Richard Watson

Phil Stevens wrote:Kia ora Richard. I love the way those sound. I might need to upgrade from the old spring shears that I still use for trimming and touchup...this would probably see me flogging off my serviceable but noisy Heiniger 12V handpiece.

Hello Phil, I started this project with one aim in mind, to produce a lifetime product, a tool that could be past down. Having a changeable blade system means the heavy user can replace once worn out, for most people with a small mob will likely never wear out these super hard durable blades, but this depends on there environment. An good example - I have a man in New Mexico, USA who's been using my shears for a number of year now, he travels around the state shearing, because of the dust in the wool he does go through a set of blades every so often because he's having to use his whetstone sometimes halfway through shearing one sheep.
The other extreme, a customer in Kentucky has shorn over 200 sheep and hasn't had to to sharpen with his whetstone since receiving his shears, he told me they are just as sharp today as the day he took them from the case, so who knows how long his blades could last for? 40,000+.

The shears handles use a acetal bearing system that has shown little to no wear over the last 10 years of use on my own personal pair of shears. When we were designing the manufacturers and suppliers of the acetal recommended against running a two part acetal bearing system, they didnt know the long term results of such an application. Normally its acetal running on stainless.

Was this ram bottle feed as a lamb. I learnt that bottle feed males often turn out aggrieve the hard way, I had two year old merino ram that would now let anyone in his paddock, had to shot him in the end. I shear a few of other peoples rams and Ive not had any problems if not bottle feed.

Hello, I have been a member here for sometime, lots to learn here and have enjoyed reading the vast amount of info to be found.
These days I'm a keen seed grower here in the South Island, New Zealand, though my bread and butter has been in shearing sheep since I was in my early 20's. Back then we learnt our trade in government run shearing schools where both blade shearing as well as machine shearing was tutored. The tools of our trade back then were UK made shears that had seen little to no design improvements since the late 1800's, which became ever increasingly frustrating as one pair of shears would only last 4-5 days, it would then take up to an hour to setup a new pair. Those old style shears have one major floor in there design and that is the handle spring system and the two blades are all one piece, meaning they can only be made from high carbon steel only. Modern durable composite tool steels cant be used on such a design because tool steels cant be turned into spring steel.
So I decided to try and redesign the whole tool with the intention of being able to incorporate the use of modern tool steels such as D2. Little did I know at the time what a major mission it would turn out to be. But 20 years of prototyping I now sell shears all around world.

The 'kiwi' style of shearing with blades has been adopted in some parts of the world as seen in the video below of myself using the Watson Multishears shears, this is the style that I'm looking to teach outside of New Zealand. I'm currently talking with a sheep farmer from Missouri about flying over to the US and running a week long shearing course. At this stage its about whether there would be enough people interested attending in February-March 2026.
The price of the course would include your own shears to take home but also depends on how many folk keen to attend. There may well be enough interest in the NW states where a course could be setup there given the numbers of sheep.

Anyone interested can also email me richard@watsonmultishears.co.nz

L. Johnson wrote:The native variety here in Japan are tiny and called sarunashi, which amusingly translates to monkey pears!

What is know as kiwi is different to kiwifruit grown here in New Zealand. Would love to be able to get my hands on seed for sarunashi but no way the boarder bio security would let it in