How/Why did you get into making knives?

Growing up in the hunting culture of southeastern Montana guns and knives where always a focus. My dad had 2 knives built by a local blacksmith and latter we had a lathe and other tools in the basement as dad got into blackpowder and built his own mussle loaders. I got into pistol shooting then and held that intrest for a long time. Later one of my brothers came home from a year long maintence job at a fish plant on a remote island in Alaska and he had picked up a bit of knife making from a fellow employ as a way to kill time. He showed me a damascus knife the other guy had built for him and I was in love. I also knew by then I loved a certain drop point blade and the only knife I had found it on was a oldtimer folder. Finally after years of welding, steel work and commercial fishing, I found out I had hepititus C from my youth and needed to undergo interferon treatment. They made me very sick and weak. I couldn't work and was bored on top of everything else. I finally called up my brother and asked to borrow the knife belt grinder he had made and he gave it to me with a of damascus. I went to work and quickly descovered the piece was flawed. Then I started reading and looking and got a bar of 5160 and an anvil built a forge and made a knife and another, then I got a damascus billet and made that drop point. A little over 3 years a couple smithing classes and 30 knives latter I think I may be a bit of an addict and more and more time is spend at forge and grinders. This saturday I helped my blacksmith instructor when he taught a group the first class he taught me.
 
the short of it is i always liked amking things and if i had trouble finding what i wanted i would say what the hell i ll just make one
i was looking for a folder and since no production knives were what i was lookoing fro i looked custom
after a wow there spendy i figgered i would jsut make wat i wanted (its still not done nore will i finishe it because it remindes me about the start)
its a Ti frame lock tonto combo edge with a spyderco hole made of 440c that the tool and die maker hardened for me
i have a picture or 2 as it does work but its not near nice like my 2nd folder for myself (i dont think i did bad using a sears benchtop drill, dremel and a 4x36 grinder )
 
Someone just wrote me and asked me this the otherday about how I got into making folders. When it comes to knives, folders are all I've ever been interested in to be honest. Fixed blades for some reason just never much appealed to me.

When I was just a youth my father bought me my very first folding knife. Well, technically it was not my first knife but my first new folding knife. My grandfather and uncle had each given me one earlier but up until this point of my father's knife to me all were hand me downs well worn and completely unreliable, dull and uninteresting to such a curious joe as myself. I had to be around 10 at the time. I remember my father telling me as he handed it to me that he wanted to get me a 410 shotgun but that my mother wouldn't let him. I got my first shotgun at a 11 so I had to be 9 or 10 I think.

The folder my father gave me was different than any other I had seen. It had a lock and up until this point I had not ever seen a locking folder before. Nor did I know that such an item even existed. I immediately took great interest in it and every aspect of how it came together. It was a locking Ka-Bar as I recall and I loved that knife. Within a week I had taken it completely apart and proudly displayed all the parts out on the dining room table for my father to see when he got home from work. It was quite a spectacle to him I guess, as it led to my very first and most memorable spanking.

He felt terribly I think when he saw that I was perfectly capable and comfortable in putting it back together good as new. It was then that my father noticed I had extra pieces and figured out that I also copied all the parts, including the blade although the grind was not that good and the body quite primitive at the time being my first ever attempt. I'd have been off the hook with an apology from my father for jumping to conclusions I think at that point had my father not asked me the one question I was praying he would not ask me. Of course he did ask me that question, 'where did you get the stuff to do that?" Of course I had to confess at that point that I copied each and every piece of the folder from a file, and a spark plug gapper tool and two of the thicker pieces out of the gapper and rivot they pivoted on that appealed to me as well as some other misc.parts of other tools I had to take apart that were all found of course in his tool box. All of which ultimately led to my second spanking. I cried big tears that day and as I recall there was a grounding in there somewhere too.

Ironically with the pain of my first experiences at knife making it is a wonder I continued but by the age of 16 I was already quite accomplished at not only making a folder but pretty much copying anything I saw and liked with nothing other than a simple picture. I am fortunate in many ways that I grew up near a couple of knife makers that took me under their wing for blades and how to do some of that but neither of them knew anything about folders which was my passion. Once I got my first truck and found a girl friend all my knife making went on hold for many years. I didn't get back into it until my early 30s and then very much so in my 40s when I was winding down quite a bit and not as active as I once was which takes me to present day as I approach 50. I'm still as much in love with the folding knife today as I was as a youth. For some reason folders have always been my first love.

STR
 
I started out by collecting some old military knives such as Navy MKIIs, M-3 Trench Knives and bayonets. I noticed an article in Blade Magazine and bought it for that purpose. I had no idea that handmade knives existed. I remember seeing them in the magazine and saying to myself, "There is no way that someone made that by hand!" I kept buying the magazine to gawk, and then went to a show in the area. After that I bought a bench grinder, a couple of files, clamped a small vise to an old desk in the attic of my apartment, and proceeded to really screw up a good piece of steel. That's not much different than the way I do it today!
 
I was raised in an environment where it was common to make things that you needed ot wanted.

My dad was a machinist at a young age working in the McDonald-Douglas aircraft factory in California at the beginning of WWII before joining the Navy. When he returned to Indiana he was a foreman welder for Alice Chalmers. Later on after AC close he purchased an old machine shop and that's where I worked in my early teen years. Making things is just part of who I am.

Over the years I have made different kinds of things that end up sitting around and collecting dust but, KNIVES, that's something that can be used.
 
I began out of frustration

We had to kill our own meat when I grew up . I was sick of having my knife go blunt and having to resharpen it 4 or more times in the process .

I went through scores of butcher knives and even learned how to sharpen knives "properly" but they still blunted . ( that was before it was ilegal for underage kids to buy knives )

I made knives out of the old carbon steel saw blades and did the harden / temper thing with dads oxy set and a drum of motor oil , and pinched his bronze rods for rivets

then I progressed to all hard HSS power hacksaw blades and a 4inch angle grinder , those knives kept their edge were rock hard and still had awesome flex , I glued the scales on with eurothane used for windshields because the steel was too hard to drill .

I still see them in service every now and then .

then I investd in an old hand cranked forge , my dad passed on and I inherited his anvil and some rudimentary blacksmith gear and a heap of leaf springs

Im no where near professional at it , but every now and then I turn out something nice .

Im still killing my own meat but not because I have to or we dont eat anymore
Im still messing with knives but I have a set now that do the job easily without losing their edge part way through the job .
 
I come from a family of carpenters, so working with my hands has been ingrained . The first knife I made was when I was 11 in boy scouts. I dropped it for a couple years then one day found a Edger blade and started back up. I still wonder some days how I really started. All That matters is I did start and I am still doing it years later.


It is the only thing that keeps me sane and happy.
 
Because I'm too poor to buy them. :D Plus, it's just in my blood to do things myself.
 
my dad made knives by just using a file and basic tools. He just gave them
to friends and family. He made one that has my name and date of birth
engraved in the blade. It is pretty awesome work. He is a perfectionist.

So now I'm into it..
 
I had a guy in the melt shop of the steel mill that I worked in ask me to make him a large hacking type of knife (mini-machete). He was tired of the cheap box cutters that our company gave him to cut open heavy cardboard boxes. I took a hack saw blade that we used to cut test plugs off of 12" round steel billets and torch cut a full tang knife shape out of it. I then ground it to a little nicer finish and put an edge on it. I heat treated the blade with a torch and quenched it in used hydraulic oil. After buffing it out, I used a broken pallet and brazing rod for the handle pins. He loved it. I eventually made about two dozen of them for all of our refactory workers in the melt shop.

When I moved on at the company and no longer could satisfy my knifemaking urges on the job, I bought some books and some basic tools for my home shop. The rest is history, as they say!
 
I started because I wanted to control everything that went into the design and shape of the knife. Not to mention that I could not justify (well, the wife actually) spending $350 for a fixed blade to use in the field. Instead, now I want to buy $750 and $1500 pieces of machinery to make knifemaking easier!!
 
well... i have tried to cover all my equipment costs with knife sales...
but i gave most of my first knives away... and they make GREAT presents...(everybody knows what they are getting when thier birthday comes around!)
even the girls like them... i am just working on getting better at it.
and i was to cheap to buy them, after mom and dad allowed me to buy them that is)
back to the ol grindstone
~Chris
 
I got into this because I had to. If someone would have told me at 16 I might be able to be a fulltime knife maker I dont think I would have ever done anything else. One day a guy informed me of a local knife maker who teaches and after getting started... well you know the rest. Addiction is addiciton.. I need another fix.
 
heres a pic of my first, and so far only knife... I spent a couple of months readign everything i could find ad lurking in half a dozen forums like here and anvilfire before posting a slew of questions... only then after I had a pretty fair grasp of whats happening in the metal did i start working on it.

5160 leaf spring, kanuka wood, .303 brass cartridge and no 8 gauge fencing wire. half tang and finished with linseed oil on the wood.

407296776_51f992096e.jpg
 
Two words: John Rambo

Don't even know if I can say I make knives yet, as I haven't finished one yet. I've got about 9 in the works right now... so busy with work and college that I seem to be allergic to files by the time I get home:o . Just before christmas we took a week of school time to use the machine shop to build christmas gifts. Ever since I was a kid I've been obsessed with knives and guns, ( I think barnespneumatic.com is really the final push I needed to jump into this machinist course), so naturally, I decided to make a couple kitchen cleavers for the folks. I got my hands on some old bastard files from the welding department ( man, welders are hard on files!), annealed'em, hammered'em down to like .050". I figured my 1 week metallurgy primer qualified me to heat treat them like a pro...

Like I said, I haven't finished a single knife yet.

But it's been 2 months, and now I'm building one of deker's grinders. I think I'm hooked.
 
I have a scar on my index finger from "checking the sharpness" on my dad's old Case Fish knife. I must have been about 5. I still laugh everytime I get fingerprinted and that scar is there! Fast forward to age 8, when Grampa gave me my first pocket knife for christmas. Youd'a thought I'd won the lottery! Over the years I had amassed a small collection. (Later most of it was sold to pay for shop stuff) Never really thought about actually making knives until after I got out of the Marine Corps, and happened to find Blade Magazine. I thought "I could do that", and the journey began. Funny that 12 years later, my journey is still near it's beginning. :D The old time vs. money equation, if you have one, you most likely don't have the other. -Matt-
 
i have a bunch of blade that never got handles, but once i get around to it... well i have moved on i.. well i kinda never look back. i look at what i did before.. and well... the next knife is always better...
so that journey will end when you die
life long hobby
 
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