January 12, 2023 The Magnacut Scandal (Internal Memo Made Public) 

We've been delivering some but we are starting to deliver a lot of the GSO-5.1s beginning this week. We'll be making a ton of content to bring you guys in the shop with us as everything is happening.

We actually recently had a wonderful customer reach out to start developing an AI-based solution for customer service. It will take a while to get that developed and implemented, especially since we have very little time to give that poor guy feedback, but we are working on it.

If you will see in the description and the placeholder image, this video is almost a year old. This was an internal memo that I have finally decided to release after much consideration. We have since found a path forward, obviously, and yes, all orders are being fulfilled and are delivering.

I know this video is almost a year old now, but I felt it important to finally make it public. It gives greater context and illustrates that we have been trying. My biggest mistake was shutting down in the face of all of this, I just didn't see a path forward when confronted with such a massive issue and didn't know how to talk about it. We had already started to pack for the move back east and the whole situation had me in a very dark place. Obviously we figured it out and we are fist fighting our way out of the situation. Any of the items in a Bohler or Uddeholm steel are great, and are wrapping up production shortly. K890 is a great alternative to 3V and Uddeholm Elmax is a wonderful stainless. These materials are much more consistent and since we have learned to deal with all of this shit you are seeing in recent videos, we are really fast at working with something that is actually nice and consistent. I owe my loyalties to you, the people who see the value, and what I'm doing, not corporations. The recent passing of my grandmother made something snap in me and I'm getting back on my original path.

This was an internal memo from almost a year ago. After much consideration, I am releasing it publicly to give folks greater context in what was going on during that time.

People want it, so I am going to continue to offer it, at least for now, as I get other Magnacut orders fulfilled. I need to order material anyway here in there, so we are just going to 100% video everything and if there are deficiencies, we are all going to hold the steel company accountable together. They will either improve, give us some kind of other resolution, or just be shown to be pieces of shit. We are only a 4 Hour drive from them now, so we can keep getting material replaced as quickly as we need to if something is deficient. It's good sometimes, so I know they can do the work, they just refuse to admit when they fall short on quality.

Ellie did add a more crystal clear title image. I didn't want to disturb the original date of the upload to modify the video. These have been my only fallback over the years with issues we've been dealing with and I don't want to taint any of the evidence by modifying it. If anyone has any ideas how to get around that, I am all ears. I'm just an idiot who makes beautiful knives.

I did open up the video with stating the current date at the time.

Now that the video is out there and has a life of its own, I am realizing it erased my original timestamp on the upload. Thankfully, I did mention the date at the beginning. I plan on releasing a couple more videos, so I will just make a intro video explaining all of it. Thanks for the feedback.

If anyone out there knows, let me know. I'm tired of being a bulletproof vest for these huge companies. We've eaten shit so many times and quietly took it.

Bohler Uddeholm seems to be working on some things. I'm excited to see what comes of it.

I mentioned the date at the intro, this was an internal memo from almost a year ago, when we first started realizing there was a huge problem with all of that magnacut. After much consideration, we are releasing it in the spirit of full transparency and disclosure and to give you guys some greater context regarding what we have been dealing with since then.

Seeing so much paint on knives makes a lot more sense to me since becoming a manufacturer.

Yeah, that honestly broke my heart. Mike Stewart and I may not see eye to eye on some things, but he didn't deserve that.

Check out some of our recent updates. We'll be giving a blow by blow of how all the parts are fairing as they move through our surface prep/inspection process. You can feel guaranteed that you're getting the very best Magnacut parts after watching how we 100% inspect every single blade. I just hope Crucible or Niagara finally decide to do something meaningful to correct all of this. I tried to let them handle it quietly and let me keep working but they didn't. Now we're all going to talk about it.

We'll be making a video tomorrow. We have a very clear path forward now that we're smoothing things out here in Pennsylvania. Attorneys take time but I'm not against it. Right now, we're adopting a policy of radical transparency and showing you guys everything as it's happening.

They never did anything meaningful to correct this or past complaints, so we're just fist fighting our way out of the situation with brute force effort. Thank you so much for the support. ❤️

Anything that leaves our shop you can trust, we 100% inspect everything.

If you can hear me in the intro or check out the timestamp, this was an internal memo video and is almost a year old. This was my first indication that something was going wrong with Magnacut. The situation turned out to be decarburization. We fought through it but nobody ever gave us any meaningful warranty relief. I am releasing this now to give folks a greater context of the situation back then, and how it affected our production. This was a really, really bad situation. I'm not the only one who went through this, so I'm just jumping in front of it for everyone.

No, the BBB is a private company, similar to how Duns & Bradstreet does "corporate credit" for profit. I don't know what a little company can do in the face of all of this to hold a large corporation accountable. I tried to let them handle it quietly, now we are going to all talk about it.

You get it. Peters' ended up unintentionally decarburizing about 850 Magnacut parts. I get that they were working off of poorly published data, but it also wasn't cool that the only compensation was not charging us for that bad work. We didn't even ask for a stress relieve, it had just become a standard part of their material prep, due to material strain and warpage they were seeing. This was an absolute nightmare, and it almost ruined us.

I didn't realize making this public was going to ruin the upload timestamp but oh well, people are seeing it, and will eventually figure out this video is almost a year old. I just wanted to give folks greater context into the situation and let them know we have been trying. I work for you, not corporations. The recent passing of my grandmother made something snap in me and I'm back on my original path.

Thank you so much for that. It's almost a year old now, but I felt it was important to release internal memo video, to give folks a greater understanding of what we have been going through and how it is affecting us. We have since found a path forward, those were all of the Cerakoted Limited Edition Knives, but there was still a phenomenal amount of loss in materials, time, and my sanity. I know other folks have been going through this, so I'm jumping in front of it for everyone.

This video is almost a year old, I am sharing this to give folks a greater context of what has been going on with us recently. I'm opening up and sharing everything. We had already done a sample batch, and a little bit bigger batch after that. That gave us the confidence to go really hard. This video also wasn't originally for you guys, it was an internal video memo I was sharing with Crucible and Niagara, to try to get this figured out. It ended up being decarburizing from a stress relieving process that Peters' heat treating was doing to address warping they were experiencing during hardening. They didn't know they were doing anything wrong, and until I lost my mind in the video, nobody else who made the steel seemed to understand what they were doing wrong either. They had already been talking about it with each other when I was affected by the situation. It's confusing to me and I don't know how they arrive at all of the data sheet information without knowing all of this stuff ahead of a public release.

This video is a year old now, from when we first started running into this particular issue. This is an internal memo I was sharing around with all the relevant people involved. This turned out to be decarburizing, I will explain in an upcoming video, but the entire situation was very strange. We've been having issues with voids in the steel and other stress/strain related issues in sheets. The reason I am seeing it is primarily due to all a process in manufacturing that is pretty unique to us. You can see in another recent video that we do a light compressive pen, which really highlights, voids and defects in material. I take this very seriously, so it has become part of my inspection process since taking over my own manufacturing. I used to be a customer of subcontractors and more or less got finished parts, so I was not aware of this stuff previously. Now that I am seeing these things, I can't unsee them.

Yeah, I'm feeling a lot less like a hostage these days. The future is looking much brighter.

I believe most coated it, or just scrapped it and ate the loss. Unfortunately, I went really hard last year after gaining a false sense of confidence in it the first go around. I know this video is almost a year old now, but I felt it was important to release it to you guys publicly, to give you a greater understanding of what was going on back then. This really messed us up and I'm sick of holding all of this in out of some misguided sense of loyalty to corporations. I work for you guys. They need to do better, to be held to higher standards, and to be held accountable when they fall short on these insanely expensive materials.

I will release other videos, and I believe I'll give an introduction to all of these internal memos, just in the spirit of full transparency. Some are on my personal profile that I use for internal sharing, so I will need to download them, and re-upload them.

Sometimes it's great and sometimes it's like in all my recent videos. I'm recording everything from now on and bringing you guys along to see everything.

Haha, sorry about that.

Sure, I can explain that. This issue absolutely stopped our production, right as we were moving back east to draw down expenses and regroup to have better communication with everyone we work with. As I said before, I can drive to everyone in a morning now, which has given us much clearer communication and absolute control over every aspect of our manufacturing. Those blades were originally high tempered, as we were having trouble maintaining consistency with the delta protocol being 2000 miles away. Now that we are back here, we are re-processing everything we can to the Delta standard, so you guys have the very best performance. They will start delivering in the next couple of weeks. The large blades are a great Heat Treat, but if we tried that now, it would twist them up to an unusual condition. They already warp terribly from material strain, which I explained in a previous video. I believe we can roll all of the smaller knives back to the Delta standard though. I just want you guys to have the best and I am very sorry for all of this. I needed to share all of this now to get the rottenness out of me. I owe my loyalties to you, not corporations.

This summary will help. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-7B0OhCENbA0.htmlfeature=shared

Yeah, Mike Stewart and I might have a difference of opinion on some things, but he didn't deserve that. To see something like that happen on such a large channel really broke my heart.

Because of previous bad experiences with these CPM steels, you can see our other videos, we went into this very slowly. I know they can do a good job and it can perform. We did two smaller batches before going hard to meet demand. To have it all blow up in our face like this was truly soul crushing. I don't understand how this was the most researched steel ever if the heat treating company who helped develop this didn't know they were doing anything wrong using standard industry practices. They had been doing a stress relieve for a while as a standard to mitigate bad part warping, I believe from retained processing stress. Again, check another video we made regarding CPM criticisms, I posted a screen grab of an email where I learned they were still experimenting with annealing temperatures on magnacut after already releasing it to the public. Peters' was unintentionally decarburizing parts in the stress relieving process, they had been sharing notes of problems with Crucible and Niagara, who both apparently didn't know what they were doing wrong either. The whole thing confuses me, and I am mad as shit for getting caught in the middle of it and being hung out to dry.

Any knife that leaves my shop, you can feel good about. If you want to change to a different steel though, I'm good with that. As long as we are actively making a knife in the steel you want, just let us know.

I will be making a video on that tomorrow, but those parts are already cut, machined, and back from heat treat. They just need finish ground and they will start heading over for assembly. We learned to deal with all this erratic stuff, so nice consistent materials are really easy for us. All the knives we have in K890 that are available for ordering are in the same situation. The only one lagging slightly is the EDC-3, which I wasn't able to rough grind before needing to jump off to finish GSO-5.1s. We should have the EDC-3s headed up to heat treat within two weeks.

We lost well over 20 sheets of material to this issue and were forced to make as many parts as possible good enough to be sellable to get through it. These were sold as the Cerakoted Limited Edition knives. This caused us MASSIVE delays, a heartbreaking hit to my name and tens of thousands of dollars in additional costs to recover the parts we did. We completely ate shit on the 18 sheets of Cruforge V I mentioned. Their warranty solve was a total of 4 sheets of material, two of those were sent to us for issues we were already having with voids in material and material strain caused because they didn't have a proper annealing formula worked out at the time. I'll make a video tomorrow but my plan moving forward is to record everything going on and share it with you guys. It's frustrating because they CAN do the work correctly but won't admit when they deliver something substandard and act like it's a favor if they decide to do anything about it.

Ok Sherlock Holmes, did we set up a whole movie set inside our new shop that looks exactly like our old facility in Boise? Did the folks who no longer work with us in the background of these videos come out to Pennsylvania to join in the grand conspiracy? Put down your rage, listen to the videos and try some critical thinking. We downloaded these from my personal profile that I use to share internal memos and re-uploaded them to our SURVIVE! RU-vid account.

We had everyone from Crucible, Niagara, Larrin, and others involved in this memo. Once everyone did their inspections and agreed it was in fact decarburization and Magnacut might be hypersensitive to being decarburized, I was cut out of the email chain. We received a total of 4 sheets of replacement material. 2 sheets for issues with voids and warping prior to this and 2 sheets related to this issue. It was a slap in the face to call that a warranty solve. I do apologize to everyone for shutting down, I just didn't know what to say for awhile in the face of all of this. I thought the journey was over right then, I needed time to regroup and figure out a path forward. Things like this, sending large batches across the country, is a huge reason we moved back to Pennsylvania. Now we can tightly control every aspect of everything. It has resolved every production issue and moving to Bohler Uddeholm steels has solved all of the material issues. I just really want someone to fucking make this right. Their carelessness in how this material was released pissed away months of hard work.

I apologize, some folks are missing the date on this video. It was in fact decarburizing, I believe due to poorly published data and not enough research ahead of releasing this steel. It happened at Peters' Heat Treating, while they were doing a stress relieve, trying to address part warping during hardening. They had been sharing feedback with the folks at Niagara in Crucible on the situation, but nobody knew what was happening. When I was affected and lost my mind, we got to the bottom of it, but we were functionally left to deal with the whole situation on our own. We had a significant amount of loss, due to extreme warping, but we were able to salvage some of it. It really set us back and cost us tens of thousands of dollars more than we were expecting to avoid it being a complete loss.

This video wasn't meant for public consumption, it was an internal video memo I was sharing with all relevant parties, trying to get to the bottom of this. I am releasing it now in the spirit of full transparency, and to help folks have a greater context of some of the struggles we've had with some of these materials. A lot of folks have been affected by material inconsistencies coming from these companies. I'm just jumping in front of it for everyone. We will be dropping more content shortly, this time with an intro video to provide greater context for anyone watching.

They were all involved in this email and video thread. Once everyone agreed it was decarburization and that Magnacut might be hypersensitive to it, I was cut out of the email chain and didn't hear anything more from anyone.

This video is almost a year old. We're sharing for full transparency and to give you guys context on what's been happening. We'll be making a ton of content moving forward, stand by.

This video is about a year old now. This was an internal memo video that I was passing around with all relevant parties. They ultimately determined it was decarburizing, yet I'm unsure how nobody knew what was going on until I was in that situation myself, and then lost my mind because of the scale of the issue. Early on, this material had tons of manufacturing stress in it from steel processing and Peters' Heat Treating was trying to do a stress relieve to fix the situation. They were unintentionally ruining parts, due to a poor understanding of the material under the conditions they were using to do the stress relieve. An atmospheric furnace is fine for a lot of grades, is a pretty industry standard and I believe exactly how Niagara Specialty Metals anneals raw sheets. I believe this all happened because of poorly published data. They were intimately working with Crucible on processing samples to create these values, so I'm not sure how this never came up during development, ahead of this material reaching the public. Even still, the data sheet does not indicate this risk exists. I will make some follow up content today clarifying everything.

Dude, human to human. I didn't want this. I did this so we could be good on our word after subcontractors made huge promises they never followed through on. I've had to become what this situation needs, I drop the ball sometimes on communication because a lot of folks are just straight up mean and it burns me out. It's not right, I know, but I'm just a human being doing his best. What I do know is we're doing better every day and we make really, really high quality knives. I only released this for greater context and to let folks know we weren't just sitting around doing nothing. We figured it out, found a new path and moved forward. Bohler Uddeholm steels weren't available then, now they are.

Listen to the intro, this video is almost a year old. We're ALL having the same frustration. Put down your rage for a second and listen. This is an internal memo from almost a year ago, when we first started realizing there were issues with a giant, magnacut batch. I am releasing this now after consideration, in the spirit of full disclosure, to give you folks greater context regarding what we've been dealing with. We are working through it but it hasn't been easy.

This video is from almost a year ago now, it was an internal video memo I was sharing with all interested parties, to try to get this figured out. I was expecting a quick warranty swap on steel and instead was essentially told to pound sand. For a minute I thought this was it for our journey, I didn't see a path forward after investing so heavily into this steel that everyone wanted. I'm sorry but I didn't even know what to say, how to explain this to people.