coating it is probably the cheapest step...
if they tool up to make 50, they might as well make 500; that costs a lot of time and money. speaking of tooling, they pretty much have to make custom stamps and other things, program CNC designs, stud mounting methods, spend time with prototypes and perfect the lockup and other mechanical issues.
if they started NOW? with nothing else to do? maybe by Blade 2011. i don't think they could make Shot Show 2011. with the kicker being, they DO have stuff to do. taking care of the current KaBar lineup, many new knives already in the pipeline, multiple new Becker items coming.
even if they said "yes, we're going to do it" (and they haven't officially said a thing (probably for legal reasons)), it would be much longer than my Machax
(2011-ish? maybe?)...
Bladite
Bladite is absolutely correct, in that the coating is actually a relatively minor thing.
He's also right in that it's the tooling for one thing and another that takes some time and expense. While this should be a fairly simple knife to produce, it does require — like any production knife — certain tooling.
I designed this knife with manufacturing in mind. It’s fairly simple to let yourself go and design something that looks good to you, only to find out that it takes extensive machining and hand work to produce: I didn’t do that. I had ease of manufacture and production costs in mind every step of the way. Virtually all the parts of this thing are simple laser cuts, with the exception of the spring, bolts and scales. The bolts are standard items, the bent spring (simple) would have to be manufactured, and the scales would be CNC milled (probably outsourced).
The blade itself would have to be ground, of course, but there should be surprisingly little other milling and hand work.
I can provide KA-BAR with vector files (Illustrator) or DFX files (CAD), or whatever other files they might need. I stopped working on this design, waiting for some Sign From Above that there was some interest. If there
were some Sign From Above, I would gladly finish it off and send the files to Toooj. There are still a couple of refinements I’d like to make to the lock-up, but — other than that — it’s pretty much ready to go.
Assuming that they did request the files though, there are still refinements to be made at their end. As Bladite pointed out, they’re going to need to tweak things to work with their manufacturing operation, and that can take awhile.
How long would it take? Well, as Bladite pointed out, it takes quite awhile to bring something like this to market: there are a
lot of things that most of us never think about that go into producing even something as simple as this knife. I think they could prototype it in a reasonable time — and probably show a prototype at the Shot Show in January — but actual production release might not be until Blade 2011.
But that’s
if they decide to do it — and that’s the kicker, folks: they haven’t said a word about it, so we just don’t know. I haven’t heard a single word from
any source (other than all of you who want one) about this knife. Absolutely nothing from Ethan or Toooj, so far. I have no idea why not, but there it is. Bladite mentioned possible legal issues, but I can’t imagine what those might be. This is an original design, and doesn’t use anyone else’s patented design for any portion.
Looks like Bladite is right: he’ll get his new Machax before we get our folder.
), but will make an exception for this one.
