S&H - Shipping & Handling consists of:
- Postage - First $18 to $45 - depends on shipping selected, package dimensions and weight, what state or country the knife returns to, and how high the insurance.
- Handling
- consists of making or purchasing return containers, scanning and emailing pictures, email, securing the finished and sharp knife for shipping, making shipping labels, cost of printing supplies for those, travel to the Post Office to mail it.
Many hours of extra time for each knife at you costs often less than $5.00
Raw materials and parts - all the materials needed to do the work: blade steels, handle materials, rivets and pins, silver solder, guard, pommel, bolster metals etc.
Labor - Every piece is hand made from scratch, every detail, precision tolerances - all takes great amount of work.
Taxes and fees - collected by government on income, and purchases of materials and supplies. and currency exchange losses
Travel expenses - To the Post Office - to pick up and mail back your knife I travel 30 km.
To go to shop to do the repair takes on average 2 trips / knife at 20 km / round trip = 40 km
The fuel and bad road gobbles up your meager payment pretty fast.
So, for each design, each knife I make or repair for you, however small and insignificant, it would be impossible without the above mentioned inherent costs.
To clean the blade, inside of liners and springs, to replace the spring, to replace the handle scales, or just to "tighten" wobbly blade:
The pins / rivets have to be punched out and whole folder completely disassembled.
To replace a broken folder blade is extremely difficult, and in many cases impossible, without taking the knife completely apart.
Your perfectly good scales will not survive this, although I try my best to save them.
Your perfectly good ancient handle scales will crumble like a dry toast at the re-assembly if not already broken up by disassembly.
This is the way it is with rivets at the very edge of materials (Master pin in the middle of handle)
You are looking at extra cost of material - I do provide new installation labor at no extra charge.
The replacement folder blade needs to be fitted as to the thickness and position in opened and in closed positions to a tolerance of 0.002" - it is installed, checked and measured, adjusted, and reinstalled several times to accomplish that.
Pins can't be reused and have to be replaced, some requiring machining.
The blade may or may not require re grind to restore it to near original - the rust pits can be very small but also very deep.
Even with a re-grind it is not always possible to get all the rust pits out, and they are usually left alone where the trademarks are stamped onto the blade's ricasso near the handle. For most rusted blades, even pits will polish somewhat, looking much cleaner.
If the blade is re ground ( even 5 thousands of an inch), the back spring has to be re ground also to match - or the blade would become too sloppy sideways and spring too squeezed in between liners to work at all.
Etching: - If there is any logo etched or stamped too faintly on the blade itself, removing rust will obliterate it. The only exception is if the stamp is deep enough, or etching is deep into metal. It is not possible to sand and polish just around it. So it takes extra time to do less.
The work takes about 8-10 hours per knife from complete basic refinish up to the time is checked in at the Post Office
takes longer for more extensive repairs.
Making, hardening and tempering a replacement blade or spring is a job requiring additional time and expensive resources.
Kitchen knives
Even if you only have a cheap small kitchen knife needing a new handle (like the one you got at the garage sale for $2.00 - the cost of the repair is a lots more than meets the eye.
The handle material and installation is the same as is for $400 custom made knife, and finishing it takes as much shop resources as for the expensive knife.
It is unfortunate, but not avoidable.
My basic prices were based on the exchange rate of $1.00 US=$0.64 Can and have not changed in many years to keep the repairs still affordable.
Prices of supplies sky rocketed, and postage went up from $8 to $35 for the Express Post.
Now there are fuel surcharges added to the mail ... The lists of costs is growing. This is what average Basic fee is calculated on.
As the problem with "lost" mail is ever present, the cheapest Trackable and insured mail is by Expedited Parcel Post.
Thank you for your understanding.
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This web site was created and is maintained by Tony Hnilica -
*AJH* Custom Knives & Services
This web site was created and is maintained by Tony Hnilica -
*AJH* Custom Knives & Services