Hi Billy,

All of our knives have started as pencil sketches, but the key thing is to get a prototype made and then have a feel and a think and then go back and fiddle with the CAD drawing, rinse and repeat. The other advantage of sketching in CAD is that you can get pretty good 3D modelling showing you how the knife will look - whereas any attempts at isometric or perspective drawing by hand (in my case at least) quickly turns in to a mess!

We use austenitic steel for our bolsters and other non-hardening parts. We're currently trialling Niolox and 14c28n for knife steels - so far all's going well with an inert gas/ electric furnace.

Because of the issue of fixing, we are trialling a magnetic fixing plate. This - so far - is certainly giving us enough grip and the accumulating of shwarf doesn't seem too bad, but we're still early days.

We both really, really enjoy what we do - the hard work at the moment is when we have to tie systems together as we've learned our most recent skills in a sort of 'silo' system, and so making sure that Inventor and the mill are completely synced is proving to be a slow, cautious process!

L