In case you haven't heard, the Knife Thursday podcast is dedicating the entire third seasons (10 episodes) to a discussion of what it means to say a knife is a custom, midtech, or production. They plan on asking a bunch of people--knife knuts and industry folks--about what they think each of those things is. It is such an interesting discussion, I thought I'd offer my two cents.

First, let's clear the ground of weeds--the terms here are MARKETING terms. People claim their knives are customs to make them seem more prestigious and more exclusive. There is an element of craftsmanship about these things, no doubt, but really this term allows makers to ask for higher prices for their knives. A knife being a custom doesn't mean that it is better than a production. It doesn't mean that it has better fit and finish. And it doesn't mean it has better materials. It could mean those things, but it doesn't have to. Custom means money, hence the proliferation of the term.

Thus far everyone on the podcast has focused on how something is made and I think that is a logical starting point. The problem is that how a knife is made rapidly becomes unhelpful once you consider boutique brands and unusual cases. Instead, I think the best way to capture what knife knuts mean by these terms is to focus on WHO made the knife. After all, we don't say a knife is a Bob Smith custom, if it was ground by Bob Smith at the Spyderco factory. Instead we call that a production knife and the reason why is because WHO made it is 1) not necessarily important; and 2) no single person did everything. Additionally, the how definition starts to make less sense when you consider some of the high tech toys at the disposal of some of the best makers. Brian Tighe's machining ability dwarfs some manufacturers, but he is still a one man show and thus I think his stuff is most properly considered a custom.

Some History

The distinction between custom and production is a relatively recent one. When the advent of mass production capabilities brought about by the Industrial Revolution, humans gained the ability to make objects quickly and in large numbers. One of the hallmarks of a production item was the fact that it had interchangeable parts with others from its production line. Production pieces looked and functioned the same. Their parts were identical. Prior to the Industrial Revolution EVERYTHING was custom.

Until recently, the idea of a custom item, pejoratively called handmade/homemade, meant that it was basically a homemade take off on a production item, a lesser piece. The term "homemade" conjures up images of a ghost sheet halloween custom and a lumpy, ugly cable knit sweater. In some areas custom always had a positive connotation--furniture, cars--any item that is sought out for how it is made. But in many areas, the idea of something being handmade implied it was a patchwork, a rough fascimile of the original. Handmade suits were of suspect quality because while a few could tailor them better than any machine, most did not have that skill and so the suit was, in some way, of lesser quality than the production suit.

But in the past 50 years or so, we have had a desire to get back to authentic roots. We have also seen a proliferation in craftsman with superior skill and machines that allow them to capitalize on that skill. And so, over time, the term custom or handmade has become a marker of quality. And so it is in knives as well.

The Definitions

Single Source ("Handmade") Custom: a knife designed, fabricated, ground, and finished by a single person holding themselves out as the creator. Essentially the person is using only raw materials and maybe a few common off the shelf parts (a pivot, screw, or bolt). I don't think it is important that it be made solely or even partially with hand tools so long as all of the work is done by a single person.

Custom: a knife designed, ground and finished by a single person with a few off the shelf parts or the use of fabrication operations in certain stages.

Midtech: a knife in which the designer had some hand in the final creation of the knife.

Production: a knife in which no single person is holding themselves out as the creator of the knife; a knife designed by one person and made by another or many others.

Modified: a previously finished knife changed by someone else other than the person or company that made it.

Applying the Defintions

First, lets look at the most hands-on of hands-on makers--Aaron Gough. Gough made the "viral video" rounds when this video surfaced:

Gough makes fixed blades and he does virtually everything not only by himself, of course, but with hand tools. He cuts the blade shapes with a hack saw. He does the grinding with a file (though he has upgraded to a motorized grinder). He does the handle work the same way. Gough, it seems to me, is someone that virtually everyone on planet Earth would agree makes a custom knife. Its easy to apply the custom label, any custom label, to him. But some would say that a custom knife uses NO off the shelf parts. If you look at a Yuna knife, he doesn't just fabricate the blade and grind it, he makes everything himself going so far as to make his own screws.

Image courtesy of Yuna Knives.

By this definition, basically Gough, Yuna, Howard Hitchmough and a few others would truly be custom makers.

That doesn't seem fair. It also doesn't seem to capture what we knife knuts mean by the term "custom." It is a definition with virtually no utility because it doesn't mean what we want it to mean. But, if you apply the "who" made it definition, these definitely work. They are customs by the "how" it was made definition, and the "who" made it definition. So it works there.

Let's jump to the other end of the "how its made" spectrum with guys like Brian Tighe and John Grimsmo. If custom requires handwork these guys ain't custom makers, but that doesn't seem to make sense. It would be like saying that a person is only the author of a book if they wrote it with pen and paper. The fact that they have new technology in the production phase seems, to me, to be immaterial. They designed the knife. They made it (with the help of machines). They finished it (again with the help of machines). The problem is that what constitutes a machine? A grinder is a machine. It has a motor. And so you fall down a rabbit hole that, in the end, has to do with defining "machine" instead of trying to make sense of what constitutes a custom knife. But if you take the "who made it" definition, these are easy cases. Both Brian and John designed, fabricated, ground, and finished the knives AND they hold themselves out as the creator.

Image courtesy of Grimsmo Knives.

These are single source custom knives, too.

But the single source custom seems to miss a lot of folks out there, folks that have real talent but are limited in some way by either a level of demand and/or a lack of certain machines. These are the guys that use water jetted parts or outside heat treaters. As a woodworkers I can identify with these folks--I use premade hinges and drawer slides (though the best drawers I have ever made were ones I made of wood). I also don't have the room or money for a lathe, so I used premade turned legs. For knife makers in this category, they face similar limitations. The monetary investment a proper heat treating oven represents is just too large. Additionally when you have a list three years long, having mass produced lockside and show side handles is huge boon. These aren't the parts that knife folks find interesting and so I am not averse to knives made this way (though I do not own any; the Pathfinder, the SES, and the Dauntless are all, to my knowledge, single source customs).

Many folks fall into this category. TuffThumbz has been very open about his use of water jet. I also think that many, many folks use outside heat treaters. Lots of folks think that using outside produced parts makes a knife something other than a custom. Its not fair, it seems to me, to say that these folks are in the same category as the Yunas and Goughs of the world.

Image courtesy of Blade HQ

At the same time, these folks are clearly not production scale makers or even midtech makers. One on needs to look at the lavish detail and amazing individuality of a TuffKnives creation to see that it is far from the world of production blades. By separating out single source customs from other customs we can still capture the essence of what we mean--knives that are designed and finished by a single person are special and worth distinction and more money.

Midtechs are knives that move much closer to full production. Often the designer (the name on the midtech) creates the CAD drawing and then outsources production of nearly everything. The only hands-on work is in the final grinding, assembly and fitting. The designer/maker might grind the blades or tune the lock up, but the parts are made by someone else and usually assembled by someone else. Chad Nichols is doing a lot of the midtech work right now. Jon Graham's recent midtech release seems like the emblematic knife of this class. Jon does some final work on the knife and designed it, but everything else is done by others. Similarly the "semi-custom" Bodegas offered by Todd Begg fall into this category.

Image courtesy of FortHenryCustomKnives.com

There is nothing wrong with this at all, but it is different in substance from the other two classes of knives. It is also something worth less, it seems to me, though not much less. It is even further removed from the custom idea and is edging closing into the production world. There is, obviously a spectrum with customs on one hand and midtechs on the other. The less the knife maker does on the final product the more it is clearly a midtech until the maker does nothing in which case it is a production collaboration. Not all midtechs are created equal, but when you start talking about outsourcing more than a few water jet parts or heat treat, I think it is clearly a midtech.

Lisa Pelton of DPx Gear contends that midtechs are knives that are limited in number. I don't share that opinion. To me, the limited number of knives produced is wholly immaterial to its status as a midtech. Afterall, Kershaw only made 211 Blue G10 Blackwash Skylines, but that is no one's idea of a midtech. Midtechs tend to be limited in number because, as Steve pointed out on the podcast, the amount of work a maker has to do, while greatly lessened from a full custom, is still time consuming enough to make the final numbers tiny by comparison. But limited numbers are a secondary attribute of a midtech knife, an effect, not the cause. A midtech needs to be touched, worked on, by its designer. Otherwise it is just a small batch production knife. The issue of limited numbers is a secondary thing, not essential to the nature of a midtech. It would be like saying all loud cars are fast. Many cars are loud because they are fast, but a jalopy can be equally loud but no where near as fast.

Production knives seem easy to define, but throwing things off are knives like Bark River blades. They are handmade. They assembled by hand. They are ground by hand. They are assembled from raw materials and very few off the shelf parts. But they are assembled in mass with interchangeable parts (returning to the original definition of production outlined at the time of the Industrial Revolution). They are very nice, but they are still productions.

Finally, modified knives. In a real sense these are the knife equivalent of fan fiction. They take something that pre-exists and is crafted by others and change it. But having had a few modified knives (I refuse to use "pimped"; giving that work a good connotation is something I refuse to do--a pimp is a sex offender and a slave trader) and they were great. The Dietz mod to the Burnley Kwaiken, for instance, is actually better--from a design standpoint--than the Burnley flipper. It retains the beautiful elegant silhouette of the Kwaiken, AND offers better flipping action. Tough to beat that.

Conclusions

In all, I think the distinction is really a classic Wittgensteinian language problem (see: Wittgenstein's quandary over the definition of the word "game"). We have a general intuition about what the words mean, but the closer we inspect them the less certain we are of their meanings. Human brains do not do well with these problems. They are particularly vexing to how we think because generally get greater insight with closer inspection, not less. But in terms of the gear world (departing quickly from the philosophy world), I think the better way to figure out what these words mean is to first focus on not the how, but the who, and then second distinguishing from types of customs.

More importantly, we have to realize this is a spectrum. Watching Gough take that slab of steel and G10 and transform it into a very elegant blade is fascinating. But putting the bar there for custom knives is not only silly (sort of like insisting that Willie Mays is the standard for Hall of Famers), it robs the terms of meaning. The differences are ones of degree, not kind. Gough is on one end of the spectrum, along with a handful of other folks, and Spyderco is on the other. Guys that buy, as oppose to make, their own screws, but nothing else are much closer to Gough. Guys that get parts water jetted are substantially further away from Gough, but I think still properly seen as custom makers.

For some folks, the work done by the "custom maker" is important. Some kind of work is more true to the sense of a custom knife than others. In my mind, having someone else anodize the knife is not as big a deal, for classification purposes, as having someone else grind the knife. It seems to me, whether I agree with this proposition or not, that most people feel like the most important thing a knife maker can do to impart his or her own touch to the knife is to do the final grind. I'd argue that fitting the lock is just as significant, but I think most hold out grinding the blade as the emblematic way of put a person's authorship on a blade.

In the end, this is about money. Customs demand higher prices. And if you could claim something you are selling is worth 600% more depending on the label its given, you'd call it a custom too. I'm not saying that to imply that any custom maker is dishonestly claiming something to be a custom when it isn't (though I have reason to believe this does happen), but simply to remind people of why the terms matter in the first place. Its about money and then probably about pride. Its not about fit and finish, craftsmanship, or materials because in the modern market you can find productions that rival the vast majority of customs on any one of those counts.

Interestingly for me, this exercise is not so much about knives, but about language. We, as the knife community, have a vague intuition about what these terms mean, but at the edges these intuitions fail. I think that the definitions I laid out above, both meaningfully distinguish between different kinds of knives and, at the same time, match up well with those intuitions we all share. I hope this helps and I hope it contributes to the excellent discussion on the Knife Thursday podcast (though from when I started writing this until I finished, Chris and Steve seemed to have moved on somewhat to other topics). I'd love to hear everyone's take, so comment below.