Wish me luck...

Smallshop

Smallshop

KNIFE MAKER
So after many months of grinding....i have decided to try grinding my small cowboy knives on my CNC mill. I hope to be able to have something by Christmas.

This is my biggest sticking point for my plan of "semi production" for this knife. because I plan on making many of these it is the only way to get my consistency down. I can grind some days effortlessly...and other days...I just turn off the grinder cause there ain't no magic...lol. Not a good business model...lol.

I have ideas that will require much experimentation....don't know if i can get there...I have a 3 axis mill....and I think a 5 axis mill is probably what the production places use.

My son's Bench Made is what got me thinking about it. It is definitely done with a wheel and I think CNC. A couple guys on this forum use a manual mill and hard wheel for pocket knife blades.(yes...i can tell...lol)

This would be my last real challenge to making limited production knives....

My goal is to give one to the Christmas knife swap....pressure...lol!
 
You have taken on a real head scratcher with this project and a the complications of sorting the machinery to do it for you consistently. Way over and above what the majority of us could contemplate.
 
IF i can figure it out...I probably won't share pics of the method. Moving into the "semi-production" zone the last two years has been very expensive for me...and I have shared anything i think would help a custom maker.(friends on this forum) This one, if possible, would give me a competitive edge among other limited-production makers and not really be of help to any here....the big 5axis machines that henkel, et al. use are prolly more than 1 meelion dollars...squeezing my cheap lil 3-axis vmc...will be a lot of time investment and noggin' scratchin' lol.

I do love this kind of challenge...and I knew a few months ago that I was not going to cut the mustard even with a simple grind fixture.

I have done grinding with a VMC for a company I worked at years ago...and it is scary to me...lol. Was always hiding behind the window frame of the doors...waitin' for...KER-BANG!!!

I think it will be slower...but more consistent.... and maybe allow me to do other things while it's grinding. When you are a one man "production" shop...multi-tasking is the only way to be profitable.

I will definitely show close up picks of the finished product.
 
Ted, I'll put money on it that you will get it done! When I was building my KMG clone I carried a piece to the next town and finally found a machinist that was willing to do what I needed to. You know since I didn't want to buy 1000 of them!!

Anyway I showed him a pic of the KMG clone I was working on and what the piece he was machining for me was for! So we get to talking and he asks about what I do. I told him at the time I was doing a lot of trim work, building cabinets and some furniture. He goes I have a picture to show you.

He pulls out a photo of a machine he had made for a man from the town I live in! It had a bottom feed something like a conveyor belt that would grab a board and feed it into the machine. Once the board began to enter the machine they had several of the industrial type wire brushes. The ones that look like a scrub brush.
As the board went thru the machine, the wire brush drug the face of the board and when it popped out the other end it had the grain of a 100 year old board. They took a product that would gray the wood and painted the roughed up side and bingo you had a genuine 100 year old board, unless you turned it over and inspected the back side of the board.

So I know what a good machinist is capable of and I have no doubt you can do it!!
 
Obviously you'd need a 5 axis machine to do it all in one setup, but just for the bevels? I don't know why you couldn't set up a tray with multiple blades in a fixture and nearly complete the bevels on one side with an end mill. I'm envisioning that the tips may be off-plane but you can always grind the tips separately. I see no reason why the bevels have to be ground in the first operation. Don Robinson shows how to mill bevels on a sine plate for his folder in his book "Slipjoints My Way". He finish grinds the blades, but in your operation you could have (pick a number) being milled via CNC while you do other things, because you are absolutely right that you can't be in production if you can't multitask.
 
It is weird. A few weeks ago I watched the Gough video and then I saw this thread.

I don't know nothing about CNC. On a scale of 1-100. I would be a zero. It is very interesting...

Here is another video.

Looking forward to seeing this progress.
 
Smallshop said:
Yep....but no cnc grinding! Lol...
Click to expand...

Ooops, when I think CNC I think machining, not grinding. You're thinking to grind using CNC?

Here is the video I was looking for when I posted the above link. Here he shows how production is incorporated with CNC. I even saw a couple of steps I can use with my little desktop CNC - the Kydex sheath cutting out and drilling holes for rivets.
 
Yeah...I do everything he is doing...in my much messier shop.Lol.

But grinding will be another brain strain....I think it can be done...but would not be worth trying unless you plan on hundreds of one model of knife.

I have been trying to get my small cowboy/paring/edc knife into the under $200 zone...not there yet. CNC grinding will help with consistency and freedom of time to finish other aspects....hopefully allowing me to get my price lower...

I've snooped other shop online that are doing limited production and can tell that the grinding is the bottleneck....so you either have to have multiple skilled guys grinding all day...or kick it over to the CNC. I cannot afford skilled labor right now...nor do I want the associated problems:

1) space...prolly my final frontier...

2)people problems...been there done that. Used love watching guys with hang-overs make bad parts...not.

3) integrity problems...guy burns a blade on a grinder going for finish edge....Does he report himself? Or does he grind the burn off and send out the annealed blade....hmmmmm...

4) integrity problems....lol....been there done that with machinists in the past....they can be a sneaky bunch....lol...cause they're human.

I really think I can make a very high quality knife this way....that's my goal. Quality 1st....reasonable price second....

The coolant is a HUGE plus....the hard wheel is a HUGE minus....we all know how forgiving our belts with rubber backed wheels are...that all goes out the window. This will be similar to surface grinding....it should be very precise, very slow,and very nice looking if done right.

I do have a small 4th axis...so I could tilt things easily....But, I think John Wilson nailed it with multiple blades on a plate...that is how a one man shop does most things...the idea is to get the collective run-time up to over an hour (this should be no problem...lol) so that you are not held captive to the machine. Anything above 15 minute run time lets me do other stuff...my attention span isn't much longer anyways...lol.
 
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Boy that is a tough one and some other makers have tried to tackle.

I spoke with Rick Hinderer a few years ago about the grinding of his 3rd gen XM-18's.

He said he used to hand grind all of the blades himself but with the popularity of the knife there was no way he could do every blade by hand. So starting with the gen 3's he sent the blades out to be ground.

This from a guy that had 3 or 4 CNC's at the time. He said it was more cost effective to send them out.

This was before he moved to his new shop so maybe (probably) he does it in house now.

Then there's another issue that's been swirling around the knife community for years.

That is, if everything is being done my machinery is it really semi-production/midtech or full production?

There was a huge upheaval in the knifemakers guild years ago when some makers starting water jetting their blanks.

Now there seems to be push back on CNC in some circles.

Myself I have no problem having machinery doing the grunt work on a knife and the only thing I have against a CNC is that I don't have one...lol.

Many top tier makers are going the CNC route for at least some of the work. Michael Burch and Tom Krein off the top of my head.

Ok now I'm starting to sound like my dad going off on a tangent.

Anyway, good luck Ted I'm sure you'll get something figured out.
 
Thanks Mike!

I have no dog in any fight...I will never be a member of a guild...I do not really understand the protectionist mindsets of makers or guilds. I've given myself permission to make the very best knives I can using what ever equipment I can learn/afford/already own...in other words...to quote Mel Gibson in Braveheart...FREEDOM...lol.

I have paid "my dues" dearly for the skill set and equipment that I have....I'm gonna use 'em....

"the only thing I have against a CNC is that I don't have one...lol. "

You may have said a mouthful there....lol.It seems the loudest complaints I have heard about CNC being "cheating"are always by guys that know the least about CNC.
A lousy designer/design is not saved by cnc...in fact he can merely produce worse crap at a quicker pace.

I do not really think a sophisticated 2 x 72 grinder with speed control fits the "Handmade" legacy model that some of the guilds espouse...but that's my opinion. I'm not the one who makes the rule about where the oh-so-fuzzy line should be....it is in a rather convenient place me-thinks.

Once again...I am very quality driven. China is the one that has made the link between CNC and mid-tech(low quality)...not Ted...lol.

I still have not sold a knife because they are not yet where I want them to be in terms of finish quality.


Okay...now I'M starting to sound like your dad going off on a tangent. Prolly said more than I should...I've been in trouble for being a mavrick most of my life...Lol! But I'm doing what I like...and I hope others will like it too...
 
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