Let me start by saying this rack was never intended to be called The Antler Rack let alone look like a set of antlers on a deer, elk or moose!
As we kept extending our collection by creating new and different knives it became increasingly obvious we needed a rack to showcase these instead of just putting them back in the boxes or under bench draw.
I wanted to create something that you can just sit on your kitchen bench easily, not having to screw into the wall. I have always loved traditional Japanese Katana stands (from my Ninja Turtle days) and decided I wanted to create a stand that holds the knives in a horizontal position similar to these to display them as they should be displayed.
I sat down with a pencil, paper, compass, protractor and a ruler and started playing with shapes, radius and angles until a full size template was created.
From this point is was a matter of tracing these shapes around onto wood and then getting into the shed with a heap of power-tools and a “can do” attitude.
It took a while to cut the forms to have the blanks ready to be assembled. Lots of drilling, jigsaw work and bench saw but we got there.
I could have made my life easy and simply designed it with all straight lines and 90° angles but like was never meant to be easy right??
I am super happy with the fact I did not take the easy option and make it with all straight lines… boring!!
Well this was great for us, we now had a rack for our knives we love! We used this to display new collections for pics and videos for our Kickstarter campaigns when we created a new collection. We had a lot of inquiries from people who saw it and wanted one. There was only 1 six knife and 1 three knife rack in existence!
This proved a bit of an issue as we to this point do not have a milling machine big enough to cut out these forms and to make them the way I make the first one took forever and we would have no time to make knives!!
We have since found someone to cut the forms for us. This leaves us to drill the pilot holes and the other finishing steps. The other great thing about this is it has now given us the capability to pack them flat meaning we can now freight them to anywhere in the world easier and cheaper than if assembled!
The evolution of this rack has taken some time as I have just explained, but I am really happy with them and super proud. The perfect way to display your KOI KNIVES collection (or any knives for that matter). Personally when I walk into my house in the evening and into the kitchen I look at it every day and it makes me happy to see my beautiful knives on display.
If you are interested you can find them here:
https://www.koiknives.com/collections/koi-knife-racks
