There are a lot of different ways to make a knife, milling being one of them. There are a lot of different ways to mill a knife, but in order to achieve a reasonable "bang for the buck" we try to make knives in quantities that lend themselves to fixturing and programming that can make something with a reasonable amount of spindle time and carbide and labor that achieves the design and performance we're aiming for and yields a good value to the end user. But this approach of manufacturing optimization and efficiency doesn't work for R&D and development, which are also areas we put a lot of effort into.
Without production fixtures things like profiling and milling bevels can still be done, but less efficiently. We do this to confirm design decisions and help us tweak and optimize designs, geometry and metallurgy decisions before going into production. These prototypes can be relatively crude compared to production work, but actually cost much more to produce. One reason there were not many Heavy Chopper prototypes produced was because they cost more to produce than they were sold for. This is because things like the bevels are not directly milled (because specific fixturing would be required for each grind geometry we want to test) so they're surface milled which takes over an hour of spindle time for each knife just for the bevels plus additional hand grinding etc. That's a lot of CNC time and carbide to put into a single knife. And then one-off heat treat rather than batches. It is difficult to make "knives for the masses" when you're doing it that way.
There were no production Heavy Choppers, they were all surface milled and hand finished and most were tested and consumed, there are only a few in circulation and I "lost money" on them, but they were surplus to our R&D.
This next batch of behemoth choppers will be made the same way, and some will be consumed in testing, but I'm more confident in what I want in this design and I'm going to go ahead and make most of the fixtures for it except for the bevel milling fixtures. Beveling milling the way we do it is a complex compound angle cut that requires a little extra complexity and I haven't settled on the geometry I want so I'm going to hold off on that tooling until I've finalized on the geometry I want. So this batch of 12" Choppers will be a mix of prototype and production machining techniques.
I'm getting long winded here. Long story short, no there will be no pre-order at this time because this is not a production pattern and there may only be a few. But, if I like the design and we go into production a pre-order would be in the cards after a process is worked out for it, but that would be later on down the road.
Edit to add: I do want to thank you all for your interest, it means a lot.