bench. I forge, profile, flat grind, dril and heat treat in a batch. After HT I work on the knives individually unless I have an order for more than 1 of the same knife. Sheaths are definately on the 1 at a time basis.
 
Batching works well for grinding, and lowers the heattreat cost per blade. I usually grind 30 or so per heat treat run. This batch consists or orders in house and several stock blades to hang on the wall until a customer indicates what type of handle he wants.

Polishing is done in batchs of 9 or 10 then the handle assembly starts with at least 5 epoxied at once. When finishing large quantities there are usually blades on the drying shelf every night waiting for epoxy to set.

The bottleneck is making sheaths, can't say I like that part, but again I do them in batches of 5 or 6.

George
 
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