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Showing 1 of 172 conversations about:
FerrumForgeKnifeWorks
541
FerrumForge_Elliot
May 11, 2018
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Omniseed
1972
May 22, 2018
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FerrumForgeKnifeWorksWill it work with other hobby knife blade styles, like the neat little sheepsfoot ones?
Fundin
119
Oct 4, 2018
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FerrumForgeKnifeWorksAnd what pray tell is the Kiridashi in the picture called and where may I get one? :-)
drewestes2010
4
Dec 21, 2018
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FerrumForgeKnifeWorksI absolutely love the RUK I have in the copper with the copper lanyard bead and the patina is a very great patina for copper. I hope to be able to find extra blades for it locally. Thanks for your support guys!!!
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There are a lot of shapes and sizes of disposable blades. But my initial research was narrowed by the overall size we were aiming for, keychain sized. That still left us with about 20 blade shapes to pick from so I suggested we look to other cultures for help... Kiridashis have been the utility knife of choice in Japanese culture for hundreds of years and given the size we were looking for I proposed we model the RUK after kiridashis that we make from time to time. The in-hand feel would be already proven and based on what I was seeing in the blade shapes I could likely make the overall look work with a #11 hobby blade.
The next step was finding every brand of #11 hobby blade I could find and buying them all so I could start working on the specific dimensioning of the internal components. Turns out nearly the all different brands had different sizes so we had pick one and go with it. I liked Techni Edge brand because they had nice consistency over the 100ish blades I took measurements of and that would allow for the design the be as tightly toleranced as possible, yielding consistent motion. Now that we had the overall look and blade type figured out the real work began. Under the design premiss of this going on a keychain and being as safe as a sharp object could be we decided it needed automatic retraction and that meant a spring. I had to brush up on my spring specification lingo and ordered a couple different sizes and tension strengths. We found one that seemed pretty good and the rest of the internal engineering could then take place.
By that point we had already handled the 3D printed prototypes and we were all pretty confident the external design was solid, but the actual mechanics still needed to be tested in their intended materials so we could judge the spring tension and what we were doing with the button screw. There were a lot of discussions about what that parts should look and feel like. Once we had metal prototypes with appropriate springs, all of us started to get excited because they actually worked.
From there Chris and I tested the crap out of them, logging thousands of open and closes over the course of a week (there was a lot of click sounds coming from our shop) before we made our final recommendations. We Knife Co. executed the final revisions perfectly and the final prototypes were what we were all hoping for. It took a hot minute to get this product worked out, but they do their job very nicely. There are roughly 100 knives on my desk and that doesn't include what is in my pockets, yet everyday we have had the RUK prototypes I have been using them to open packages and mail instead.