People often ask us, “Are you fabulously wealthy knife makers by now?” I then respond with maniacal laughter. Actually no one asks that but if anyone is wondering we have made virtually nothing at this job so far in the past 5 years. Everything we make has gone into upgrading and improving our shop and production process. This is the latest thing that has taken all our money. This is an Evenheat kiln. Why do we have it? Well it lets us improve our temp cycling of our steel for better grain structure and harder steel and it gives us accurate tempering cycles as well so we can bring the steel down to a serviceable hardness. It also will get the knives out of the kitchen oven for tempering which makes my wife happy. It will also allow us to experiment with D2 steel and a whole variety of stainless steels. Right now we are making a batch of Aeb-l Stainless oyster shuckers as well as our normal 1095 steel shuckers. This will allow us to do all our own heat treating of these more complicated steels in house with out having to send them out for heat treating. It has a really cool computer controller that lets us program all our heat treating recipes and save them which assures consistency and quality every time.