When I bought my old company (Heartbeat Power) it came with a number of unique designs for racing go karts and engines. I asked the seller if he had patented any of them and he explained his logic which makes great sense to me.
Mike didn't bother with patenting anything because all a patent does is give you the right to sue someone who copies your design. You have to find them, hire a lawyer, go to court and wait to get a cease and desist order to enforce your patent if they don't want to play fair. All the while they are making money on your design which you have provided detailed drawings for via the patent office. If you are small and they are big you don't have much chance of being successful in any meaningful time-frame.
What Mike did was to always have the "new and improved" design ready before he started making the original. That way when people started copying him (and they always did), he could release the new one and crush the competition. Money that would have been spent on lawyers and patent applications instead went into product design, production, and advertising.
Unless you're going to make knives yourself I know this doesn't help much, but the chances of getting even your lawyer bills covered are probably pretty low. The patent office is full of better ways to do things which are never sold because the companies in business already have no interest in changing what they are doing. If you do have a good idea large conglomerates have plenty of lawyers and offshore affiliates which can easily flood the market before you even have a chance to get them into court. If you love inventing things it may not always follow that you'll love the legal process of protecting your invention. There are plenty of stories of inventors who went mad trying to get paid for their work from corporations that stole their ideas, heck you could probably make a pretty good movie night just watching a few that have made it to the big screen.
So, I really do wish you the best in getting your design out there and making money from it. But be clear about your intent, if you have a better mousetrap and want to see it in use consider releasing it as an open source or copyleft design.
www.gnu.org
You may have more success getting contributions or consulting fees from small knife makers than licensing to a single large manufacturer that may pay your fee to just keep their competition from using it. Just because you find someone who will pay you does not mean they will ever use what they pay for, stories of companies buying patents just to keep them off the market are legion.
We're at an interesting place with small knife manufacturers and hobbyists doing some really cool stuff. If what you have is truly revolutionary you might have far more satisfaction seeing what they do with your ideas than you'll ever get from giving it to one of the big guys....
JMHO,
John