Hey there kid...
So you want to be a freelance machinist eh? A privateer on the seas of capitalist manufacturing! Well, it's not quite as shiny as it might look. The road to greasy gold is fraught with horror stories of men starting down the winding path to stainless success, only to come unwound themselves.
All pirate-machinist themed joking aside, manufacturing is one of the hardest sectors of industry to make a profit in. Between high overhead costs, expensive machine purchases, unexpected repairs and a highly unpredictable supply chain, making money off of making things gets to be a huge headache.
Why am I bothering to tell you this? Well because there's an off chance that a few youngsters are reading this and thinking about trying the same thing. I know because I was one, I had quite a few people when I was younger try to talk to me about the dangers of doing something like this and I was stubborn enough to ignore them. They say love is blind, and in my case, also brainless. So, if you're young and looking at getting yourself started with that sweet new financing deal on whatever import machine has just hit the market, save yourself the trouble and just work at a shop for a few years.
For those of you whos first rodeo happened when John Wayne was still hauling cows on the big screen, I invite you to read (and perhaps chuckle) at my honest account of teaching myself CNC machining.
First, you need a machine:
I started my CNC journey pretty early in my teens. I've always loved making things, my family is very handy and extensively renovated every room in our home. By 15 I got my first job at a local machine shop, I was pretty well versed in basic tools. The owner showed me how to run a mill and a lathe (not that I did either very well at the time) and I did a lot of deburring. While I was there I discovered there was a machine that actually ran itself, provided you could speak the code language. I sort of beheld this information with a level of existential awe that one might view a UFO with. I didn't think I would ever be able to figure it out myself (why did I need to anyway? I was gonna be a knifemaker) but the idea that such a machine was out there really stuck with me.
I knew I wanted to make things for a living, I just didn't know how. My parents were very supportive and put me in a career tech school for engineering where I was exposed to many of the basic skills I use in the shop on a daily basis... Especially proficiency in CAD software. I took as many certification courses as I could and became one of the top students in my class. This later landed me a job working a sales position for an affiliate of Dassault systems (Solidworks). Around the same time, I decided to try and sell some knives that I was making online. In hindsight, I hit the internet at exactly the right time before the pandemic. My designs were getting a lot of interest and daily order inquiries in my message inboxes.
After a few years of making knives by hand I started to realize that regardless of whether or not I made money, I didn't have any time to expand since all my efforts were focused on one thing: making knives. To say nothing of the physical toll of grinding thousands of bevels by hand, I knew if I wanted to do this long term I was going to have to get smart about how I produce my products.
At the time, the entry level CNC market was getting to the point where you could make a few parts at a time on a machine that cost less than $3000. It was a chunk of money, and I didn't have much. I decided to leverage what few connections I had to see if anybody was interested in CNC machined scales and to my delight I had a friend willing to try some out. I pulled the trigger on one of those flat-pack aluminum extrusion based CNC routers and got to work.
What followed was a series of very embarrassing machine crashes, things flying off the bed, and really ugly knife scale after really ugly knife scale. Eventually with some significant help from a few knife friends, (and the undying patience of my first ever client) I figured out how to reliably and accurately machine a few sets of scales for my blades.
I kept my sales job with Dassault and sold knives online for about two years before the amount of money that I was making from knives was projected to exceed my sales job salary for that year. I had a conversation with my dad and we agreed it made sense to see if I could make a living off of this full time. I got deadly serious about my business. If this was going to be what I staked my future on, I couldn’t afford to be slacking off.
CNC machining the handles meant that I had more time to focus on things like design and grinding the blades. Once everything was implemented, I experienced what easily could have been a 30% or more boost in my output and I had a new stream of revenue making scales for my friend.
WKT Chapter 2
Making hand-ground blades with CNC handles is a pretty sweet gig. I had a lot of fun honing my freehanding abilities and refining my designs. Freehand grinding bevels was the first skill I really fell in love with and it gets more rewarding with each new level of proficiency. Unfortunately familiarity breeds contempt and as I got better, I got pickier. The level of pre-finish bevel checks, post finish bevel checks, and final QC checks got gradually more intense and the volume of knives kept increasing to where I mentally couldn't handle visually inspecting that many blades at a time in addition to my other responsibilities with the business. The physical toll of working in workshops for as many years as I had became noticeable as well. It was clear that If I wanted to expand I was going to have to increase my production capacity beyond what one human could grind by hand.
I had a good foundation in CNC machining by this time, running batches of 100 scales or more on a regular basis had taught me a lot about machine setup and how to stage tools for quick access and minimal operator up-time. I began to seriously study CNC milling and even traveled to Georgia for a few days to visit Mike Taylor, owner of KeyBar USA, a CNC shop that has been making EDC accessories since the very early days of what is now the modern knife scene.
Armed with the right mixture of knowledge and naivete to feel confident moving forward, I began to plan my attempt to scale. What followed was a 3 month "side quest" where I learned more than I'd care to know about being a general contractor. Building a new shop would have been exciting, unfortunately due to timing constraints we ended up pouring our concrete slabs mid-November and working through January to finish the walls. We couldn't feel our fingers half the time. 
Once we flipped the lights on for the first time, it was mid-February. We promptly began the search for a machine. It became pretty clear early on that HAAS was a good choice for a machine since they are domestic, have a wide array of educational content online, a rich history in the machine tool market, and there is a service station not more than an hour away if anything went wrong.
Buying The DM-2
Buying a machine is a special process… Buying one at barely 23 even more so. The machine is only about 60% of the total cost of everything you actually need to get started with machining if your dad didn't have a machine shop already. At the time, I had been warned against credit cards my whole life and spent most of my early twenties learning how to make money rather than manage it (why learn to manage something you don't have in the first place, right?). We originally were going to buy one new from the factory, I had emailed HAAS the year before asking about financing directly given my limited credit history and they actually agreed. When the time came to purchase the machine however, I was turned down due to a recent policy change.
My options were very limited, I had just sunk a lot of money into shop renovations and I had no direct financing option. Suitable machines could be purchased used, but buying a used machine really scared me, I had no direct experience running a CNC mill, let alone diagnosing one for issues. I spent weeks learning everything I could about machines and what to look for when buying one used. Buying a used CNC is most similar to buying a used car; if you don't act quick, it will sell from under you. Especially if it's anything worth having. This makes things pretty precarious if you don't know exactly what you're doing. Eventually I got lucky and found a *very* lightly used machine that had all the specs I was looking for. The previous owner had bought it a year before closing down and a ballbar inspection from a HAAS tech confirmed no more backlash than was allowed new from the factory. I pulled the trigger.
It took about a week before we actually saw it in the shop. Then another several weeks to install the air system, 3 phase power, and get the remaining bare bones accessories to switch the machine on. Once everything was in place to get running, I had to stop and pivot back to making knives by hand. I had a few extra blades to sell on the website while we expanded but those had run out a while ago and we started to get emails asking if we were still in business.
The frenetic pace of new information that needed to be addressed, mastered, or adapted to was taking a major toll. I was losing sleep and eating became difficult. On top of my personal issues, my truck had a catastrophic breakdown that compounded the difficulty of balancing learning the CNC machine while also producing knives by hand for retailers, the website, and later Blade Show. I went back to grinding by hand, feeling slow and inefficient compared to what I knew the machine was capable of.
After Blade Show, I shifted my focus entirely towards the machine. I ran into a lot of issues, running an industrial CNC mill is vastly different than cutting little pieces of G10 on a router. To start, the manual was thicker than the family bible and the controller had more buttons than the Apollo astronauts had to ace the moon landing. In addition, the software that I had become so familiar with could only get me so far. Something that looks good in CAD could end up looking completely different in the machine for a myriad of reasons, all with varying degrees of subtlety that have to be fully investigated in order to rule them out.
To top it off, I had something to prove. I knew that a lot of other people out there were making knives in a mill and that if I wanted to be competitive, I was going to have to come up with something really impressive. I completely redesigned the Eddy 2 leveraging every capability that I had in my newly expanded shop, and then some.
So What About It?
The R&D process for the Eddy 2 took a long time and cost me a lot of sanity. In truth, I'm still perfecting it. I don't think I'll ever stop. The quest to make a better knife has been a challenge man has been chasing after since the dawn of time, and I am honored to play my part. I’ve learned a lot about myself and the world around me since starting this journey in 2019. It’s been a wonderful experience to meet new people and hear the stories of the men and women that have come before me in this time honored tradition.
We believe in making tools that perform. Products that can be relied upon are becoming fewer and fewer with each passing year as businesses continue to sacrifice the long-term wellbeing of their trusting customer base at the hands of the almighty dollar. The Eddy 2 stands for something different, a representation of a timeless heritage that stands apart from the shifting sands of “the hype” or “what’s popular”. I am proud of the new design I’ve created and we’re excited to finally share it with you.
The Eddy 2 represents over 10 years of focused planning, hard work, and determination to make some of the best fixed blades on the face of the planet. The redesign adds premium features like radiused handle spines, hyper ergonomic scales and a more subtle handle texture for a comfortable, strong grip even under heavy extended use. These exciting new features all come together with the same blade geometry and size factor that has made the Eddy 2 one of the knife worlds best kept secrets since 2019.
