Steel is the cheap part. Add the abrasives, handle, heat treat, fuel and — the one most makers skip — your time, and the number looks very different. Nothing here is saved or sent anywhere; it just does the arithmetic.
| Materials | — |
| Your time | — |
| Overhead | — |
| Cost to make | — |
| Profit | — |
| Fees & commission | — |
| Price | — |
Free tier: these numbers pre-filled, nesting for your next batch, and 5 saved quotes. No card.
Copy link to this breakdownBar sizes for ten common knife patterns, weight per inch for every standard flat bar, and quick heat-treat numbers for the usual carbon steels. Print it, tape it to the grinder.
Most first knives are priced by looking at what similar knives sell for and shaving a little off. That works until you count the hours. A hunter that takes six hours and sells for $120 with $35 in materials pays about $14 an hour before any overhead — less than the day job, and it cannot go up without either raising the price or getting faster.
The calculator prices from the other direction: what it costs, what your hour is worth, and a margin on top so the shop can afford its next belt grinder. If the market will not pay that for this knife, the answer is a different knife, not a lower rate — a smaller, quicker pattern, or a batch of five so the fixed setup is spread out.
Overhead is everything that is not this knife: belts that wear across many knives, power, propane, the grinder itself, insurance, the corner of the garage. Fifteen to twenty-five percent on top of materials and labor is a reasonable hobby-shop figure; a shop that pays rent should work it out properly. Margin is profit beyond your wage. Zero is fine for a hobby; a business needs some.