What’s your best efficiency tool?

M

Maineiac1

Joined
May 3, 2017
Messages
339
Looking to see what you folks have for a tool that gains you a lot of efficiency in production.

I’ve noticed a lot of my time in making is with the “finishing” of the steel. Getting to a nice grit, flat and clean finish. I’ve been drooling over a surface grinder but don’t have the space/money/time to become proficient with it.. maybe an attachment for my 2x72 to save me a bit of time handsanding..
 
for me its simply experience. i noticed the more i became good at grinding with the higher grits, the less time it took hand sanding, because i missed less spots. a mini mill saved a lot of time. yeah i can do a decent guard slot with a drill press and files, but it will take hours. the mini mill about 35 minutes to final fit. it paid for itself quickly. good files. for years i had old used files from the flea market. i got some new grobet files. 3x less strokes to remove the same amount of metal.
 
Things that have saved me time hand sanding are a disc sander to get things perfectly flat and as Mr. April noted getting higher grit finishes off the grinder.
 
When you say production what do you mean? When I say production I mean large batches of knives. With large batches of knives the big time saver is jigs and automation. One thing that has helped me is the 80/20 rule. 80% planning and 20% work. Nothing eats time up more then having to go back and fix or do somthing out of order. Also give each knife a 100% inspection with each operation. It really sucks if you think each knife got X operation and so you take down that setup and set up for the next operation. Then halfway through that operation you find a knife that did not get the last operation. That eats time up like a son of a bitch.
 
I think planning and experience are what saves me the most time. Planning is 70% and experience is the other 30%.
 
Waterjetting lol. My shop is a closet under a staircase so what used to be my go-to for profiling (angle grinder) is no longer a good option. So besides my main workhorse, the 2x72, utilizing waterjetting has helped tremendously.
 
JTknives said:
When you say production what do you mean? When I say production I mean large batches of knives. With large batches of knives the big time saver is jigs and automation. One thing that has helped me is the 80/20 rule. 80% planning and 20% work. Nothing eats time up more then having to go back and fix or do somthing out of order. Also give each knife a 100% inspection with each operation. It really sucks if you think each knife got X operation and so you take down that setup and set up for the next operation. Then halfway through that operation you find a knife that did not get the last operation. That eats time up like a son of a bitch.
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I meant it as "What saves you time in the making of knives", as it seems you assumed correctly. Sometimes I would get a handful of knife orders and do a couple at a time, finish then start over. Recently I started all and kept them at the same step. This deff does seem to be more productive. But as you said about inspecting. Two days ago I thought I had 4 blades ready for HT but then noticed 1 still had 220 scratch marks in it where the others were at a clean 400. So lost time going back to tough that one up.. Thanks for your input as I overlooked this problem even though I just encountered it..

Stacy and JT, thanks for the input on planning. I do spend a lot of time pondering of what I need to do next, just means I need to have a plan in place from the start. I'm deff getting some good advice that ill need to make use of!
 
Disc grinder hands down. I would love to get a surface grinder but the disc grinder helps me keep everything flat including my primary bevels since I do a lot of full flat grinds. It made a huge difference both in time and quality over just trying to do everything on my 2x72 and a flat piece of glass.
 
TLR said:
Disc grinder hands down. I would love to get a surface grinder but the disc grinder helps me keep everything flat including my primary bevels since I do a lot of full flat grinds. It made a huge difference both in time and quality over just trying to do everything on my 2x72 and a flat piece of glass.
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I guess I need to look into how you folks are using a disc grinder on the blade!
 
2x72 grinder

50,100,220 and cork belts.

This things can get many things done in knifemaking.
 
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