I had planned this as an audio adventure podcast episode, but that didn’t work because, well, making knives is noisy. As a result, its a post here with some awesome pictures. Because of the sensitive nature of their work, I have run this article (and most importantly—the pictures) by TRM’s President Marianne Halpern.

I had reached out to Marianne a while ago and finally, two days before Christmas 2019, my son Isaac and I had time to make my way to Three Rivers Manufacturing. As an aside this is Isaac’s third knife-related quest as a kid. He and I went to see Nick Rossi’s set up at the New England Metalwork School in Lewiston, Maine when he was four, and then he and I went to visit one of the best knife sharpeners in the world when he was six.

Nestled in an old mill town southeast of Springfield, Massachusetts, Palmer is a place that looks like the layers of an archeological dig. There was the original boom in the 19th century, another in the 20th, and if TRM has anything to say about it, another one sometime in the early 21st century.

The building itself is a sprawling old industrial complex. If they had manbun wearing hipsters employed in this location, it would be called a campus. As it is, it is just a bunch of big buildings. TRM is located on the bottom floor of the largest building.

Down a quick flight of steps and through a door to the main work floor and just on the other side, Marianne’s office and their awesome shield.

Even though it was two days from Christmas, the place was absolutely hopping.

They were getting new machines delivered, machines so big they had to remove a part of the exterior wall and they had a waterjet running the entire time we were there.

Marianne greeted Isaac and I am immediately began a tour/history lesson about Halpern and TRM. The beloved knife company started, as it turns out, when her husband (and TRM’s lead designer and owner, Les) ordered a massive shipment of screws to help with his own burgeoning custom knife making habit. He repackaged them and sold them in smaller lots. From there it was a long slow process of morphing from folks employed in the special education field (Les’s mechanical genius was the result of his passion for making assistive devices for the disabled) to owners of a machine shop.

Halpern gained a reputation as handling materials and machining the most challenging stuff (hence the shield above made purely of carbon fiber and titanium). They would machine parts for others, both in and out of the knife business, and they did so effectively and with high precision. There was a lot of sweat equity generated in those early years.

Les’s habit of invention and tinkering eventually led Halpern to branch off into their own knifemaking enterprise, TRM. That started slow and they are in the process still of scaling up. That scaling up is one of the reasons why demand for TRM knives far outpaces the supply (more on this later). Marianne let us in on a secret—they are doing everything they can to make more knives, and from the looks of it, there is product on the way. Isaac asked her a great question at this point and it explained the whole supply and demand situation. “How long does it take to make a knife from start to finish?” The short answer is 12 weeks. Here is the long answer.

At this point we start going through machines—wire EDM, CNC, a bank of tumblers, a surface grinder big enough to flatten a driveway, a few heat treat ovens, some blasting cabinets, a few sharpening stations.

It was all informative. At each step Marianne would explain to Isaac and I what each machine did, how long it took to finish the step, and how many knives were currently at that phase of production. No machine, not a single one, was in disuse. There were blanks at each station, handles, liners, blades...every one had something in process.

At the surface grinder, Marianne busted out her personal EDC, a clipless three dot Neutron with purple and black carbon fiber and a purple G10 scale.

The three dot designation means that the knife is not up to TRM’s standards. Marianne’s personal carry shows me just how high those standards are...the knife, upon inspection, was flawless. There was not a single problem I could see with the knife. When I asked, Marianne told me that the laser etching had burnished or marked the blade around the thumbstud. It wasn’t something I would have ever imagined being an issue—no more than tape residue on a well-used knife. If that is a defective knife, then we know why the undefective ones are so consistently good.

At the tumblers we saw a knife in assembly. It was an Atom and it was truly flawless. The work area was clean and the knife was going together smoothly. We also saw the clip bender which, as you can imagine, isn’t a terribly complex device, but it has produced thousands of TRM clips and hopefully produce thousands more.

The last stop on the tour was the water jet machine or, if you prefer Isaac’s name—the water laser. The water laser was run by a really skilled machinist named Mike. He was very friendly and raised the bed out of the water so we could actually see the cutting. Sparks flying, titanium being obliterated, and jets of superpressurized water were pretty cool and Isaac was duly impressed. Impressed enough to tell his four year old brother that he saw a machine that burned water. Not exactly right, but an apt description. Having seen this before, I can say that Mike’s skills are for real and a competitive advantage for TRM. He gets results that are uncommonly good on a waterjet, good enough, in fact, that they can skip some steps in production some of the time. And when time is money, that’s huge.

After the tour we went back to the office and talked a bit. Les arrived by this time and we discussed the Nerd’s release. I got to handle two prototypes and both were very nice.

The knife is compact, contoured, and solid. It has that classic TRM thinner than thin grind, yet it still has a sturdiness that comes from good design. The clip is an improvement over the Neutron’s (which is, already, a great clip). The marbled carbon fiber prototype was Les’s personal carry and it was excellent, but the G10 version was also quite nice. As between the two, I’d probably opt for the G10. With no weight difference and a distinct disdain for bling, it would be an easy call. Les also busted out two extraordinary blades—prototypes from a collaboration with Greg Lightfoot called the Turbo.

These were knives of a different kind than the TRMs we are used to. They were thick, heavy, glossy, and incredibly smooth. The handles were complex, machined to amazing tolerances, and beautiful. They flipped like a dream, as both Isaac and I got them to fire the first time. Even the underside of the clip was machined. If you saw TRM at a show last year you may have handled these knives. Ultimately they decided against releasing them, because they were seriously off brand for TRM, but a part of me wishes they had. These knives were easily the equal of anything put out by Reate, WE, Chris Reeve, or Hinderer. These were world class, high end production folders.

We were also treated to see a few Neutrons going out the door. They were being boxed, wrapped, and shipped as we were there. It was a nice capstone to an incredible tour and a good punctuation for Isaac to see the process soup to nuts.

After that I gave them some feedback. I am going to recount it hear because I think it bears on my credibility going forward. None of it is a surprise if you have read my reviews, but these are biases you should know about when reading future reviews.

First, I told both Les and Marianne that the Nerd would be a hit. The knife is a home run in my mind, an instabuy if there ever was one. Marianne indicated that I would get a review sample, but I gave her that assessment before the review arrangements were made. Its hard to avoid this conclusion though, looking at things from a purely objective perspective. The knife maxes at $209. It will have 20CV steel, great handle materials, a great design, a superb clip, and all come in under 2 ounces. Its made in the US and is basically a higher end, nicer Dragonfly. Regardless of the tour or even me seeing the knife in person, I would have said this thing was going to be awesome. As lover of small knives, the Nerd is my jam.

Second I told both of them that TRM has a bit of room in the market in terms of price. Their knives are the equal of Spyderco, Benchmade, and other higher end domestic producers. The designs are superb and the materials choices and flexibility are top notch. Only high end materials like burls and damascus separate their stuff from the Reates and Chris Reeves of the world and the decision not to go there, like the decision not to make the Turbo, is intentional. With this level of quality the Neutron, at $169, is an outstanding buy. They could easily sell it for $179 or even $199 and it would still be a great value. I don’t know what the price will be for the Ti Atom (Editor’s Note: Marianne confirmed a price of $375), but it could definitely sell for the same price as a Sebenza and I wouldn’t bat an eye. These are world class knives made in the US sold for well under what the market will bear. The regular sell outs (in minutes) is proof of that.

We concluded the tour with a discussion of knife laws in Massachusetts, which I will not torture you with, as the phrase “knife laws in Massachusetts” is like “beach day for albinos”—always painful. Hopefully, I can help to change that someday, but for now, I live in and they make knives in one of the most anti-knife states in the US.

Thanks to Marianne and Les Halpern for the tour and the cap lifter (as well as Isaac’s thin slab of steel that he told his brother was “Beskar,” too much Mandalorian in this household). It took years of trying and planning, but we finally managed the TRM shop tour.

And, I can’t wait for the Nerd [Editor’s Note: Wait over, the Nerd arrived last Friday January 17, 2020]