This is the Chef Knife Making Kit from Man Crates. As the name suggests, the crate includes everything you need to make yourself a high-end chef knife at home, with an heirloom-quality, forged VG-10 Damascus steel blade.
Inside this crate you’ll find a portable bench vise, metal files, sandpaper, a full tang Damascus steel blade, glue, fixings, a detailed instruction manual, and micarta handles that you file into the perfect shape to fit your own hand.
This is the Chef Knife Making Kit from Man Crates. As the name suggests, the crate includes everything you need to make yourself a high-end chef knife at home, with an heirloom-quality, forged VG-10 Damascus steel blade.
History Speedrun: Man Crates
Man Crates is a US-based gifting company known for shipping products in sealed wooden crates that recipients typically with a crowbar. That said, some Man Crate offerings have also been shipped in metal ammo cans, depending on the theme in question. The whole concept really centers on presentation almost as much as the contents.
Man Crates was founded by Jonathan Beekman in early 2011 in the Bay Area. Early on, Beekman was running the company from an apartment before moving into warehouse space in Redwood City, California as the company grew.
In 2015 Man Crates announced a $3.1 million seed funding round. Investors included Rothenberg Ventures, Sovereign’s Capital, OVO Fund, Corazon Capital, Tekton Ventures, and several individual backers. At the time, the company described itself as having grown largely through organic word of mouth promotion rather than any significant paid advertising campaigns.
The company soon added an East Coast fulfillment and shipping warehouse in New Jersey to support increasing demand. Around the same time Man Crates had a catalog of 40 to 50 product varieties, with prices ranging from $25 to over $180 USD depending on the item.
Man Crates is now a well-recognized brand across the United States, with many having either received one themselves as a gift or can think of at least one or two men they know who got them.
They have a huge variety of crates including the grill master for people who want to BBQ at restaurant level, the gourmet hot sauce crate, the beef jerky crate, the Valentine’s Day crate (actually a heart shaped box), the bacon crate, and quite a bit more.
The Man Crates Chef Knife Making Kit
This is the Chef Knife Making Kit from Man Crates, inside you’ll find everything you need to make yourself a professional-grade chef knife, including a detailed instruction manual and a beautifully forged VG-10 Damascus steel blade with a full tang.
This is the Chef Knife Making Kit from Man Crates, inside you’ll find everything you need to make yourself a professional-grade chef knife, including a detailed instruction manual and a beautifully forged VG-10 Damascus steel blade with a full tang.
The kit also includes a portable bench vise, metal files and rasps, a few different grades of sandpaper, drill bits, handle pins, and the Micarta handle pieces. The handle comes in rectangular form, and requires the knifemaker to shape it using the files to get a perfect fit for their own individual hand.
The kit is now available to buy direct from the official Man Crates Amazon page here with an MSRP of $79.99 USD.
Images courtesy of Man Crates
Articles that Ben Branch has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
