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Old 04-01-2017, 04:56 PM
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Ray Rogers Ray Rogers is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2002
Location: Wauconda, WA
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The problem with making a folding knife first is that they take much longer to make than a fixed blade knife. You still have to learn about heat treating and metal finishing as well as how to finish and manipulate whatever handle materials you use and that is in addition to learning that delicate machining you mentioned. So, what happens? What happens is you make a decent looking blade and screw up the handle due to bad design. Or, the blade and handle look pretty good but the lockwork is terrible. Or, everything looks good and locks up tight but when you actually use it for a few weeks it goes sloppy. Or a million other scenarios where things fail because you're trying to build a castle on top of a sand pit (meaning you don't have the foundation yet to get it right). The end result of all that is you spend a huge amount of time on each folder because of the many learning curves you're trying to deal with. If it takes a long time to get through one, it will take a long time on the next one, maybe less but still a long time because you'll fix one thing only to find that fix affected something else unexpectedly. The bottom line here is that jumping into folders first is likely to extend your learning time significantly. I'm only guessing here but I doubt you started out running the 100 yard dash, you probably learned to crawl first, then walk, the run. Make fixed blades first so you can go through the whole cycle in a few days, over and over until you learn what you need to know.

'Delicate machining' is certainly useful but we don't make knives that way for the most part. True, there is some machining involved on most folders like my liner locks but the bulk of the work is done by hand or hand controlled power tools like drill presses and belt sanders. Basically, we approach knife making as a technological art form. You didn't say this but if you're thinking of having the machines do most of the work you're in the wrong place. We make the knives, the machines just provide some of the muscle ...


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Last edited by Ray Rogers; 04-01-2017 at 04:58 PM.
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