One Step At A Time
How do you make a $1000 dollar knife? 1 hit at a time.
Someone asks how do you make a knife? I didn’t really know how to answer them at first.
If I am in my shop it could be as little as 20minuites or as long as a month. It depends on a lot of things.
I can make a small blacksmith patch knife, 5 to 8 in an hour. I heat treat them all in 15 minutes. An hour drawing time and the other Hour of drawing time after heat-treat where I didn’t really touch them. 10 minutes on a wire wheel. This works out to about 20 minutes of work but it took 3 hours to do it. All that being said the actual time in my shop to make a knife could be hours.
An 8-inch blade with a 5-inch handle can take 2 hours to forge. Another hour to profile and an hour to rough grind, not to mention the three normalizing steps before getting ready to heat treat.
Applying clay for the heat-treat could take up to an hour and the drying time before you can reheat it.
The hour draw time twice.
Another hour to finish grind and the file work if it is desired.
The buffing and hand sanding can take hours too and that’s only the blade.
The handle could take another couple of hours.
But how long did it take me to learn to be able to do that?
30 years
Swinging a hammer and knowing how and where to hit the hot steel. Learning how to get to steel hot.
Sometimes just making the steel.
I’ve made it from ore.
Crucible steel can take hours to do.
Making my own Damascus. The prep time for the individual layers to be forge welded and the many hours to fold and reweld over and over to get to the high layer, 300 to thousands.
Grinding the profiles and blade geometry takes years to learn. So when taking into consideration the hours of swinging hammer to learn how the first hit on any knife has to be considered.
The leatherwork for the sheath is another story.
This relates to everything. Being a skilled craftsman in any field takes time to learn. As Nathan says in his article https://readmedium.com/attention-online-marketers-are-you-making-this-1000-mistake-like-i-did-bcaf28edc290 The idea of one-click applies.
So the next time someone asked how long does it take to make a knife I will tell them
One Hit at a Time.
Thanks for reading. You could have spent your time elsewhere but you choose to be here.
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I’m Larry Nowicki the KISS Specialist. What do you want me to kiss for you today?
Keep It Silly Simple.
