All About Pocket Knives

one of our posters says he thinks canal street outsourses their blades, etc. and assemble and finish inhouse. i thought you might have the real skinny.

When they started, Queen was making parts for them. I understood they were going to slowly assume all operations as they could afford equipment, but I have no idea how their plans are going.

Blade grinders are very expensive!
Alot of knife companies outsource the grinding of their blades.

Thanks for that info Phil.
Your experience gives you an entirely different perspective on the business than most of us have.

Phil, in your opinion which is the most skilled position in the process of making a slipjoint knife?

BTW Phil, Welcome back. I trust your move to Arkansas went smoothly any you & yours are getting settled in. It is good to have you back online at the forum.

Dale

well, i guess it shows who is the premier cutlery in the u.s. - queen.

So is it just the blades or are they getting other parts made for them by Queen?

Nick

It takes some expensive machinery and lots of labor to cut blades. I'm sure what they get is the heat treated blanks, so the polishing, grinding, sharpening is still up to them. Most of the knife companies buy their scales from the same distributors. These usually come as rectangular pieces that are ground to the contours of the knife after mounting. For example , here's a amber jigged scale in it's raw form with just the holes drilled for mounting on a Canal Street ring turn knife (Incidently one I've never seen Queen make.) While I'm at it here's a micarta locking folder out of their custom shop as well.

Eric

thanks for the replys guys and thanks eric for sharing.

orvet wrote:Thanks for that info Phil.
Your experience gives you an entirely different perspective on the business than most of us have.

Phil, in your opinion which is the most skilled position in the process of making a slipjoint knife?

BTW Phil, Welcome back. I trust your move to Arkansas went smoothly any you & yours are getting settled in. It is good to have you back online at the forum.

Dale

Assuming the blades are not ground by hand but by machine (not that setting up a blade grinder is not a highly skilled job, especialy the old cam controlled type!) then in my opinion the most skilled position in the production of traditional slipjoints would be reinspection & hafting (Camillus terms, I believe also used by Schrade & others).

Reinspection is the art of making the knife walk & talk after riveting. All aspects of function are addressed in this procedure: nice snap open & closed; blades tight in the open position; blades "set" correctly so they do not rub against each other or the liners/centerscales; and to ensure the knife assembly is not "shucked", meaning there is no bending of the pins & the 2 sides of the knife are true & parallel. The tools of the trade for reinspection are a "cutler's steady", best way to describe this is a miniature (3" long) anvil mounted on the workbench; & a hammer. The truely amazing thing about the process I was exposed to at Camillus was how the reinspecter's hammer shafts were worn so thin in the shape of the ladies hands! Depending on the type of folder & the number of blades, those ladies could reinspect close to 2000 knives a day!! This was a job that could never be automated, & probably changed very little in the last 100 years.

Hafting is the process of sanding or grinding around the back & ends of the knife after reinspection. Camillus did have some cam controlled hafting machines that did a lot of the sanding on some of the larger volume knives, but even those knives needed to be finished of by the hafters by hand. The skill needed to sand all around the edges of a knife to blend all the parts together while maintaining the shape of the knife & keeping it all square is quite daunting! Many times these hafters also blended in the bolsters to the handle materials & cut in the bolster "slopes" (the chamfer or filet between the face of the bolster and the end of the knife. I always had the utmost respect for these guys. Can you imagine the hand strength required to haft 1000 knives in a day?? They used "double baders" for this. They are basically Bader Sanders with 2 contact wheels & 2 sand belts (2 X 172" belts) normally with 60 grit & 120 belts running sided by side so the could do the rough & fine sandings in one handling.

To sum up, if you were to ever meet a lady who was a reinspecter or a guy who was a hand hafter from Camillus, don't be surprised by their strong handshakes!

Thanks for all that great information Phil. Very cool.

Nick

Amazing info Phil.

The fact that someone could haft 1000 knives per day boggles my mind!

As someone who rebuilds knives, the hafting (to me) is always the hardest part. If you rush through this process, it will be noticeable!

Thanks for sharing this information. I am looking forward to your next post.

Dale

Thanks Much Phil! It's really great to have you Posting here. I always

learn something from your treasure trove of knowledge

This is the stuff that makes me come back to AAPK, great wealth of information and great folks taking the time to share it.

Thanks,

Sunburst

Thanks Phil,

A thousand knives a day..................

ah, the good ole days... 17 hour workday, a knife a min. -$3-15? a week. with the laws today no man could produce like that again. not even john henry! great stuff phil, please go on.

jonet143 wrote:ah, the good ole days... 17 hour workday, a knife a min. -$3-15? a week. with the laws today no man could produce like that again. not even john henry! great stuff phil, please go on.

That was hafting numbers from a year ago!

Based on an 8 hour day, it's about 2 to 2 1/2 knives a minute. The base rate for the job was about $11 - 12/hour.

During the strike I had to do the job for a while. I had to produce about 1200 MC-1 parachute knives. I got close to 2 a minute hafting them, but after about 2 hours my hands felt like they had been in a meat grinder!
Luckily for me I had several other operations to do to the knives, so I never did more than about 4 hours of hafting a day.

Like I said, I had the utmost respect for those guys.
Now they are all unemployed. What a waste of talent.

god phil, that's phenominal. did you take some meat off with those baders?

Mercifully never lost any meat, but did erase a few fingerprints!

Phil Gibbs wrote:Mercifully never lost any meat, but did erase a few fingerprints!

I am missing a few myself & I don't do it for 4 hours per day!

Dale

Great stuff Phil...thank you for sharing that kind of knowledge with all of us. It sure adds to the forums.

Bill

....what utterly fascinating stuff! Being a relative newcomer to knife collecting, I find this stuff very interesting, to say the least. What a thrill it would be to take a tour through a knife making establishment and be able to see the process, from beginning to end of the creation of say a Schatt or a Queen....or a Great Eastern. I've watched one of the "How it's made" programs on T.V. about knives, but it doesn't give you the full treatment, just kind of skips through things too fast to really appreciate what goes on "up close and personal".

Thanks for sharing your personal information on this process and all that's involved. I find it most informative and educational.

I just want to say many thanks to Dale and Phill, for all you guys do for the new knife collector. Your knowledge is unsurpassed.
Harold

I forgot about this Great old thread I got to say though, everytime I see a post on here by Johnnie, it makes me a little Sad and it reminds me how much he is sorely missed around here!

I appreciate your post Phil. Thank you for your remarks. Great information.

edit: well, I never looked at the date. I appreciate it just the same.

Hi Bucksforus!
Welcome to AAPK, the friendliest knife forum on the web!

This is a great old thread.
I hope Phil comes back and talks more about his knife making experiences.