Knew Concepts
Aircraft-aluminium and welded-titanium fret saw frames, and the bench tools to match
🇺🇸 American Manufacturing
Our assessment
Company details
Where Knew Concepts products are made
The Mk.IV frame is built from “powdercoated aircraft grade aluminum” and is “powder-coated red and … extremely scratch and damage resistant.” The 5-inch Mk.IV “weighs only 214.3 grams”; the 3-inch titanium Birdcage “weighs only 171.5 grams.” A company that publishes its tools’ mass to a tenth of a gram is competing on engineering, not on price.
The Mk.IV is “designed to pull 50–60 pounds of tension on their blades, which makes it much stronger, and the blades vibrate less than our Mk3 saws,” using a cam lever “designed for rapid, repetitive blade changes (when piercing for example). The tension does not change when re-setting the blade.” On the titanium saw, “the spine is a welded titanium beam, the blade is tensioned with a Lever that can tension blades so tight they ‘ping’ with notes never heard before.”
The stainless bench pin is “Made in the USA of 3/16″ solid stainless steel, it will not bounce or shimmy as you cut,” and is stainless “rather than aluminum, so there is no risk of contaminating your sweeps or files with aluminum.” It ships with “a brass guide fence to give you a reference for angles in 15 degree increments from 0 to 60 degrees.” Custom in-house laser engraving is offered across the saw range.
American Manufacturing is the right label, and the reason is a distinction Knew Concepts makes itself. The frames and bench hardware carry unqualified “Made in the USA” statements across three product families, and the company calls itself an American manufacturer. The blades are a different business: they are bought in and resold, the Herkules jeweler’s blades are stated on the company’s own page to be “Made in Germany,” and the Pegas, Fix Blue, Fix Yellow and marquetry lines carry no origin claim at all. Blades are also the consumable — the thing a customer rebuys. Buy the frame for the American engineering, and know the blade in it probably came from Europe. The titanium saws are currently out of production because the company cannot obtain imported titanium sheet, which it says plainly on its own site.
The story
It started because retirement did not take. “Knew Concepts began 10 years ago when Lee Marshall, the inventor of a line of small hydraulic presses for the art jewelry world (Bonny Doon Engineering) decided to retire. That lasted about a week, then Lee was back in the workshop, taking the first serious new look at improving the centuries old design of jeweler’s saws.”
A job-hunting friend became the other half of the company. “At this beginning point, Brian Meek signed on with his old friend Lee for a few weeks to help out while job hunting. Brian designed some of our most distinctive products like the titanium Birdcage saws and the coping saws. The first production models rolled out of the Santa Cruz shop in early 2009, and it’s been a non-stop rollercoaster ride ever since.” Marshall died in June 2017; Meek bought the company.
The engineering has been recognised outside the trade. “Over the years, our patented saws have won a number of innovation awards, and just recently our titanium birdcage saw was featured in a paper by a Cambridge University researcher on innovative design.” Marshall’s own statement of intent still runs in the footer of every page: the tools “may feel luxurious to use, but they are never extravagant … and are made to last a lifetime.”
Why they matter
They re-engineered a tool that had not meaningfully changed in centuries. The jeweler’s fret saw is one of the oldest hand tools still in daily professional use, and a small American shop replaced the traditional heavy frame with a light aluminium truss holding 50 to 60 pounds of tension — out-designing a legacy European product category on measurable specifications rather than on price.
Precision hand tools for jewelers and metalsmiths are a segment almost entirely ceded overseas. Knew Concepts machines its frames domestically and sells them through distributors on five continents, which is American manufacturing competing by exporting rather than by undercutting.
And their titanium page is an unusually honest public record of what supply-chain dependency actually looks like. A US maker telling its customers that it has stopped producing its flagship titanium saw because it “can no longer import the titanium sheet we need to make these saws” is the domestic-materials argument stated by the company itself, not by a commentator.
Shop Knew Concepts products
Fret and jeweler’s saws, coping saws, precision vises and stainless bench pins — plus the blades to fit them.
Shop all Knew Concepts products →Visit Knew Concepts website →
Knew Concepts questions
Is Knew Concepts made in the USA?
The saws and bench tools are. Knew Concepts states “Made in the USA” directly on its aluminium Mk.IV fret and jeweler’s saws, its titanium Birdcage saws and its stainless-steel bench pins, and describes itself on its About page as “a small American manufacturing company.” The saw blades sold alongside them are a different matter — those are made by outside firms in Europe and are resold, not manufactured, by Knew Concepts.
Where is Knew Concepts based?
Watsonville, California. The company publishes a mailing address of PO Box 1087, Watsonville, CA 95077 and a phone number in the 831 area code. It does not publish a street address for its workshop; its About page records that the first production saws “rolled out of the Santa Cruz shop in early 2009.”
When was Knew Concepts founded?
The company does not publish a founding year, so we do not state one — its About page says only that it “began 10 years ago,” a rolling phrase, and separately that the first production models shipped in early 2009. What it does document is a product lineage: successive Mk.III, Mk.IV and Mk.V saw frames, each an explicit redesign of the last, plus the titanium Birdcage developed as a premium variant.
Are the blades American-made?
No, and Knew Concepts says so plainly. Its Herkules White Label jeweler’s blades are described on its own product page as “Made in Germany,” and its other blade lines — Pegas, Fix Blue, Fix Yellow and the marquetry blades — are outside brands carrying no US-origin claim. The American-made part is the frame and the bench hardware; the blades are consumables the company buys in and resells.