I went the route you are talking about and essentially went whole hog when outfitting my shop early on. Here are a few pieces of advice from what I learned.
First I realized I was overwhelmed. Now personally I had never done any of this, wiring up a shop, safety, proper usage of some tools I've never used, etc. So if you have some back ground in say machining and already have a shop you may be a bit more ahead of the curve than I was. I did turn wrenches on bikes and cars with my dad and some other stuff so I wasn't completely green but it was a lot to take in and still is.
Second knife making is difficult. I don't know if its youtube, this website or the internet in general but a lot of people seem to think knifemaking is easy. Not saying you are one of them but being you need only a few pieces of wood, a bar of steel and some pins and you have all the raw materials you need to make a knife, I can see how it could be easy to underestimate the difficulties in making a nice knife. But it is a real challenge to come close to some of the nice pieces you see on this site from veterans who have many years of doing this under their belt.
Back to being overwhelmed. In the first year and a half I had just about every geeneral tool a knifemaker would want save for a mill and lathe. That includes a powerhammer. However the problem I had was that while I was still trying to learn to grind clean bevels, improve fit and finish and nail down heat treat... Many of these awesome tools sat idle collecting dust. I didn't hook up my powerhammer for a year. My surface grinder sat for a year before I cleaned it up and gained the courage to use it (only after calling a helpful forum member up and getting a crash course over the phone, thanks Javan!). And even after all this I finally decided to stop buying tools and invest in training instead. I took almost a month of ABS classes with Mastersmiths including the two week blade forging class. I can tell you that hands down it was the best thing I invested in. I learned so much from the helpful instructors including using a powerhammer that I came back and set mine up. Not only did I learn a great deal I also became friends with several knife makers at my skill level and well above to call on for help or bounce ideas off of. It was a tremendous help and I can't recommend that enough.
In closing I would tell you that I don't ever use my power hammer to forge knives. I bought it for fittings, blacksmithing and damascus. I have tried it both in training and at home to forge knives and it is just way to easy to mess them up while its not that difficult to hand forge a blade with proper training. Plus hand forging a knife is like an art to me and I find it very therapeutic.
I'm sure my way is not the norm and even though my dad was in the auction business and I got great deals on most my tools it wasn't cheap either. That said for me personally I enjoyed every minute of learning and satisfy my ADD bouncing between grinding a knife and rebuilding tools.
I hope this helps and I wish you luck. Be sure to keep us posted and post photos, we love photos especially of cool tools!
-Clint
