Hey folks,

Patrick here with MT Knives, and it’s time to give you guys the low down on the progress of the long-awaited Limited Edition Knives.

The Generals
A handful of the knives are out to the stakeholders already, and a few more are ready to send out the door today. However, the rollout on these knives has been a little slower than we would all like. Basically, there’s two reasons for that.

Number one, as picky as I was about quality on the first set of stakeholder knives, I’m being even more ruthless with the second run of my limited edition knives. I’ve been taking more time for additional training during the past few months than I did last year, and I’ve been constantly trying new methods and techniques. I’m striving to try and achieve a flawless finish on these knives that will be better than I’ve ever attained on any of my knives before. At the same time I’m working to reduce the differences between individual knives. These knives will be much more accurate copies of each other than the previous run of knives. The experimenting is slowing down the process, but the end result will be more than worth the effort.

The second reason for the delay is because of the way I’ve changed the process of production. With Eli here, we’re using an assembly-line style of production for these knives. Instead of taking a few knives at a time through all of the steps of production, we are doing each step in the blade preparation, be it surface grinding, buffing, polishing the secondary edge, or what have you, on all one hundred knives at once. Basically, we’ve produced relatively few finished knives, but once we reach a certain point preparing the blades and we’re ready to attach the handles, things are going to start to snowball, and we’re really going to start putting out a lot of knives in a hurry.

There’s good news and bad news. Bad news is, we’ve had some equipment breakdowns to deal with, featuring most prominently the belt that broke on the bandsaw the other day. But the good news is, after much experimentation, I’ve found what seems to be just the right technique to achieve a perfect mirror finish. The disk grinder and the right combination of abrasives seems to be the ticket. I’ve put up a quick video of the disk grinder in action, and you should see the sparks fly when that baby starts moving some steel!

So despite some equipment downtime, with a little elbow grease we are keeping this show on the road. We are officially in burn-out mode until we get these things out the door and into the hands of the stakeholders.

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Thank You for your patience and support,

Patrick Roehrman