I make knives for a hobby. I didn’t always have a love of knives…before knives it was The Six Million Dollar Man and Silly Putty. You can deduce I was born in 1970. My early passion for knives began when my father Alan handed me a book titled Step-by-Step Knife Making: You Can Do It! by David Boye. There was something about this book that took my complete attention and fascination. It was easy to read, had great photos and illustrations and made it seem achievable to make a knife. Dad was at the time an engineering teacher at Geraldine High School and had taken his senior students through the process of making a knife.
I was 20 years old and I decided to make my first knife from an old slasher blade I’d been given. I used a bench grinder to reshape the blade, then I soldered on a steel bolster and glued on a wooden handle. I made a sheath from deer skin and was as proud as punch. My second knife was done in much the same way, except I shaped the blade using a draw-file method to form a bowie knife. I used six pins on the handle, made a sheath and presented this to my brother-in-law as a birthday gift. Twenty something years later and that knife is still the main cutting tool in his kitchen.
Around nine years ago I wanted to make my son a knife. Finding an old file, I mounted a belt sander upside down in a vice and spent hours slowly grinding a bevel into the hardened steel. I was limited to the belts I could fit to the sander so I took my time, then used a buffing machine to get a reasonable finish on the blade. I added a handle and was done.
