About the Rockwall

About the Rockwall
Most knife companies start from a passionate maker in their garage making some knives. As time goes on they get a belt grinder, a heat treat oven, a bunch of hand tools, and they expand their knowledge and experience to make better and better quality products. Tactile Knife Company has a massive leg up from most new knife companies because we already have a team of talented craftspeople and a large shop to put amazing new equipment in, as well as more turning capacity than basically any other knife company, period. Many of the biggest knife companies make most of what they sell, but quite a few have outsourced it to the cheapest sources around the world. Almost none actually make their own screws and pivots. We started this with the intention of making everything possible in our shop. The end result is that we only buy raw materials and ceramic ball bearings, and we turn those into finished knives. We rely on two outside companies because they have equipment that just doesn’t make sense at our scale, but hopefully in the next year or two we will be able to bring that in house as well.

The more a company has to rely on outside sources, the less they control the quality and the timeline. When we started this project it was looking like it was going to take 8-12 weeks to go from raw blade stock to a finished blade, where now we have it down to about two weeks. The reason this is so important is so we can reliably tell our customers that we will be contacting those on the wait list every two weeks to let you know whenever your spot is up to be able to purchase a knife. The goal from the start was to always try to meet customer demand. If you want a knife, we want you to be able to have a knife within a few months. Will and the team knew when starting this venture that they had a serious task at hand. We’ve got a huge list of happy customers from Tactile Turn, and if even a small percentage of those buy knives, we will have to figure out how to make quite a few of them.

For months we have been toiling over design and the process to make them painstakingly looking at every aspect. For example, there are lots of ways to make a blade. The method that has been common for centuries is to find a piece of steel and heat it in a forge and forge it into the rough shape of the blade you want to make, then quench it, and grind off excess material until you have the shape you want. It’s an amazing process when done by a skilled craftsperson, but hard to get exacting precision needed in the best folding knives. There are several ways to cut steel for production knives. Plasma torches are an option, but almost never used. Waterjet is more accurate, and laser is even more accurate and both of these methods are fairly common by large and small companies. The most accurate method to cut flat material is to do it with a Wire Electrical Discharge Machine. Waterjet and lasers can be accurate to 0.001-0.005”, the table on our EDM is guaranteed to hold 0.0001” for ten years, but often can be significantly more accurate than that with a proper setup. It’s slow, but we are not looking to just make good knives, we are looking to every process to find what is the best way to do something. This same approach has been taken for every one of the steps for every part we make.

When you sign up for our wait list, know that we are working around the clock to try to get one of our knives in your hand. We don’t take your excitement to have a TKC knife in your hand lightly. We don’t want to waste your time by signing up for this wait list and then have you wait years to get one. Expect to be given regular updates every month about where you are on the wait list, so you can plan for when you’ll be able to have one.
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