New Knives Available!

It's been 5 months since we last had new knives to offer.......but we finally have some new pieces coming available for sale!

Currently we have about 60 pieces done, 30 of which are already sold to dealers, which leaves about 30 that will make it on the website.

“How much will it cost to have a knife shipped to me?” I have been asked several times. Good question. What I will be doing is packing knives into shipments of 10-25 knives and shipping them from the Philippines to Michigan where my dad will repackage them and ship whatever you order directly to you. The reason I am doing that is to save you shipping cost. It costs a minimum of $30 to ship a knife from here to most of the world. But for my dad to ship from Michigan to most places in the US it is only $6. ...and for him to ship international is typically $13. So your shipping cost will only be the standard $6 (or $13 for outside the US) instead of the $30+ it would cost to ship from here.

I shipped out the first batch of 10 to Michigan today and they should be arriving on Feb 5th. Once that batch arrives ok I will ship a second batch, then a third. I am breaking the order up into multiple shipments in case something happens....plane goes down at sea, custom agent decides they would look better in an incinerator, the package gets stolen, etc.

What I will be doing is listing the knives in 3 different sections on the website. The sections will be under “available knives” and then the sub category will have the title of the anticipated arrival date to Michigan. A sub category named “ready to ship 2-5-2010” would mean the knives are expected to arrive in Michigan on that date So if a knife is to arrive in Michigan on the 5th and you buy it on the 2nd, as soon as the knife arrives my dad will repackage and ship it to you via USPS Priority mail...which typically takes 1-3 days to mst of the US and 10-14days to most of the world.

Some examples of upcoming pieces:

Long Delayed Status update!

Hello everyone,

It's been awhile since I left an update so I thought I would take the time to fill you in. For those of you that didn't know, about 5 months ago I packed up and moved from Michigan, USA to Cebu, Philippines. As you can imagine it's quite an ordeal to move to the other side of the world and it's been taking some time to get settled in.

There have been some bad aspects to the move and some good aspects but so far it's been a good experience overall. On the bad side it's hard to find items here....so it's taken a long while to get all the tools needed to get a workshop up and running. Also there have been things like getting targetted by a pickpocket team (I caught them and got my wallet back thankfully), and just the other day a girl on our street got mugged and stabbed. On the plus side I'm not freezing my butt off in a Michigan winter. I lived in Michigan for all of my life so having it 80-90 degrees out all year round is kind of fun (although I missed the snow on Christmas) And the beaches here are beautiful! Prior to visiting here last year I had only seen the ocean once...now I am on an island quite a bit smaller than the county I used to live in with beaches within 20min drive any direction I go. White sands, palm trees, coral reefs, tropical fish, small limestone cliffs, etc. It took me a week or two of swimming to stop looking 360degrees around me all the time for sharks, but now I worry more about stepping on a sea urchin. One of these days I will pick up an underwater cam and snap some pics for you guys.

Ok now for the knife related stuff....


This month we finally got a workshop setup. It is very basic so we are only making a limited amount of designs... no powdercoating or damascus/san mai for the time being. But we are producing knives and we will have some up for sale soon, maybe tonight.

We are also working on making changes to the website. It's something I have been meaning to do for the last year but I just never had the time. I am working on a FAQ page, more photo albums, and we will be introducing a “pre-order” section to the store soon. The pre-order will allow you to place an order for some of our more popular designs. You will be able to pick the blade finish, the cord wrap colors, etc and we will make it to order. Keep in mind this is for placing an order, and there will be a waiting time before it gets delivered. I will be adding this section because I often get people asking me for designs that are sold out, or sending me messages saying they keep checking my site for certain knives but they don;t catch them in time before they sell out. Now you can just order one and be assured that the first available design that you wanted will be yours.

As I mentioned in the past I will be training someone to help me. Well I started training a co-worker about 3 weeks ago, His name is Glen and he is my fiancees brother. So far he is doing a great job, and he hasn't lost any fingers...so thats a plus. As he learns the trade he will be helping me with some of the basic, but time consuming, tasks of knifemaking. Right now I have him drilling handle holes, rough profiling blades, and hand sanding/buffing blades. I will be doing all the grinding of the blade bevels and all of the heat treating since thats a skill that takes a lot of practice to get right...sometimes years. Having the additional help will allow us to get more blades done...so you guys won't have to wait so long. It will also allow me to expand into areas I didn't have time to before. For example I am working on new designs (the first new design is called the “Karamklaw” and will be shown in the next blog post, and put up for sale soon), and over the next few months I will be offering more steel choices...O1, A2, 5160 are towards the top of my list of steels I will be offering more often (I have worked these steels in the past and like them) and in the next half a year I will be making some out of the CPM steels. These knives will have a higher price tag.

Speaking of higher prices... I will start offering a limited amount of pieces geared more for collections that have higher end materials. Damascus, stabilized wood, mokume, etc. You won't see much of the at first though....we will be working on building inventory of our standard models first.