These are now sold out! Thank you to everyone!

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I’ve been staring at an empty text box for the last couple of minutes now, wondering how I’m going to start this.

Guys, I kind of messed up.

The other day I set about to make some knives, and in particular I wanted to try a slightly smaller rendition of my previously showcased Emperor using thinner stock and resulting in a marginally lighter weight final product. That seemed like a solid plan. In the hypothetical hierarchy of flightless waddly birds, the king penguin is one notch down in size from the emperor, so I called this one the King… S.

S for slim. Don’t worry; I’ll probably make a couple of fat ones later.

Then I had the brilliant idea to try the same radiused Scandi grind technique as I used to make the last batch of Macaronis, of which there is just one out of four left in stock (hint, hint).

Normal people, professional people, they do this by spending a bunch of dough on a nice solid tilt table for their grinder. I haven’t got one of those. It will probably not surprise you to learn that the beveling jig I used for the Maraconi was one that I developed and 3D printed. That’s fine when your bevel angle is 14° instead of 5° and your work piece is only three inches long instead of ten. I have to say, though, it very nearly worked. But then I encountered rigidity problems. At the polishing phase my platen started to dish. Then my tool rest shook itself loose and wandered out of square without me noticing. And the thing about metal, see, is that once you grind it off you can’t put it back.

In short, I wasted 140 bucks worth of steel producing, in assembly line fashion, three ugly knives. Oh, for sure the third one wound up a bit less ugly than the first one as I tried everything I could think of short of actually purchasing the correct equipment to rescue myself from my mistakes. But I still didn’t quite succeed. One of them I gouged slightly. The other two have noticeable surface imperfections.

Oh well. Is the journey and not the destination, right?

The Japanese have this thing they call “wabi-sabi.” It’s a zen kind of philosophy of appreciating things for their flaws. My own perfectionism drives me towards the goal of wanting to produce a hand made knife that’s as visually perfect and flawless as a commercially machine made one. Which is, once you get right down to it, silly. I can’t find the quote right now but I’m positive it was Terry Pratchett who once wrote that the makers of, for instance, handmade souvenir knick-knacks no matter how skilled downright have to leave the occasional lumps and fingerprints in them or otherwise nobody would believe that they’re hand made. If anybody wanted a geometrically perfect knife I’m sure they could go and buy one from Benchmade or Spyderco or Esse or hell, even the Chinese.

No, this absolutely isn’t a bunch of sour grapes. Perish the thought.

The King is a couple of inches shorter than an Emperor at about 10-5/8" long and half the thickness at 1/8". It’s still D2 that’s tempered for toughness, and I cunningly recycled the exact same handle design so I wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel. Learn to expect a lot of that sort of thing in the future. There are the same hollow handle bolts that accept cordage and a Kydex sheath for each.

I also printed up a couple of different colors for the handles. I did super thin 0.1mm layers this time which actually make them look and feel really nice. It’s the only part of this entire debacle I’m really happy about.

The red one I’ve already promised to a friend (it’s also the ugliest of the bunch and he won’t care), but the orange and the green one are up for grabs. If you really want a particular color I could also just print it for you. Heck, I have a whole new spool of blue lying around I haven’t even opened yet.

I thought long and hard about this, and ultimately concluded that I can’t sell these for anything approaching my full price. Instead, I’d be happy to break even on materials. So until I manage to get rid of them I have these on my website right now at the fire-sale price of $75 a piece, shipped.

Yes, I just made you read this whole thing and it turns out it’s an ad. I’m sneaky like that.

So do me a favor, will you? Help me get rid of these things.