Thursday, April 19, 2012

Grasshopper you can't put a pocket clip on a slip joint!





Well, yeah actually you can! Here are three special order clips made up the other day for someone that is a big fan of this little knife right here. What a gem too! I actually plan to acquire a couple of these myself. The boss already told to get a couple so no way around it now! :-) Even though this job was done for a person working in the knife industry please note I do not wish to do anymore of these jobs. I am getting away from tapping jobs and since 95% or more of what I'm asked to do involves making clips fit existing factory hole patterns and the threading jobs are infrequent anyway I just decided basically after doing this job here that I don't really enjoy the stress of these hair raising fold your hands and pray the tap doesn't break off routines I go through to do this even on cheaper knives like these.The other factor is that the time it takes for these type of jobs over the routine frequently asked for jobs using factory holes is quite marked and when I get several of these it puts my watering behind, my pet and animal feeding off schedule and everything else so something has to give. I've already given up scale jobs, frame lock and rebuild conversions, Wave mods to the blades and anodizing jobs to focus on my clips and mini ti pry bars. Now I find I have the need to taper things down further so, the drilling and threading days are gone and all I will even consider threading as of this date forward is softer materials like the G10, FRN, and Micarta or doing so with inserts already threaded and even those will only be if someone is buying a clip. The example that comes to mind that I will do would be the Buck 110 since it is brass and I'll still thread aluminum and I'll gladly flip clips on Military folders and others using G10 thick enough to do an insert type thing instead of threading. These number two taps are larger for small screw sizes and they do work but honestly I won't miss this part of what I do involving trying to risk tap breaks by forcing them through stainless liners harder than you expected or titanium that hugs the tap the deeper it gets. Other than this I greatly love my work so I finally realized if I hate threading so much I just need to quit doing it on the things I don't like doing.. It is a near religious experience for me daily to make these clips and pry bars I do for people and I regret that some will be disgruntled by this decision when it affects them wanting a clip on their knife as some have already voiced to me but it is the case. If it has ti slabs or ti liners, stainless liners and you want them drilled and tapped I'm not your man. I've broken off my last tap and that's that. Thanks for understanding.

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