Wednesday, July 31, 2013

A Jk project: Designing Your own

I'm working out a knife design project that (hopefully) will both appealing and simple to make. John, of JK Knives (my favorite custom knife maker and I think one of the best) has offered to try and give me a good price on a bulk order. I put handles on and then sell off with little price difference, it'll get me something else to do and also get some of the walnut I have sitting around out of the shop :)

John has very generously (as his motto is "Your Design or mine") offered to let me design it to, I'm trying to come up with something that will mean cost effective, cool, good to use and nifty :D, no pressure.

The only problem with designing a knife for Jk knives is the same problem I have with buying them, their addictive!

Here's a small clue as to how many of these cut outs I've made in the last few months, just sitting around while my kids play with their own drawing projects:





Speaking of my kids, it seems my son might have some interest himself, while I was designing one for Johns Annual anniversary contest (customers vote on the best design and you get the knife made free!) same came into the room with this (which I think he may have traced around one I'd forgotten to pick out of the pile :)) 


The best part is his design got more votes then mine, I was very proud!

Here's mine anyway:




So anyway, on to my project:

 Here are some of the ideas I'm playing with, if it has been designed on white paper that has been stuck to the cardboard then it's an old design I’ve re-done to fit my new idea. The rest I just sketched roughly on cardboard and started cutting today while I looked at the picture.

They can all be made out of 1" bar stock or smaller (we're talking about height here)  accept for 1 I still have to fixed. Lengths vary from just under 4" to just over 6". Very handy pocket fixed blades is the idea.


 Some close ups:



You can see more of this project while it progresses in my "Work in progress" link at the top left of the screen for as long as I'm working on it. Also I’ll hopefully have a picture of some knives here in a while as well. you can also see more on johns website and forum on baldeforums, linked on the left.

The finalists