No Forge, No Fire, Half a Ton of Titanium: Archie at Nice Guy Machine Co.

Watch The Great American Knife Tour™ video: https://youtu.be/Y73bbToSDk8

Three stops into this tour, my daughter had forged two knives by hand with a hammer and an anvil. Then we walked into Nice Guy Machine Company in North Carolina, and there was no forge at all.

There is a long, narrow building Archie calls the caboose, which is the shotgun style you build when your lot is small. There are two CNC machines, a computer station, a tumbler, a sandblast cabinet, and close to a ton of titanium.

It is the same industry solving the same problem from the opposite end, and it was worth the drive to see them back to back.

He bought the machine to learn to make knives

Archie did not set out to become a pry bar guy.

"I honestly started doing this with the purpose of learning to make knives," he said. "I thought I would buy a CNC and learn to make a couple of widgets and gadgets and gizmos."

Then he started carrying one of his own pry bars. And kept carrying it.

"I carry a pry bar way more than I carry a pocket knife. I almost never reach for my knife unless I'm cutting my kids' sandwiches."

The original idea came out of travel. He spent time in countries where you simply cannot have a knife on you, and needed a tool that would still be in his pocket when he got there. Everything since has come out of the same place.

"There's a little niche for every little thing that I make, and it comes out of the need to have it."

He is also unbothered by people who think an EDC pry bar is unnecessary.

"I suppose it is," he said. "So are fingers."

Every curve, drawn by hand

The part of the shop where Archie spends most of his day is a desk.

He pulled up the CAD file for the Japanese Cowboy, which started as a 10mm wrench. He designed the geometry for the wrench first, then drew the entire pry bar around it.

What I did not appreciate until he showed me is that every curve on that tool is a spline he placed by hand, then dragged into position point by point. He grabbed the handles and moved them around while we watched.

Then he explained the tangent tool, which is the detail that stuck with me.

Fusion works to millionths of an inch. If two lines look perfectly aligned but you have not explicitly told the software they are tangent, they are not. They are not even connected.

"Anything that looks the way it's supposed to look is never right unless you select it to be right."

He walked me through the build history of the tool, which starts as a flat two dimensional extrusion that looks like a water jet cut part and gets uglier before it gets better. Big cuts, geometry drawn on faces, features added and then suppressed when he decides he does not like them.

"There's a lot of stuff where you're like, I'm not sure if this will work. And then again, I'm not sure if this will work."

His summary of all of it was blunt.

"Drawing the pictures is the easy part. Programming the CNCs to make that is a lot more difficult."

Then there is the reason his tools have rounded edges when most do not. The fillets on the perimeter are cut with a specialty tool that costs around 100 dollars and lasts about 20 pry bars before it is done.

"That's why nobody does fillets. It's a 100 dollar tool that is harder to use versus a 20 dollar tool that's easy to use."

Titanium, and the tool steel argument

Archie works almost exclusively in grade 5 titanium sourced in the United States. He hears about it.

His answer is not that titanium is harder. He knows it is not.

"I have tool steel pry bars from every popular maker, and I choose titanium," he said. Titanium is harder to machine, harder to get right, harder to get a good surface finish on. He picks it anyway because it does not rust or corrode, it goes through a metal detector, you can swim in the ocean with it, and it is remarkably light. I picked up a solid bar of it and was still surprised.

Then he made the point I keep thinking about.

"The thing that EDC tools are meant to do is the C part. You carry it. Just because the only tool you have is a hammer does not mean that everything is a nail."

He does not baby the ones he owns, but he also does not pretend a pocket tool is a wrecking bar. His own daily beater is a blem. He showed me two pry bars that lived in his tool bags for the last five years of his contracting career, one a titanium Stiletto and one a grade 2 bar, both thoroughly beaten and both still working.

"It doesn't look sexy, but it's an extremely useful lightweight tool that's there for me when I need it."

The bank account is in the corner

I asked whether titanium is hard to source. He laughed.

"It's not hard. It's expensive."

He used to buy around 2,000 dollars of titanium at a time to keep his pricing reasonable. His last order was 45,000 dollars, roughly 900 pounds. There is close to a ton of it in the shop.

"This is my bank account. I put every single thing that I have into the future of the business."

The waste side of that is better than I expected. Because he runs one material almost exclusively, nearly every scrap gets recycled. A guy who runs a YouTube channel called Scrapping with Grandpa comes by every two weeks and hauls off two full bins.

Seventeen years of finish carpentry

Archie was a general contractor for 17 years, and a hands-on one.

"I wasn't just writing checks. I was crawling around in the crawl space all day every day."

For the last five of those years he was doing almost exclusively finish carpentry, including 20 room five star hotels where every unit got cherry, oak, or knotty alder trim by his own hands. That work is where the shop comes from.

"You have to set up jigs, you have to set up workstations, you have to be super efficient."

Watching him move through the building, that is exactly what it is. Raw stock in one zone, op one, op two, deburr, wash, blast, tumble again, then upstairs. He calls upstairs the clean space, and it is where final quality control and hand finishing happen. Everything gets hand rubbed with oil. He likes jojoba. Kelsey, who works one day a week, prefers olive oil, so it depends who is doing it.

He runs quality control three times. Twice downstairs, once after each machining operation, because he does not want to spend op two on a part that is already lost. Then a final pass upstairs. He showed me a pile of pocket clips that had failed, and the failures were things like a faint burr near the M in the NGM stamp. I could not see it until he pointed.

What drove him out of contracting was partly the sawdust and partly the help.

"I want every single thing to be level and plumb, and I know the excuses of why it's not right," he said. "I wanted to work in my own garage instead of other people's houses."

The EDC part was never in doubt. He was taking pocket dump photos in 1996 on a disposable 35mm camera, back when that meant a Case knife, a Zippo, and a Maglite Solitaire.

Forty a day, all signed

Archie makes around 40 bars a day, and every one ships with a hand-signed certificate.

He does his own initials on all of them without exception. Kelsey or his wife sometimes fill in the rest of the card, and he does about half of those himself.

The packaging is minimal on purpose, and it has one strange, excellent detail. Open the box and you get hit with the smell of Bazooka Joe gum, along with a short company biography, a sticker, and a fortune.

That comes from a specific frustration.

"I'm always like, oh man, bummer, I have to finish this part of it. Or I have to oil the scale because I don't like how that looks," he said, describing opening a new knife from just about anybody. "I do not want that with Nice Guy Machine. I want somebody to crack this thing open and it's just done."

He has also never moved any of it overseas, and his reasoning is not a slogan.

"I can only serve my own interests. Every single thing that I make is something that I like. I wouldn't buy that, so why would I make it?"

The 200 dollar question

People see the price and reach for the obvious objection. I have a screwdriver that could do that.

Archie only answers for himself.

"I put high value on my personal space and my personal time on this little go around that we have here. I'm not sure that we ever get another chance," he said. "So when I put something in my pocket, I want to be like, I like this thing. It inspires me."

Then he told me about being a raft guide in the early 2000s, making 21 dollars a day, and carrying a Sebenza.

"The dollar value of my day was not as important as the value of my time and space on this planet."

Why he is on Patreon instead of chasing an algorithm

Archie runs a sizable Patreon, and when I asked if he pushes it, he pushed back on the premise.

"The five dollars people pay does not make up for the time that I'm not on the shop floor. I would be financially better served down there with my nose to the grindstone."

What he actually likes about it is the plumbing. It reaches people by email, which means nobody gets to shadowban him out of his own audience, and nobody sells ads against it.

"Your email inbox serves you, and it only serves you what you want."

His free weekly videos are free because he decided that is what he would want from someone else.

"How cool would it be if Mick Strider or Rick Hinderer did a live once a week on their Patreon, and it was free? I'd be on it just like that."

For buyers the practical case is simpler. Patreon is a guaranteed pre-order system with a 24 hour window, so nobody has to set an alarm, and he puts something new up every six weeks. Failing that, the email list gets drop notifications and nothing else.

Where to find it

Nice Guy Machine Company is at niceguymachine.com, and the Patreon is the surest way to get a specific thing you want.

We also carry Nice Guy Machine at LoneStarKnife.com, including a few pieces that have never dropped on his site.

Buy a pry bar. While you are at it, buy something sharp too.

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The Great American Knife Tour is a three week run through more than 35 American shops. Watch the full playlist on YouTube to see how differently these makers get to the same place.