Nice meeting you, Stephen F., I believe that it would have been great to have a long conversation with you, but you know, time is the greatest commodity at Blade, and one only gets so much of it.
Yeah, I messed with the handle on the Foster a bit. It is personal preference. Burt has big hands, I don't and it feels a lot better in my hands this way. I don't mess with knives unless I feel they
need it, but I do a skilled job, technically speaking, without trying to sound like an egotistical pud. I have shown the work to the best in the business, and they are unfailingly complementary. Sometimes it is just tuning an edge, sometimes it is a fairly dramatic makeover.
Last year, I got into a heated discussion with Dave, "Lifter4Him" on the Forums. Mitch Lum asked me after I won the lottery at a show to purchase a Ken Onion, for a shot at the knife, should I decide to sell it. I told him that it was not for sale, and walked away from the table. Actually, I had won the knife for a friend of mine, we had to borrow the money from another friend, who is a knifemaker. I should have offered the knife to Mitch first, but my friend had already sold it. It was really not our intention to sell the knife at the show, but we had not anticipated how aggressive some buyers would be about purchasing right then, and there. In 18 years of buying and selling knives, most of them as a professional, I had personally never seen anything like it before.
Anyway, Dave called me on it when I posted my report on the Forums, and he was right, but I didn't remember the specifics of how it went down until later, and I got defensive. Then, Randy shut the thread down, and I was feeling like an ass until I saw Dave on Saturday at the show. I went up to him, introduced myself and apologized for what I wrote, and how I worded it. He accepted my apology, and we shook hands. So, I'll say on the Forums, just like I did to Dave on Saturday, I try to write the way that I speak to people, face to face, and I let my defenses get in the way of being respectful. I try to accept my shortcomings with dignity, and learn from them.
Best Regards,
STeven Garsson
