Kydex, Innovation, and Pushing the Line Forward Part II
Tools of the trade
Before we go too far into the production process, it’s important that we have the right tools for the job. If you’re approaching Kydex as a hobby or a way to make your own gear just the way you like, you probably don’t need to go wild at Lowe’s buying all the top of the line tools. However, if you are going to be making a lot of gear, you really want to step up to professional grade tools as soon as possible.
When we started KCT, our shop had some very bargain-level machinery and tools in it. And a lot of that stuff did pretty well getting us going. Once we started tackling high piece count retail orders though, we knew we needed to upgrade. We got a new belt sander, two new Dremel stations with flexible necks, built a few more presses, and got a few more odds and ends. Yes, the cash outlay was a concern, but the improved efficiency makes up for it.
While we were making these upgrades, there were a few smaller Kydex companies that we
talked to about what we needed. What we soon realized is that there are a lot of people doing this at a hobbyist level while trying to project a business-level image. These are the people heating their Kydex on a griddle or trying to use a razor knife to do a Dremel’s job. If you want professional results, you need to work like a professional. There’s no secret to that, and it applies to everywhere in life.
Since I’m at it, I want to impart a little bit of information I had to learn the hard way. Book presses suck. A lot of DIY sites for Kydex show you how to make and use a book press. The problem is that every book press we have made breaks under repeated use, which really slows you down. We solved this problem using small sheets of aluminum with molding foam layered over them. Tension and pressure is supplied by several industrial self-ratcheting clamps. This gives us a secure press that is immune to warping or splitting, while giving us excellent definition and crushing force.
What now?
If you want to dive into this as a business, even something part time, you’ll need to get your production methods down cold. You’ll know you have your methods down when you’re not breaking your equipment down for retooling every run. You’ll be able to eliminate more of your materials waste. And, most importantly, you’ll be able to produce a consistent product. And that last part is really critical. Your workshop can be a mess, you can waste all kinds of material, but if you make a product that is consistent with the other products you make, the customer is well on their way to being happy. So once you’ve gotten your methods down, don’t change horses mid-stream. Eventually you’ll get to the point where you’ll be innovating and optimizing your own designs, which is great, that’s how you bring new products to market. But if you struggle to make five holsters exactly the same way, you’ll want to nail that down before you push forward.
With something like Kydex, standardizing a design can be tricky. It’s not like machining a part, where you have precise tolerances and a fully spec’d part. There can be a lot of variation based on tooling, production process, heating method and evenness, and good old human error. The best way to make a repeatable design is to make a finished product that you’re happy with and measure it, and record the key dimensions. You should also bear in mind the material dimensions that you started with. Sure, that belt loop is X inches now that it’s finished, but how big of a piece do you need to start with? Making Kydex gear is an art of subtraction, you’re starting with pieces that are much bigger than the finished product, so make sure you give yourself enough material to end up with a properly sized product.
Innovation
Finally. My favorite topic. This is one of the most rewarding, and maddening part of working with Kydex. It is a deceptively easy material to get started with. You don’t need any complicated machinery, you don’t need a CAD program to make functional gear. So there are a lot of possibilities right from the ground floor. Like any other invention process, it’s a lot of experimentation, trial and error, frustration, and then, finally, joy.
One of the first things we did when we started making gear is ask ourselves “what can we do with Kydex that is currently being done with something else?” That question is a good one, and has yielded several new designs. But our biggest leaps in innovation have come from the customer. Because no two people think exactly the same, people are going to have different ideas about how things should look or function. And sometimes that will push you in directions you never thought of.
Our MOLLE-Link system, which has been widely regarded as pretty damn amazing, was developed in response to a customer’s need. Now that I’m done racking my own charging handle, I’ll explain. A Force Recon Marine vet came to us and asked for a sheath for his knife that he could mount behind his mag pouches, but in front of his vest. We worked on it for weeks with no joy. We tried a bunch of different designs, all of which were too bulky, complicated, prone to failure (lots of little parts and screw sets), or too much like something else on the market. We were about to tell the customer we just couldn’t make the magic happen. And that’s about the worst feeling there is in this business. We were using some scrap to try out new ideas when we figured it out. An older design that never went anywhere formed the basis, and a few hours later we had the dimensions drawn out, the sheath made and a few prototype holsters finished.
Fast forward to today. The MOLLE-Link system is like Picatinny rail for Kydex and MOLLE. It addresses the need that a lot of shooters have without a bunch of reliability problems. That’s a pretty bold claim, but I stand behind it. The big takeaway here is that this never would have happened without someone asking us for something that we didn’t do. Hell,
when the request came through for the sheath, we weren’t even doing knives. We were comfortable with holsters and mag carriers, and this was so far out of our comfort zone that we didn’t even have a map for where this could lead.
When it comes to thinking outside the box, the customer may not always be right, but sometimes they really do have the right idea.
