About HOTKNIVES

Hot Knives now offers your tool room a great choice. And it boils down to this: if you could buy a set of quality, custom-profiled semi-finished HSS knives and a precision template from a reliable supplier, and 90% of the work is done when your order is delivered – then you apply a light finish grind and side clearance (if necessary) in 5-10 minutes - is that a better way? From a cost perspective, for many if not most companies, the answer is probably yes .

There is a huge cost factor involved in making the determination of whether Hot Knives can be cost-effective for being your profiled knife source. That is opportunity cost.  Say your knife maker wasn't making that template and knives for an hour and half, but rather was doing another task for that hour and a half that actually made money for the company while we took care of 90% of the work and time in making your set of knives, then you  simply apply a light finish grind. How far in the “+” column are you on acquiring those knives? This is a very real cost analysis for most of our customers -  whose knife maker has other job duties to perform.
If you don't grasp this point, I can say with most certainty: you are throwing money down the drain going through the whole tedious process of making knives, starting from scratch.

For example, we can supply a set of two 4” total length knives and a template for $85.00. Some companies would calculate that they could make those knives completely in-house for, say $69.50 (1.5 hours labor @ $25/hr. = $37.50 + 8” steel @ $4/in. = $32.00).
If your knife maker performs other tasks, it doesn't end there. Say he could have been doing another job in that time that would have produced $50.00 profit? Now the actual (and real) cost is $119.50. Now you're $35.00 in the hole over what it would have cost to order from Hot Knives. What if doing other work would have produced $75.00 profit? Now you're $60.00 in the hole. On one set of knives!

The point is it's more expensive to make profiled moulder knives than you've probably realized. But without a knife service like Hot Knives, you didn't have a better choice. Now you do!

We truly believe we have a concept here for all companies that is, in a small way, revolutionary in concept. Now you can depend on an outside source to deliver a supplemental punch to your moulder knife-making that is long overdue and a real value to boot.