Commissions · 22 weeks · deposit on agreement
Write it down first.
Every commission here starts as a written specification, because almost every disagreement between a maker and a customer is really a disagreement about a number that nobody wrote down. Set the five things below and the sheet fills itself in: geometry, hardness, weight and a guide price, worked out from the same figures we work to at the anvil.
Send it, and we will write back with where we disagree. Nobody pays anything until we both have the same sheet.
What happens next
Five steps, twenty-two weeks.
Week 0. You send the sheet. We write back within a week, usually to argue about one number — most often the length, occasionally the steel. Once the sheet is agreed we ask for a third as a deposit and you go on the book.
Weeks 1–16. Waiting. We make in batches of six because the forge is lit either way, and yours is made when its steel comes round.
Weeks 17–20. Forging, normalising, grinding, clay, quench. If it cracks in the tank we tell you the same day and start again; that costs you nothing but time, and it happens to about one blade in nine.
Weeks 21–22. Stones, etch, handle, edge. We send photographs of the line before it ships, because that is the part we could not promise you at the start.
The balance is due when the photographs go out. If the line is not what you hoped, say so then and we will keep the blade.
- Lead time
- 22 weeks
- Deposit
- One third, on agreement
- Balance
- Before it ships
- Batch size
- Six
- Cracked in the tank
- Remade, no charge
- If you refuse it
- We keep the blade
- Resharpening
- Free, for life
- Shipping
- UK and EU, insured
Before you send it
Two things worth reading twice.
The guide price on the sheet is a guide. It moves with the handle timber and with how badly the grind fights us, and we will give you a firm number in the reply. It has never moved by more than about eight per cent.
And the line itself is not specifiable. We can promise you the steel, the hardness, the geometry and the weight to the gram. We cannot promise you where the hamon will run, how active it will be, or that it will look like the one in the photograph above. That is the part the steel decides, and it is the reason this is worth doing at all.