2025 Ultimate Steel Information

The Ultimate Steel is a drawing, NOT an auction, because we feel that all too often a donor’s’ work is severely discounted at non-profit auctions. While there are exceptions, too often a maker’s donation sells for ridiculously low prices at a non-profit auction and many folks expect to get such deals with any non-profit auction.

In the Ultimate Steel your donation is listed at its Retail Value. The value of your donation is not diminished, you are protected. Ultimately, we feel this contributes to more funds being raised from the whole of the prizes in the fundraiser, which is the entire point.

You can see how we do it from the 2024 Ultimate Steel at:  https://kniferights.org/ultimatesteel/2024-ultimate-steel/

The Ultimate Steel is a winner’s choice drawing. Each winner selects their prize from all that are not already chosen. It helps make the event more enticing for our donors and it means that you know that the person who selects your prize got something they wanted, not just a prize of a certain value. Plus, it means they view the vast majority of prizes.

We have a minimum Retail Value for custom knives of $350. The more valuable and exciting your donation knife, the more that helps us and the more it helps you by gaining more views. We try to arrange professional photography for all donation knives valued over $500.

In any case, we build you a page for your donation with links to your social media and web site as you may have viewed on this year’s site linked above. We get over 200,000 unique visitors to the Ultimate Steel during the fundraiser. We show the most exciting knives we get at our booth at the BLADE Show.

Ideally we’d like to receive your donation by no later than mid-March so we can include it in the fundraiser launch. Alternatively, if you can let us know what we will be receiving, and its value, and if you have a photo of a similar knife, we can receive it as late as the BLADE Show and still get it in for the launch in early-May, providing you maximum exposure. However, we need to receive your donation well before the BLADE Show for us to get it professionally photographed.

When your donation is ready, please contact me at dritter@kniferights.org and I will provide shipping instructions.  For knives that are to be professionally photographed, we typically have you ship it to the photographer.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me on my cell with any questions: 602-292-0997

Doug Ritter (Chairman)