Packaging the Product

July 23rd, 2005

There are lots of steps to take from the time a knife arrives at my doorstep, until it gets mailed to a servicemember. Most of those steps involve getting rid of a lot of excess packaging while turning the knife into a Hobbit Hole “special”. This is a brief summary of what happens to a Camillus BK2 “Campanion”.

First, a photo of the “ingedients” in their original form, with the “finished product” at the bottom of the picture:

We see the nice large green box, the knife, sheath, cardboard safety sleeve, cleaning cloth, instructions, and a very nice business card from Camillus Cutlery. To that, the Hobbit Hole adds a diamond sharpener, and adapter to attach the knife to the loops on body armor, and our own cover letter.

The handles are removed from the blade, the blade is then laser-engraved, reassembled, honed, and put back in the sheath. The adaptor is then put on the sheath. Then everything is stuffed into a plastic bag, and taped shut. Once sealed, I know the knife is ready to put into a heavy-duty shipping box bought especially to house knives of this size.

And all those nice commercial boxes, vital to a knife collector, useless to a Soldier, get thrown away.

The original boxes have to be sacrificed because we would need an even bigger box to put it in, and the troops would just throw away the box when they got the knife, anyway. It’s easier to discard the box here, than ship it to Iraq, only to have it thrown away there.

This process also cuts down on the volume of packaging I have to store until the knife is mailed. Space is at a premium, as is funding.

Entry Filed under: Hobbit Hole Knives