Touring the Boker Factory

[eisman]

As a part of the Solingen Knife 2024 show Boker offered a tour of the factory which is a little over a mile from the site of the show. Attendance was limited to two tours, 20 people per tour. I was lucky enough to reserve a slot for the 1600 tour on Saturday. The tour takes about 1.5 hours, walks you through the whole factory, and is in German, so it helps if you can understand that. It is a modern factory, with laser jet and CNC machines, but there are a lot of steps in the process of making a knife that are still "old-school". The grinding and polishing are all hand done, and is a large portion of fitting the scales and other bits and pieces. I really liked the old screw type rivet presses; they're probably 150 years old.

The factory store

Knife Types Poster

The Break Area

Fitting Slipjoints (a by hand process)

Grinding stations

 

[Slice-E]

looks awesome. one day I want to tour a factory as well, namely CRK

 

[eisman]

The tour ends back at the shop, which was open to the public and very busy. They had a whole counter of knives that were "returns" for 20 euro and several dozen hatchets also. All of their current knives were on display and available for sale, at a 10% discount.

Some of the displayed knives:

I picked up this WC Davis Collaboration ( a Loveless pattern drop point folder). I have owned several of Bill's knives and one has been my go to field knife for decades. I also picked up a copy of the current catalog, which is about half an inch thick and heavy.

 

[TC]

Thanks for that knife type poster - saved.

I note that the archetype of a folding knife is a CRK Sebenza. Mr. Petersen is to be commended for his astuteness.

 

[YaArArYa]

looks like fun!

 

[ClickBoom]

That seat with the cushion in front of that sander says a lot to me about how much who ever is sitting there is focused into what they are doing ~