About a year ago, we started toy­ing with the idea of cre­at­ing a spe­cialty CNC work­shop at the Tor­mach Train­ing Cen­ter here at the com­pany head­quar­ters in Madi­son, Wis­con­sin. The work­shop would fit into a niche-interest like knife­mak­ing, RC car mod­ding, or model rail­road­ing. We already had the train­ing facil­ity and qual­i­fied machin­ists—the only fac­tor miss­ing from the equa­tion was an instruc­tor will­ing to come up with a project for the class.

Part­ner­ing with John Grimsmo on his pop­u­lar Knife­mak­ing Tues­days video doc­u­men­tary, we put the chal­lenge in John’s cor­ner, ask­ing him to design a knife that could be built from a raw piece of water­jet cut from 5160 high car­bon steel over the course of three to four days. Describ­ing the work­shop as a hands-on spe­cialty course designed for CNC enthu­si­asts with a spe­cial inter­est in the craft of mak­ing high-end cus­tom knives, stu­dents would also receive prac­ti­cal expe­ri­ence in CNC pro­gram­ming, machine con­trol, and machining.

He came up with the Tor, a fixed blade hunt­ing knife each stu­dent would make as a “take home” project at the end of the week.

Sched­ul­ing the class for the first part of Novem­ber, five stu­dents reg­is­tered — one from Texas, two from Cal­i­for­nia, and two from here in Wis­con­sin. Fol­low­ing a daily itin­er­ary, blades were machined, heat treated, tem­pered and hard-milled for a sur­face fin­ish. G10 han­dles were then machine con­toured and installed with the blade before using a Wicked Edge knife sharp­en­ing sys­tem on the final edge. Between class­room instruc­tion and mak­ing their own Tor, stu­dents worked together and even hung out at the local brew pub one night.

Know­ing a few peo­ple might be inter­ested in see­ing what went on dur­ing the class, we took the oppor­tu­nity to roll the cam­era through­out the week. Talk­ing about their over­all expe­ri­ence and impres­sions on the last day, here’s what they had to say.

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And, as long as they were in the build­ing, we put John and Erik in the inter­view seat and asked them a few ques­tions about their jour­ney so far. Watch this one all the way to the bloop­ers out­takes at the very end.

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About Julie Hen­ning

Julie Hen­ning is the Tor­mach Tech­ni­cal Writer. She has a ten year back­ground in tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion and mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion in the med­ical device and printed cir­cuit board indus­tries. Julie holds a BS in Tech­ni­cal Com­mu­ni­ca­tion from the Mil­wau­kee School of Engi­neer­ing and a MS in Tech­ni­cal Com­mu­ni­ca­tion from Col­orado State University.