Author: Cape Cod Cutlery

NCCA show  Knives video. Pretty cool!!

https://www.facebook.com/events/2081486438771379/permalink/2181129748807047/

Hit the link above to find out all about Cape Cod Beer’s Shuck a celebration of Oysters and Beer.   Live music, beer,wine, cider, raw shellfish, grilled cheese sandwiches, local conservation and farmers and Us!!  Does it get any better?  I don’t think so.

The “Wellfleet boys” got to try out our knives said they were solid and just as good as anything else they had used only a whole lot prettier.  It was nice seeing the rubber handled commercial knives sitting in the ice and guys using our knives to open thousands of oysters all day long.  We got to check out lots of Oyster shucking competitors knives and learn way more about oyster knives then we ever thought possible.  We will be tweaking our oyster knives a bit.  We will still offer the traditional Boston Stabber but we will be making a shorter version with a New Haven tip called the Barnstable Poker and we will make a long version of the new haven tip as well.   Also going forward we will be making them all from AEB-L stainless as we have been really impressed with bench testing of the temper by bending tips in a vise without breaking. We feel the heat treat in the kiln is very repeatable and will give us the strongest most reliable tips we can get.    We also had many requests for a clam knife so will be making a clam knife as well.

We will be at Wellfleet Oyster Fest this Weekend!!!  We are so excited!! This could be the biggest event we have been to so far!!!  Come on down and check us out and taste the ocean!!  We have stainless AEB-L steel oyster knives as well as our regular 1095 blades.  Lots of kitchen knives! we have been working straight out for three weeks to be able to offer a great selection of knives!!! Can you tell how excited I am from all the exclamation points!!!!

We met one of the members of the family that owns Barnstable Sea Farms this weekend at the Love Local Fest in Hyannis!   They tried one of our oyster knives and gave us a favorable bit of write up.  They raise oysters in Barnstable and Osterville so they get the taste of both sides of the Cape! Pretty awesome stuff!  October is the Month for Oysters and we will be at the Wellfleet Oyster Fest and Shuck! A Day of Oysters and Beer at Cape Cod Beer the following week.  We are so excited!!

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.

We had two cleavers brought to us this month for rehandling and sharpening.  The first belonged to a gentleman’s father or grandfather it was verified from the 1800’s it had no handle but was in other wise good shape.

The second one was found in the ground of a back yard by a plumber.  The house was from the 60’s but prior to that the land had housed soldiers. It was a rust crusted archaeology find but the biggest cleaver I have ever seen.  It of course needed a handle and the edge needed a complete reprofiling. Here it is after he cleaned it up with about a 15 inch overall knife for size comparison.  Both knives received handles of center cut cherry boards from my grand dad’s chicken house he built in the 1950’s.  My father had them milled when the house collapsed a few years ago.  They were the central roof supports.  They were still fine it was the rest of the building that collapsed.  They still smell like Mississippi clay, hay and musty barn.  Kind of awesome.

We will be a the Harwich Cranberry Fest this weekend for what we hope is a repeat of a remarkable event last year.  We have a good assortment of Japanese style chef knives and a great selection of outdoor knives for the camping and hunting enthusiast.

Hi all!  We are winding down the farmers market season.  The tourists have left in droves and we can finally take a breath.  WRONG!  We have a mad crazy holiday season lined up that promises to be busier than summer if only we can make enough knives!  Yeah, I may have way over booked a tiny two man shop but Tom told me the other day he works best under pressure so I took it to heart!

We had an awesome meeting with town zoning and building commissioner today.  We weren’t previously aware that while we can still be “two guys in a garage” we aren’t allowed to advertise our residential location to the public.  We really do want to be good neighbors.   This means we cannot have people coming to the shop from now on which is sad but probably for the best. We’ll still be around though! If you’d like a knife sharpened, or to check out our custom knives, check our schedule page or email us at fred@capecodcutlery.com to find out when we’ll be in your area or to see if we can schedule a pickup at a nearby public location.

We will  meet with a SCORE volunteer next Tuesday to talk about working on a long term business plan to grow from a home business to a medium sized custom knife maker and a destination location on the Cape.  I have hung around Ann Miller of Summer House Soap and Todd and Beth Marcus of Cape Cod Beer too much and have been inspired to become something as integral to the Cape Cod experience and community as Great White Sharks.  Just a matter of figuring out how to get there.