BOOMER52
Gold Member
- Joined
- Feb 27, 2013
- Messages
- 1,056
It’s been just over two years since I began negotiations with a specialized offshore machining entity to produce my modified Spyderco scale designs in 6AL4V titanium. This was an undertaking I had first given thought to starting back in early 2018 and finally took the first steps of this journey in December of 2019. The pandemic didn’t help the situation but the amount of time to get to where things are now had more to do with funding than anything else.
I made the decision to use my PROMOD Endela/Military design as the first of four designs I hope to have produced in titanium. These will be 2D scales CNC machined in a tip up… right hand carry configuration… with lanyard hole. Funding again has forced a compromise where I had to abandon having a machined titanium back spacer. That will be revisited in the future if these titanium scale sets find a market demand.
Attempting to handle an endeavor such as this strictly by phone and email has been difficult, frustrating and at times infuriating… but after a great many months of zero progress a bit of positive momentum finally has taken place. We have fixed the per unit cost and the minimum order quantity threshold. My CAD and CAM files have been converted to the requested formats and were sent to the machining facility the last week of April of this year. As of May 25th two sets of prototype scales have been machined and were shipped to my location for fit and finish evaluation. They arrived several days ago and in checking the fit, finish and comfort I determined that an edge chamfer was needed as the scales as machined caused hand discomfort when gripped strongly.
Rather than suffer any further delays that requesting a second prototype set with a 45 degree edge chamfer would cause I thought I’d attempt hand filing a chamfer. Metal work is not my forte and I quickly discovered titanium is difficult to work. It took considerably more effort than I anticipated however I was able to achieve a reasonable result. At least one that proved to me that an edge chamfer provided the desired comfort. All scale sets in the production run will have a machined edge chamfer and will look considerably better than my hand filed efforts.
Here are several photos of the prototype Ti scales. The first photo is of the two scales sets fresh off the CNC. The remaining photos are of an assembled knife sporting my hand filed chamfer on the presentation side scale only.
More as it happens…
I made the decision to use my PROMOD Endela/Military design as the first of four designs I hope to have produced in titanium. These will be 2D scales CNC machined in a tip up… right hand carry configuration… with lanyard hole. Funding again has forced a compromise where I had to abandon having a machined titanium back spacer. That will be revisited in the future if these titanium scale sets find a market demand.
Attempting to handle an endeavor such as this strictly by phone and email has been difficult, frustrating and at times infuriating… but after a great many months of zero progress a bit of positive momentum finally has taken place. We have fixed the per unit cost and the minimum order quantity threshold. My CAD and CAM files have been converted to the requested formats and were sent to the machining facility the last week of April of this year. As of May 25th two sets of prototype scales have been machined and were shipped to my location for fit and finish evaluation. They arrived several days ago and in checking the fit, finish and comfort I determined that an edge chamfer was needed as the scales as machined caused hand discomfort when gripped strongly.
Rather than suffer any further delays that requesting a second prototype set with a 45 degree edge chamfer would cause I thought I’d attempt hand filing a chamfer. Metal work is not my forte and I quickly discovered titanium is difficult to work. It took considerably more effort than I anticipated however I was able to achieve a reasonable result. At least one that proved to me that an edge chamfer provided the desired comfort. All scale sets in the production run will have a machined edge chamfer and will look considerably better than my hand filed efforts.
Here are several photos of the prototype Ti scales. The first photo is of the two scales sets fresh off the CNC. The remaining photos are of an assembled knife sporting my hand filed chamfer on the presentation side scale only.
More as it happens…
