Producing Knife Blanks for Knife Manufacturing
Whether you’re producing custom blades for cutlery, weapons, or machinery, quality is of the utmost importance. The last thing you want is a knife that can’t cut properly due to dulling or chipping.
Arbiser Machine supports knife manufacturers in everything from fulfilling bulk orders to achieving complex details or geometries. Our CNC machine shop in Georgia has the technology and capabilities to create beautiful blades that are truly cutting edge.
Knife Blank Manufacturing at Arbiser Machine
At Arbiser Machine, we consider knife blade manufacturing to be its own art form. The elevated level of craftsmanship and expertise that goes into a finished knife blade is awe-inspiring. That’s why we leave the actual finish work to the knife manufacturers that we partner with. They’ve got the secret sauce for their company’s blades.
However, we do strive to make our customer’s lives a lot easier by creating the knife blank for them. The knife blank functions as a template; it creates the basic structure of the blade, but doesn’t polish or grind the blade down to its final sharp edges.
Knife blanks can be manufactured via CNC milling or with Wire EDM. While machining can produce quality knife blanks, the design must be simple and straightforward. In general, we like Wire EDM capabilities for these parts. Wire EDM allows us to easily produce blades and knife components that are designed with complex geometries and would be difficult or even impossible to achieve with milling. In some cases, we can also waterjet knife blanks.
Selecting the Right Material for Your Knife
What’s the purpose of your knife? Will it need to cut through bread, meat, cheese (we’re getting hungry just thinking about it!)?
Our team can assess the intended function of your knife to determine the perfect material for the blade. Hardness, as indicated on the Rockwell C scale, is an important factor. If you need your knife to be strong, alloys with carbon, or manganese might be a good choice. But hardness isn’t the only consideration to take into account. A material’s ability to maintain its sharp edge or even resist corrosion is important as well. Copper and nickel, for example, can help protect your knife blade from corrosion. Machinability of the material may also be a factor at higher volumes.
And of course, cost is an important factor as well! What’s the consumer price point for your knife? If you’re making a basic kitchen knife, you might want to work with 440A. On the other hand, if you’re making machetes, 1095 is probably a better choice. Once we examine your requirements, we can make appropriate recommendations accordingly. [See common knife elements and materials.]
Other Knife Manufacturing Capabilities
In addition to producing their knife blanks, many knife manufacturers also ask us to produce tiny components that go into the handles of their knives, particularly for automatic knives or knives that open with an assist. Most knife manufacturers use highly specialized equipment focused on finishing the blades and knife assembly, so they’re not set up to create these smaller parts. However, our Wire EDM services can easily make these components at scale, without the need for additional tooling.
We can also perform in-house knife testing during the prototyping phase to ensure that the material you’ve selected will be hard enough, durable enough, and as corrosion-resistant as needed.
Whether you need a butcher, bread, or boning knife, the Arbiser Machine team is ready to put our knife-making expertise to work! Submit your drawings and let’s get started!