With Round 2 of the Competition heating up, and the opportunity to go ‘all out’ this time, I knew I wanted a Big Knife , I’m sure you know the saying … “The Bigger the Better”.
Justin Wienand
3D Printed Knife – Justin Wienand Entry #2
Deciding on the blade style was step 1.
I’ve recently started to like the angular look of Tantō Blades. Might be something to do with being the polar opposite of my first knife I guess.
When I began designing, It, funnily enough, echoed the first knife in that it once again gave me the opportunity to learn the current design package we use in house.
Next was to choose between fixed or one of the many folding options?
With some prolonged thought, I settled on a friction folder.
This was for a couple reasons; the mechanics are super simple and there wouldn’t be a need to fuss with sourcing springs or any obscure small bits and pieces for assembly.
Surprisingly this ended up having a bigger impact on the overall outcome than I had initially expected. With the only non printed part being one M6 x 12 Grub Screw.
The result , a 3 part Knife …
Part 1 – The Handle.
The one piece handle 3D printed in SLS Polyamide Nylon. Then stained black and polished to a satin finish in our DyeMansion post processing system.
Initially when drawing this up, I had array copied a hexagon pattern to mimic honey comb. This was swiftly done away with after printing a test handle as it seemed too simple.
Leveraging some of the software we have on hand. I managed to replace the entire handle geomerty with a structure we occasionally use to reduce thermal loads and powder consumption for very heavy parts.
This has a really cool effect when holding the handle and looking at it from different angles.
Part 2 – The Grub Screw.
The grub screw, which I found ‘lying around’.
And lastly Part 3 – The Blade.
The blade was printed in 316 Stainless Steel, aged and sandblasted to a uniform finish with some light hand polishing to accentuate the parallels of the blade and add some contrast to my touch-mark.
The original intention was to backfill the blade with a clear epoxy so as to avoid bits of stuff clogging up the holes as it gets used. After some thought, I decided that as a pocket knife, which will in all likelihood still mainly be used only as a box cutter, so the clear epoxy fill was probably not necessary. Maybe I’ll come back to this idea in round three.
About This Competition
About a year ago we decided it would be fun to run a small internal competition to design knives with the aim to use Additive Manufacturing as much as possible. This was inspired at least in part by Davids nephew having a fascination with forging and knife making which led to much YouTube research.
None of the Akhani 3D team had ever made any sort of knife ever. So everyone started off with their own ideas. Some were faster than others in terms of execution and printing but we have now entered into a second round and, have included the new members of the team into our little competition.
