[...] until I'm done with law school and can get a real shop.
I have seen a lot of shops, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with yours. You can get a lot of impressive things done in a far lesser shop than the one you have now.
With no water, how are you going to supply a sink? Are you recirculating the water? Solvent tanks do that, so you could probably do it with shop water too. The amount of water you would use might be small enough you can just pour it outside and let it evaporate.
Do you have a sand blasting box? A lot of cleaning can be done with a cheap sand blasting station, and the sand is conveniently recirculated. Plus, sand blasted steel looks nice. The tumbled finish you use is a very good surface preparation for sand blasting. All my "pretty" sandblasted stuff was tumbled first. It gives a very even, glowing look, like bright sun on a thick layer of flawless fresh snow. Without the tumbling process, things like scratches and tool marks show through the sand blasted finish, so it doesn't look nearly as good at it could.
I'm imagining a luxurious safe-queen blade with ice cold frosty surfaces and a brilliant mirror-polished edge. It wouldn't stay looking that good if it weren't a safe queen, but considering how cheap it is to make a blade look so uniquely beautiful, the investment might pay for itself pretty easily if you wanted to make something special for the blade connoisseurs, to improve your profit margins. It wouldn't need to be so much more expensive that people would be afraid to use it, but connoisseurs might be tempted to buy both a user blade to get dirty and scraped up, and the same blade with the gorgeous frosted finish on it. One is a working tool that gets used and abused, and the other gets admired for its beauty.
There are a lot of
sandblasted and satin finish knives in the world, but to my knowledge, no one has ever utilized the impressive cameo contrast you can get when you combine a mirror finish with a frosty finish. Coin die makers have been doing it for centuries, and the effect is pretty impressive:
Coin die makers can use either actual sandblasting, or a chemical pickling process in acid to get the sandblasted effect. You could selectively use mirror and frosty finishes to create your logo and perhaps custom text across a blade. Now that I'm thinking of it, a tribal tattoo or barbed-wire design across a blade would be ridiculously beautiful. For sandblasting, you would use a rubber-like compound that can resist the sand impact without being worn away, for the mirror areas. For pickling, you would use some kind of adhering barrier to keep the acid from attacking the mirrored parts. Both methods require the whole blade to be polished. You could use orbital sanders, buffing wheels, and other power tools to speed up the polishing process.
For coin die makers, they only need to do the work on the dies, and then they can use the dies to mint thousands of coins before they need new dies. That keeps costs low. For the blades, you would probably need to manually apply the finishes to each blade. Frosting is cheap, mirroring is expensive. If you only wanted to mirror a logo, maybe you could mirror a small patch on the blade, layout the areas that distinguish the mirror parts from the frosted parts, then go ahead and frost the entire thing all at once. That could minimize the area that needs to be polish, to speed up the process for each blade.
Other techniques you could use are electropolishing, electroplating, and electroless nickel. The electroless nickel process is pretty slick, literally and figuratively. It's very durable, and would greatly enhance corrosion resistance. Both electroplating (chrome) and electroless nickel give you a smooth finish that would be much quicker to polish to a mirror finish. It might be good enough you can skip polishing, and just proceed to mask it for whatever frosting technique you want to use - mechanical sandblasting, or chemical pickling/etching.
Some of these techniques are compatible with high production automation, so if you stumble on a moneymaker, you can outsource much of it and ramp up production so you're not overwhelmed in your "prototyping shop". Basically you would design them and make the prototypes, and then when you're satisfied, order larger production runs from a facility that can meet your requirements. You might get lucky and find a way to at least temporarily make more money on blades than you can earn in your lawyering...until everyone else figures out what you're doing, and they start doing it too, haha.
For small and very thin blades (like utility blades), you can use very productive chemical etching processes to make the entire blade from start to finish, with all the mirroring, frosting, and even sharpening done automatically in a rapid chemical routine, outsourced to a facility that specializes in it. That can drive costs way down, and still give impressive results.
