TEMPERLINE

Pricing

What a custom knife actually costs to make

Ask a maker what their last knife cost them and most will tell you the steel and the handle. That is usually less than a third of it.

October 2026 · 6 minute read

There is a particular silence that happens when you ask a knifemaker what their hourly rate works out to. Not because they're hiding it. Because they have never done the sum, and somewhere underneath they suspect they won't like the answer.

This is the sum. It takes about ten minutes with a calculator and a knife you have actually finished.

The four buckets

Everything a knife costs you falls into one of four groups. Most makers count the first properly, the second roughly, and the last two not at all.

1. Materials you can see

Steel, handle stock, pins, bolsters, liners, sheath. The things you bought specifically for this knife and can point at. Nearly everyone counts these, and nearly everyone stops here.

2. Consumables you don't count

Belts. Sandpaper. Epoxy. Buffing compound. Etchant. Tape. Gloves. Fuel for the forge. The disc you wore out. The belt you binned because it glazed.

These are invisible because you don't buy them per knife — you buy them in boxes, months apart, and by the time you use them the purchase has stopped feeling like a cost. It still is one.

3. Overhead

Power. Gas. Machine wear and the tooling you replace every year. Rent, if you pay it. Insurance. The extraction system. The bandsaw blade.

Overhead is the bucket makers resist hardest, usually with some version of "but I'd be paying that anyway." You would. That's not the point. The point is whether the knives are paying it, or whether you are.

4. Your hours

The big one. And the one where the counting tends to get generous — the two hours that were really three and a half, the evening that doesn't count because you enjoyed it.

A worked example

Numbers below are in whatever currency you sell in. The ratios are the point, not the units — they come out much the same in rand, dollars, euros or pounds.

A drop point hunter. Stock removal, stabilised wood scales, mosaic pins, heat treat sent out. Sold for 400.

What went into it	Cost
Steel — CPM154 bar	65
Handle scales	25
Mosaic pins ×2	12
Bolster stock	18
Heat treat, sent out	25
Consumables — belts, paper, epoxy, compound	35
Power and machine wear	13
Before you touched it	193

So the knife sold for 400 and 193 of that was spent before your time was worth anything. Which leaves 207 for the work.

Ten hours on that knife, start to finish, including the sanding you'd rather forget. Two hundred and seven divided by ten.

You made 20.70 an hour. Before tax. In a trade that took you years to learn and thousands to equip.

That is the number. Not the 400, and not the 207 — the 20.70.

The way round it that doesn't work

The instinct at this point is to argue with the hours. It wasn't really ten. Some of that was learning. Some of it was enjoying myself.

All of that may be true and none of it changes anything. The customer paid 400. The bench was occupied for ten hours. You cannot spend that time twice, and next month's knife will take about the same.

The other way round it is worse: setting a shop rate, counting your hours against it, and then quietly not looking at what comes out. A knife that costs 637 to make at a 45 rate and sells for 400 is not a knife with a thin margin. It is a knife you paid 237 to give away.

What to actually do

Measure one knife properly before you change anything. Not an average, not a guess — one real knife, with the belts counted and the hours honest. You cannot fix a number you haven't got.

Then you have three honest choices, and they're all legitimate.

• Charge more. Usually the right answer and always the scariest. Most makers are a long way below where the work would support.
• Take less time. Not by rushing — by finding the two hours that go somewhere they needn't. Hand sanding past the point anyone can see is where they usually are.
• Accept it knowingly. Plenty of makers do this and it's a perfectly good decision. Deciding to earn less on a knife you wanted to make is completely different from finding out afterwards.

The first two need numbers. The third only needs honesty. All three beat not knowing.

The two mistakes everyone makes

Counting only materials. If your price is steel plus handle plus "a bit", you are pricing a kit, not a knife. The materials are the smallest part of what you sold.

Counting overhead twice. The opposite error, and rarer. If you fold power and machine wear into your hourly rate and add them again as a per-knife charge, every knife carries them twice and your prices drift up for no reason you can explain to a customer. Pick one road. Either overhead lives in the rate, or it's a line on the build — not both.

What good looks like

There isn't a correct margin. There is only a margin you chose.

A maker who knows a knife earns them 22 an hour and has decided that's acceptable for now is in far better shape than one who assumes they're on 60 and has never checked. The first can plan. The second is going to be surprised, and it'll be the kind of surprise that arrives about the time the grinder needs replacing.

Cost one knife properly. It takes an evening and it changes how you quote the next one.