Making a knife drawer insert

[Rural Platypus]

Advice please folks!

I've been scratching my head over this one for the last few days and wonder if anyone has tackled something like this before.

I've been asked to make a knife insert for a kitchen drawer to hold a bunch of those nice Global knives - just like this in fact:

The only way I can think of doing this is to draw around each knife on a bit of mdf or hardboard, cut out the shape and then make myself a pin router arm for my router table, then use the template & the pin router arm to help me cut the profile of each knife in the drawer insert timber with a straight cutter, then rout away the waste to a consistent depth for each knife profile. Then I can add the 'pick up' cutouts using another template & a guide bush.

There must be a better way! :shock: Grateful for any pointers...

Cheers

RP

(BTW the picture is borrowed from the Mark Wilkinson website)

 

[orangetlh]

Hi RP,
I made a knife insert recently for our new showroom. Was slightly different to that one in that then knifes fitted into a slot so the knifes were horizontal but the blade slotted vertically into it. The problems i faced were, different thickness steel for different size knifes, very irregular handle profiles and also the fact some of the knifes were balanced so the handle was heavy and it would drop backwards out of the slot. As for the one in your photo, i think the templating and using a pin router is one option. You could cut out the knife profile and then use a large 50mm coving cutter to machine the slot for you to pick them up. The other way would be to cut the shape of the knifes out of a pice of timber say 20mm thick and then glue it to a thicker base to give a bottom to your inserts. The only problem i can forsee is as i said before the blades tend to taper and have irregular steps and things, could be a lot of work!