The Fixed Kraken was inspired by Hypercar and traditional leather cover knife handles. We always love to do something people would love yet with different solution.
'Let's make a leather cover knife scales with stitches like hypercars, so we could have both nice leather touch and the aesthetics of stitching line. ' Damon said.
That's how this project starts and this type of solution was never being done before in the knife world.
It's new, turn out simple yet execute difficult.
- Leather shape design
It was very difficult to find a great looking inlay or leather cover design shape for the knife. The easy way to do is to cover the whole scale, with the same shape as the scale yet that looks lazy and have none aesthetic.
After tons of drawing and debate about why that line looks great, yet another one doesn't. We have come to the conclusion, that the shape should fill the bottom of the scale and leave some space on the top of the scale, which would make it feel solid instead of floating in air.
With those idea in mind, we finally get the design done with the inspiration of a car. You could find the finger cutout and the space for logo just designed like the space for wheels.
- Stitches design
It was designed just like hypercars with double stitching lines yet aesthetic have to let function go first. We could not make that double stitches in this compact narrow handle design and we refuse to sacrifice the ergonomic function to just for make it double stitching.
It's hard by the way to execute great ideas into real products have to make a lot of this kind of trade-off. And shape the idea with possible processes into an executable great idea that has true value.
- Stitching process
After all that work, the one thing that keeping us delay and delay the launch of the Fixed Kraken until now was the stitching process.
Since the design of the leather shape and stitching line shape was base on scale design and aesthetic, the stitching work can not be done by stitching machine like common shapes, we have to make it manually.
We also have to blast the scale first and then do the stitching, and once the needle hits the scales accidentally then leaves a mark, the whole scale has to bead blast and stitch again.
After all this difficulties, not to mention the difficulties of the blade(that will be an other story maybe for next time), the outcome is great!
Talking about being inspired by Hypercar, how could we miss the leather used in one? The Alcantara® is known as the luxurious, environmentally friendly, man-made leather for supper cars, and sports car decoration. All are made in Italy.
We bought some from their distributor, and we picked the color number 7586 for a very close blue to the Piratech brand.
It's very expensive yet can be clean with water or even some other cleaning soap unlike real leather. It's a prefect material for a EDC fixed blade or steak knife like the Fixed Kraken.
With the Magsnap system and the Alcantara®, you could easily take off the scales and clean the knife and scales after dining or any oily situation without worrying about the bacteria growing in some screw gap you could not clean.
We will also repose some blogs of how to clean and maintain your Alcantara® from their official website shortly.
You could also click the link down below to go check out those information at Alcantara.com.
Alcantara® Clean & Maintenance
How to remove stain on Alcantara
