* Pocket Knives

Rapid River Knifeworks Custom Pocket Knives

There was a time when everyone carried a knife. Life was hard, and a knife provided a way to meet most of the demands of an unforgiving wilderness. Nowadays, life isn’t as difficult, but there are still many occasions when a custom pocket knife can come in handy.

Pocket knives can be used for everything from opening envelopes to getting those plastic blister packs apart. Plus, they are just really cool to carry around and help the person to feel prepared for any eventuality. Being able to carry a knife that is beautiful and unique helps to create a special identity.

Engraved custom pocket knives tell the person that you are thinking about them specifically when you picked out their gift. As a corporate gift, they make a great way to say thank you to employees or to special clients. When a knife is engraved, there is no question who it was meant for.

Watch this video below or read the transcript.

Transcript:

Basically we are going show you how now we start. Everything is raw material. This is a piece of sheet stock steel. This is 821/4 inch thick. Blanks are cut out with a water jet and the brass thumbguards are machines on a CNC. Here is a little piece of deer antler that's pre-cut, a block of wood, and some washer material then we glue all of them together and they look like that. Very rough, its all hand work there is nothing coming off of the end of an assembly line. So we are going to take you in the back and show you now how we get this knife to look like this knife.

Now Matt's going to put it on a 40 grit belt and hes going to get it to about the shape that we need before he takes it to the 80 grit belt and gives it its final shape.

We get a lot of people that ask us, "Good Lord, what happened to your fingers!" This 40 grit belt is responsible for about 90% of that. It's very unforgiving.

That's the knife on a 40 grit made basically to the shape that we are looking for. Matt will take that and put it on an 80 grit belt and get its final shape.

All right, now he is on an 80 grit. Hes basically giving the knife its final shape. Now Matt makes this look really easy. Hes had his hands on over a quarter of million knives in his life. Hes making it look easy but its actually extremely difficult to do what he is doing right now.

The real neat thing about the cocobolo and a lot of the woods we work with you don't know what it is going to look like until you get into the grain. Now that was a really dark piece of wood that did not look very nice but as you can see as he is going the purple and the yellow and the different colors are coming out in the wood. And this is actually going to be a really, really beautiful cut.

Each knife is made by hand so you know a Matt will put this knife in his hand every time and if there is a lump or something that does not feel right it goes back on the 80 grit belt and its finished to feel perfect everytime so that there aren't any defects in it.

Now that we have the general shape of the knife Matt will put it on the 320 grit belt. It's very important that our belts flex as you can see that our belts are moving and they are not very rigid. They have got to move so that we can blend the knife guard into the handle so that it is not just a blah. We like them to look nice but the most important thing is that they have to be really comfortable and they have to be very functional.

Matt's after the 320 grit belt and that knife is ready to be polished and finished up. Thats basically 400 grit compound on a buffing wheel. He's taking the 320 grit scratches out of it. From then he will be taking it over to the black wheel which is a 600 grit compound that will take the 400 grit scratches out and then it will make it easier for polishing that brass.

That small black wheel is a grease compound and this is the stuff that really gets you dirty. You'll look like a coal miner after you have been polishing knives all day. It's actually a jeweler's rouge that polishes the brass really nice and takes out all of the scratches and takes everything out of it so it is a really smooth feel.

What you looked at earlier was just basically a blog with a piece of steel sticking out of it. This will get sharpended. The blade will get satin-finished and it will go up front to be laser engraved and shipped off to its new owner.

After we get the knives done and polished and sharpened up in the back they come up to this room where we do all of the laser engraving. In this case we are going to be putting your logo on the knife. So a lot of people walk into the store and they are looking for personalized gifts. The laser engraving is something that we can do that only takes a few minutes. The knife is already done in the showroom its got our logo on it and everything that is supposed to be on it already so in this case we are just going to put your name on it. It's less than a five minute job if you want to come in and have it done.

Engraved the deer antlers on the piece of deer horn then the knife will be ready to clean up, oil up, and put in the sheath. The knife has to come with a real high-quality sheath. If you notice this thumb guard comes out and it is long enough where you cannot even pull it out of the sheath and it won't fall out. And if it becomes unsnapped a lot of times it will just hang there anyways. So the sheaths are very high quality and the sheaths are also warrentied for life with the knife.

That blocked knife that you just looked at is all finished.