Dork Design is the label I made up a couple of years ago to label my silly CAD and 3D printing designs. Largely this seems to consist of an avalanche of niche single purpose trays and storage widgets, but my efforts also extended to producing two knives.

Well, sort of.

3D printable materials being some of those famously unsuitable for producing functional blades, or at least blades which you'd expect to work more than once, both of these are utility knives that accept standard Stanley style trapezoid box cutter blades. Thus the entire hassle of dealing with blade steels at all can be neatly outsourced. Now that's somebody else's problem, which is my favorite kind of problem.

Dork Design knives have a couple of simple design paradigms, which taken together conspire to make things not so simple after all. First, every component except the box cutter blade must be producible on a consumer 3D printer. Everything means everything — Fasteners, clips, any spring loaded components, all of it. Second is that all parts should be printable as-is as much as possible and eschew requiring any supports or stupid tricks to pull off. Third is that everything must be able to go together as printed to produce a real functional mechanism without resorting to any glue, tape, rubber bands, or other nonsense.

The upshot of this is that my Dork Design knives are unlikely to excite anyone enough to set the world on fire or revolutionize the synergistic paradigm of the vertically integrated cutlery manufacturing supply chain, or whatever. Neither will they attract to me millions of dollars' worth of investor cash. But the process was a fascinating and highly instructional experience in the field of, for lack of a better description, product design.

If you'd like to purchase an example of either of the Dork printed knives, you can do so over at the Shop page. I've also released the print files for these on Printables, so if you have access to a 3D printer you can have a go at making your own. "Why, on the whole damn green Earth," I hear you cry, "do you make the models freely available to everyone in the world if you expect to sell a single one of these things?" Because that's the kind of generous nerd I am.

Purchasing a Dork knife from me directly allows you to support me in my endeavors, if any of those do so amuse you, and also entitles you to a very silly included instructional pamphlet.