Kinda misleading to start with hinoki wood and not show a blade that uses hinoki wood? The interesting part to me is how the layers are put together, but I guess they were not allowed to show that.
My exact thought!
Thanks souch for posting this, I found it absolutely fascinating 😍😍
The obvious omission of the gluing and pressing processes was a disappointment. I've seen other videos like this from various manufacturers which show some of the presses at work, and a couple which show the gluing assembly, but none of them tell you the clamping pressures, the glue recipes, or demonstrate the actual full bonding times -- as you pointed out, they don't display this info 'cause they can't -- that's where a *lot* of the playing feel comes from, and it's some of the most important IP they have.
I was also really wanting to see their timber drying processes -- it takes two years of careful, humidity controlled storage to air-dry a crown cut timber slab... But that video showed them processing the entire tree boul straight into quarter sawn one-ply panels, (Drool!!) ...but then they cut straight to drum sanding the Hinoki boards, and then to CNC routing of different glued multi-ply panels!!! 🤯🤯 Hello? WTF? Whatwasasthatabout??
How long do they dry their green Hinoki panels for? Do they air-dry or kiln dry their timber? What's the RH and temp of their drying room if air dried? What's the kiln times and drying temperature settings if it's kiln dried?? What about the processing of their medials and outers? Do they get in koto, limba and ayous logs from Africa and process those in house as well? And what are the drying conditions for those? Talk about a bloody cock-tease of a video. They left out so much of the good stuff. 😭😭😭
Oh the luxury of buying and purpose processing an entire felled log at once!! I'm SO jealous!!! I would give my left nut to have that kind of capacity, or to do the kind of volumes that make such processes possible. You wanna know how much time I need to spend inspecting boards to find the right density timber??? Don't ask 😂😂😂😂😂
On the plus side, I loved that they still do so much by hand, and they still hand-sand the blade edges individually. Butterfly do their edge sanding by industrial machine, in stacks of ten or more blades at a time. Nittaku's way is better IMO. They also seem to be using PVA to attach their handle scales to the blades, and the low viscosity suggests it's a type 1 glue, but it's so hard to say from the video. (No manufacturing videos of them making dying and assembling the handle scales I note 🤣🤣 I reckon that's done via a third party manufacturer in a dedicated factory, just like Haitian do. That process ain't quite as pretty to look at.)
They also only showed them doing their flatness and QA checks at packaging -- there would have to be additional QA checks all the way down the line -- especially after pressing, to see if there was any internal collapses in the core woods (maybe they use vacuum presses? 🤷🏻) Also no mention of sealing the blades, just the labelling (and man I really need one of those labelling machines!) They put the blades into non-airtight boxes, so they would have to seal the blades as well I imagine, otherwise they'd start moving like Beyonce the second the blades hit any high or low humidity air.
Thanks again for posting this --- I gotta say I have a newfound respect for Nittaku gear on seeing their manufacturing processes in a bit more detail. Their blades have always been pretty good IMO but that video clearly demonstrates to me exactly why that is. Put simply, they care. Every worker there was moving slowly, carefully and deliberately, through every stage. No focus on through-put or speed or productivity, just a total focus on the end product itself, and carefully executing the task currently before them... They are people after my own heart!! 😍😍 Really love the way they go about it... Respect! 😎👍
