If I owned my own knife company.

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OK , so now that we know Don has a crap load of tools in his shop with PLENTY of room for expansion. How bout basing this new knife company out of Pahrump NV , there are 2 more BADER3 grinders in the valley here ( one in my shop and one in a friends shop a few miles away ). And there is a CNC on craigslist here..

so lets get started.... Don...sweep up the shop.... company is coming.... a KNIFE COMPANY.

oh and Pahrump is Class 3 friendly , and we can set up a range right out in the backyard ! :)
 
Lots of shooting space across the road on BLM land!

Of course I can only grind 3 knives a week. Lately anyway...
 
I wasn't thinking of "the most," I was more concerned about "the best." And I'll tell you why.

As you know, here in Wisconsin we're known for cheese and beer. And you might think that about the last thing we need is more beer. After all, the big guys like Budweiser can horsepower us to death with volume, and folks like Schlitz can beat the market in pricing. So what's the big deal here in Madison?

It's a thing called "micro brewing."

There are entrepreneurs who have purchased smaller copper fixtures, installed them in restaurant style botiques and cater to people who care about quality.

As a reseller, I can buy any knife I want at half of what it costs the consumer. I open so many UPS boxes of knives that many just sit on the counter until I'm good and ready to face the packing peanuts. "Oh goody, look, another over-chromed, super-hyped five hundred dollar knife..."

Then I put on some crusty Harley jeans, jam a worn Emerson knife in my pocket, fire up a F-150 with a Mustang block, and go see a motorcycle I had ripped apart before it even ran. I've had to surround myself with modified, tooled up, worn down, re-configured tools for decades because I'm dissatisfied. And so is the client who patronizes micro-breweries.

If you're honest, there's a favorite tool of yours sitting there now, within arm's reach. And you've chosen it for the same reasons.

I want to build a knife as a "micro-cutler." If I can't build it, then I want to buy it. And for every ten guys who say it's too hard to survive, there's a hard-azz like Terry Tussey, who has found a way to work without limits.

Wouldn't it be nice to make a knife of such quality that for every singular owner there twenty people who were scared to death of it?

My wife has a time-share in Vegas. Tell me about this little town of Pahrump...
 
Tinker's Curse

I dunno.

For the "irony rules" crowd, a high-end, high-quality, lifetime-guaranteed knife made by a company who's name means "epithet of little or no worth" might appeal.

Me, I'd opt for something a little less ironic.

On the one hand, I'm okay with companies named after the founder (Case, Buck, Schrade, Reeve, Gerber, etc.). On the other hand, I'm fond of company names that are evocative.

You know, Valkyries Forge or something like that.

Name has to be short enough to stamp on a tang or ricasso, have few enough syllables to be said easily, and should (if possible) support a memetic device that's pleasant and easy to retain.

So, Smythe & Lindermann's Cutlery Fabrication Shoppe is right out, thank you very much.

:D
 
Pahrump?

Well, it's about 65 driving miles due West of Vegas.

It's not in Clark County, so it's not subject to the funky "blue card" hand gun ordinance they've got there.

It has a fairly well-known training outfit there (Front Sight).

If I remember rightly, that's also brothel territory.

It hotter'n the dickens in summer. It's pretty dry year round.

Population density is low. Very low, in fact.

They do, however, have high-speed internet down there.

And it's only a 90-minute drive from all the civilization you can stand.
 
LOL. I dunno, myself. In my old neighborhood everyone seemed to be quite impressed with "The Mothers And Fathers of Italian Americans." Of course, we referred to them by the acronym...

Rather than the "name make the knife," I'd prefer the reverse. If a micro-cutler made a good product you could call it "sharp stick" and the thing would sell. A lot of old graybeards carried Merc Worx knives before I read anything at all about them in knife magazines. I had to wait years to get a real Emerson handmade knife.

(You might laugh about this, but a few months ago I called Terry Tussey to put money in his hand. He chewed me out for calling in on the wrong phone line. Good night, you have to love a craftsman who has that attitude. I'd stand in line for his work. Ooops, I do already...)

Now back to the debate. Would the phrase "blue eyed biker" fit on the ricasso? And I'm thinking of a drop point with smooth sweeping belly. Oh, and we have to make one chisel grind that comes packed with logo-stamped bandages.
 
TT,

Vampire Gerbil from Bladeforums is in Parhump (if that helps at all).

You could open shop in TN and become yet another member of the TN Knife Mafia. Plenty of smiths and grinders 'round here (and no state income tax to dodge).
 
Nye County - 2nd highest meth lab county in the country I'm told. Very spread out, where we live it's all 1 1/4 acre lots or bigger.

Got my CCW in 10 days.

We do have brothels and casinos. :D

Yes it gets hot and I guess that'll happen soon as they're calling for 90's next week!
 
Nevada = No State (Income) Taxes

However, don't let that fool you into believing that they let you off without extracting that pound of flesh.

For every nickle of income tax they don't suck from your paycheck, theres a dime fee hidden somewhere in some service you can't live without.

My wife's dad spent a year after he retired researching fees and taxes in Nevada. When he finally did the math, he was fit to be tied.

But there's "no income tax" in Nevada.

(Cue relevant Beatles song.)
 
Of course I can only grind 3 knives a week. Lately anyway..
Click to expand...

I'd tell you you need to start charging more, but the evil part of me smiles every time I use one of your knives and think of how little I probably paid per hour of your time :D Keep up the good work.
 
Thing I like about Vegas is no SNOW ! cant say that about Pahrump though , as they get more rain and snow than Vegas.

Ok so then where is this knife company gonna be set up at ? Idaho so that you can just drop the blades by to Paul Bos for HT ? :)
 
I hate to stick a pin in the fun, but you guys have to remember that I have started my own company. There's going to be some 18 months to two years of some very serious times before the ship comes in.

My job was a "retirement job." Yikes, I never worked so hard or worried so much. In fact, I called Ben Dale and we discussed the reality of his business model. Some days I made seven bucks. He told me that the first day I made 100 dollars I would never look back. If you can make that nut, then you have enough customers to keep the ball rolling.

My wife and I would painfully count the crumpled ones--sometimes a five--when I returned home. Every night. first an 88. Then a 93. Then nothing. Then another 93.

One night we counted out the money and found 103 dollars--heck, we counted it again. Now, we were both two, highly paid professionals at the peak of our careers. And let's face it guys, you cannot fill your truck with gas and buy two bags of groceries with 103 dollars. But it was more of a benchmark, a sign I was on the right track.

I will tell you this. A few weeks later, my wife cooked dinner--on a Wednesday. I asked her what the special occasion was. She told me that felt like doing it, as she had just returned from the grocery store. I asked her where she got the money to splurge in the middle of the week.

And then she looks up and says, "All of this, every stick of food on the table, in the refrigerator, in the pantry, all of it, came from sharpening money."

Guys, I cannot describe that feeling. I was no longer tied to the whims of a boss, the economy, or even the weather. If I needed more money, out came the stones. And over the following weeks I saw my wife pay an ever increasing list of bills with crumpled money from the swarf soiled pockets of my jeans.

At the end of the second year my wife told me she had something wonderful to tell me. She had made the house payment with her first week's check. But every other bill that month--all of them--heat, light, food, fuel, movies, clothing, the works, derived from a soaking wet stone!

If I built my own knife company, my employees would know that feeling and work towards it. I guess in the end, the knives are the very minor part of the equation. In every debate here we underline the concept of being free men. This is simply the path that I have chosen.
 
I Have This Pattern

My wife and I have been through the self-employed model twice.

The first time, we had a good product/service, good customers, and all that. We made some bad choices. When things got tough, our bad choices killed us. Paying too much for office space. Putting all our business eggs in the "one-or-two-big-customers" basket. Servicing people who couldn't stay within a product spec from one week to the next. Spending all the money and keeping no rainy day reserves.

We lived really well for three years, and then went over the cliff when the not-really-a-recession of 1990-1991 hit.

Funny, really, but looking back it's easy to see where a couple of minor adjustments would have made all the difference.

It's really a trick, learning to live on a fraction of what you're making in gross. There's all that money, just sitting there, and there are all those things you just need, and besides, we can afford the payment.

The most evil words in the world of personal finance: we can afford the payment.

We rebuilt, I went back to work. The bubble burst again in 2000-2001, and we took another nose dive.

Since 2002, my wife's business -- remote executive assistant -- working from home, has consistently out-performed my software engineer day job. Still, we listened to promises from the people who wanted to sell us money, and we got killed again. Oh, it won't mean a BK, but we could lose the house we just remodeled.

Hard lessons.

But I can completely understand the feeling that comes from realizing you've just made something from nothing. When we realized, in late 2002, that my wife's business could, in fact, support us both, it was awesome.

Now, if I can just convince her that the words we can afford the payment need to be expunged from our vocabulary, we'll do okay.

If you can't pay for it with the cash in your pocket, you can't afford the payment.
 
That's the nice position in which I work. I have some safety nets.

One, I am officially retired. Yes, it limits how much I can make, but my counselor over at SS has assured me that I won't come close to it with my plans. I only work a few days for a few hours. Summer is short in Wisconsin, and if I have to look at "metal" it's going to be a bike, not a knife.

Even if the restaurant thing fails to materialize over time, I still have the knife sales company. We have no B&M stores around here that offer my niche' for products. I cannot think of another guy in the state that sharpens with waterstones. (The guy on our west side sharpens with one of those "Jed Clampett" spinning grinders.)

So, that opens the door to new possibilities. I want to work at least five more years. My wife will then be fully retired, and it will be time to quit.

During this time it would be nice to build something and train an apprentice.

There's always two, a master and an apprentice. We wear long black robes and are called, "The Dark Lords of Swarf." Everybody laughs until I do a perfect rendition of Ian McDiarmid and teleport a Japanese waterstone across the room into my hand...
 
best of luck with the TDKC. . . . .

with any luck those letters will become the sort obscure acronym cherished by the cognoscenti everywhere. If you ever decide to make something with a Finnish accent, put me down for one.
 
You bet, I've had a lot of fun. On the other side of the debate, we do not know who lurks and reads these threads. Hopefully the owner of a knife company.

I own a knife company and it necessarily fantasy looks like dream building. The economics are also an issue. But even if you produce the perfect product it is then a matter of who can afford it and how many can I sell to maintain cashflow to support all the employees and overhead cost of equipment.
Funny thing about Angel capital, they always, ALWAYS expect a return.
One thing to talk about it, but until you put action behind it with a bit of cash you have, "The greatest idea that NEVER was."
We started on shoestring budget and we are going on 3rd year and now we are in aggressive growth phase, that means skinny income and everything goes into the business! Kids starvin and stuff, but hopefully the return will be there and allow us to actually achieve the dream we started on.

I am always open to discuss projects and do joint projects with guys. Sometimes companies become larger and loose the flexibility to respond directly to customer requests. I will not loose touch with the customer base. I handle most of the customer issues directly or at least at some level if not directly, I know about the issue. I think that ownership does not exclude you from dealing with the daily grind of problems or disputes from YOUR direct audience. I have seen a lot of guys miss that and I have also been on the customer end. I would say 80% of the time the ownership do not know about these issues with negative product feedback until it hits a large percentage.

If you would like to check out what we do visit our website. www.redscorpionsix.com
I have a store but put most of the focus in making our Predator WSK, Predator RAVEN WSK and Companion ESK line.
We are launching other products later this year with a feel for the kali knife fighting arena. This has occurred because of the direct involvement we have had with military and contractors. We are working hard on the design and and the training solutions that will compliment the blades.
I am glad you started this type of thread. Sometimes it is really refreshing to see others share our vision of "HOW things should be ran"
But it is always easier to TELL someone What's What when you don't have any skin in the game. Cheap seats are pretty easy to come by, so I always welcome others to get involved. I did it so what's holding you back?
 
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