Hey Robert and Bob:
Thanks for the invitation! I could go on and bore you to tears for hours, but I'll try for short.
It's been a while since I've been around the knife/sword "scene" so I really don't know a whole lot about what's been happening in the last six or so years since I dropped out.
I started making back in 1975, and right away wanted to do swords. Hardly anybody in the states was doing them then. A few makers had done one, then swore never to do another. Nobody was specializing in it. I thought it would be a good niche market.
The first ones were pretty clunky, using steel that was too heavy. I played at forging a while, then decided the bladesmiths were pretty high on their horse for me, and went back to stock removal. I settled on D-2 as my favorite steel, and built a heat-trating oven specifically for swords (still have it, it's for sale).
I got into the habaki construction style, and the wire wrapping, and applied those features to a wide variety of blades, both swords and daggers. I made 960 blades in my career, from 1975 to 1994, 69 of them were swords, defined as having blades of eighteen inches or more.
There were ups and downs in the business of course. One of the ups was meeting Ken Warner at the 1980 Knifemaker's Guild show in Kansas City. He came up to me and said "We're going to produce an annual publication that will be the top knife book in the world". I thought "Yeah, right!" but I gave him a bunch of photos, and... yep.. KNIVES '81 did pretty well and kept on going.
There were a small number of really nice orders. One job I was asked to bid on was simple but detailed and painstaking. I quoted $4000. The fellow looked pained. "here it comes" I thought... then he says... "Make it $5000 and just do something really nice with it." With patrons of the arts like that, things can move forward.
Most times it was "How about you forget the polishing and do it for half price?" or some such. That seemed to increase into the early 90s.
I pioneered the form-fitting Kydex sheath and brought it out at the 1981 New York show. That seems to have taken the industry by storm, though few seem to remember where it came from. The Vorpal combat knives became a larger and larger part of my business. Interest in swords was still there, but now there were a lot of crappy knock-offs being made, and many buyers settled for those.
Finally, in 1994, one of my customers called to tell me that the vorpal I sold him really worked. He told me all about how he had killed a man with it... a complete description of the event mind you.
Now, I always knew, of course, that such an event was possible... and I quite understand any of you who want to label me a whatever for this... but I couldn't handle it. I would go into the shop to work, and I'd look at the knives in progress, and I'd think about who that dead guy was, and how did his mother feel, and did he have a wife and kids... And then I took off my apron and dust mask and never went back. The half-finished blades still hang on the wall where I left them. I can't explain how I could walk away from a 20 year career like that.. it is totally incomprehensible even to me. But I have had no interest in going back to it, the very thought gives me a queasy stomach.
Still, I've had some requests from people like Bobby Branton to pass on some of what I have learned, and I don't mind doing that if someone cares enough to ask.
Gee, I thought I said I was going to keep it short. Oh well. Hope everybody's having a swell start to the new year. Tom
