05-11-2020, 09:05 PM
Thanks for the great feedback and good ideas Mr. Brian. It’s good info that you sharpen right up to the handle frequently. That’s very interesting and exactly why the Kallyrest has a 7/8” wide rest piece. Glad that design is being put to good use!
A lot of thought has gone into trying to make the sides easily attached/removed and we are still working on it. There are many considerations to make it work well with the current rest design. The screw hole nearest the belt is very low on the rest. The lower screws or whatever need to be very flat and not protrude much from the side or the knife handle would hit them. If the handle of the blade hit a screw head, that would increase the distance from handle to belt and more of the edge could not be directly sharpened.
The sides need to be as thin as possible and made of plastic. Permanently attaching posts in thin plastic is problematic.
The sides need to be well attached to the rest. They can’t wobble or become detached in the middle of sharpening.
One idea we kicked around was to have magnets in the center of the rest with metal pins on the sides so they could snap onto the rest. Sound good on paper, but attaching metal pins to 1/16” thick plastic has its issues. The magnets would have to be strong enough to securely hold the sides in place. Folks would grab onto the side and pry it off. That would put all sorts of lateral stress on the pins and the little pins would soon get wobbly and the MTBF would be ephemeral.
Another idea was to have o-rings in the bore of the holes in the rest. Metal posts on the sides would press tightly into tho holes and be secured by the o-rings. Sounds cool, right? Just push the sides on and pull them out. A couple of issues however: The same issues with pins in thin plastic apply to this too. Additionally, machining tiny grooves on the inside bores of the holes is problematic. Assembly time would be a real pain. I for one would not want to sit down with 500 rests and 2,000 tiny o-rings and have to insert them into tiny holes. Assembly time has to be considered.
I only mention the above thinking to demonstrate that easy attaching/detaching of the sides is important and is under consideration. When the fine points of implementation are considered it’s not as quite as simple as it seems at first blush.
A custom injection molded plastic cap that slides over the top of the rest and is held in position with one thumb screw would be ideal. The problem with that is having molds made is expensive and production needs to be scaled to thousands of units for acceptable ROI. And… the Kallyrest just ain’t there yet. It’s the details of actual implementation and production considerations that always turn into a head-scratcher.
My current thinking that sides will attach with two small thumb screws (like the screws on the ATF-10G) at the top of the rest and two regular flat head screws in the lower holes. Not as slick as I would like, but in reality would only take about a minute to attach/detach.
Please keep the great feedback and idea coming! It is super appreciated and every idea is seriously considered.
A lot of thought has gone into trying to make the sides easily attached/removed and we are still working on it. There are many considerations to make it work well with the current rest design. The screw hole nearest the belt is very low on the rest. The lower screws or whatever need to be very flat and not protrude much from the side or the knife handle would hit them. If the handle of the blade hit a screw head, that would increase the distance from handle to belt and more of the edge could not be directly sharpened.
The sides need to be as thin as possible and made of plastic. Permanently attaching posts in thin plastic is problematic.
The sides need to be well attached to the rest. They can’t wobble or become detached in the middle of sharpening.
One idea we kicked around was to have magnets in the center of the rest with metal pins on the sides so they could snap onto the rest. Sound good on paper, but attaching metal pins to 1/16” thick plastic has its issues. The magnets would have to be strong enough to securely hold the sides in place. Folks would grab onto the side and pry it off. That would put all sorts of lateral stress on the pins and the little pins would soon get wobbly and the MTBF would be ephemeral.
Another idea was to have o-rings in the bore of the holes in the rest. Metal posts on the sides would press tightly into tho holes and be secured by the o-rings. Sounds cool, right? Just push the sides on and pull them out. A couple of issues however: The same issues with pins in thin plastic apply to this too. Additionally, machining tiny grooves on the inside bores of the holes is problematic. Assembly time would be a real pain. I for one would not want to sit down with 500 rests and 2,000 tiny o-rings and have to insert them into tiny holes. Assembly time has to be considered.
I only mention the above thinking to demonstrate that easy attaching/detaching of the sides is important and is under consideration. When the fine points of implementation are considered it’s not as quite as simple as it seems at first blush.
A custom injection molded plastic cap that slides over the top of the rest and is held in position with one thumb screw would be ideal. The problem with that is having molds made is expensive and production needs to be scaled to thousands of units for acceptable ROI. And… the Kallyrest just ain’t there yet. It’s the details of actual implementation and production considerations that always turn into a head-scratcher.
My current thinking that sides will attach with two small thumb screws (like the screws on the ATF-10G) at the top of the rest and two regular flat head screws in the lower holes. Not as slick as I would like, but in reality would only take about a minute to attach/detach.
Please keep the great feedback and idea coming! It is super appreciated and every idea is seriously considered.