Knife blanks and cheating?

I just went to a web site and bought 2 damascus billets just so i wont be a cheater anymore lol
 
Here's the question I am asking myself to get my true answer. Is that blank you bought a knife? Well, no not really, it's a blade shaped piece of steel... Ok, so then the guy with the blank in his hands is the one who turns it into a knife by grinding bevels, making and fitting a handle, guard, bolsters, polishing, etc. which makes him a KNIFE MAKER. Unless... you're one of those guys that say you aren't a knife maker unless you pound a chunk of steel into a blade with a big hammer. :rolleyes:

Personally, I like to take a rectangular bar of steel and grind it into knife shape myself but, I'd also have no problem making a knife from a pre-cut blank and saying that I made it either.
 
Last edited:
hellgap said:
I just went to a web site and bought 2 damascus billets just so i wont be a cheater anymore lol
Click to expand...


CHEATER---CHEATER--CHEATER.......shoulda made your own damascus first..................;)JUST KIDD'EN!:D

just couldn't resist, good luck to ya bro, im sure they'll be real beauties!!


andrew..........going back to my cave to pack this damn toaster oven with k-wool.....in a pittiful attempt to make a decent tempering oven, so i dont have to use the one in the damn kitchen any more!! BYE
 
I believe what counts is what you end up with and not how you get there. there are mamy, many "known" makers that have lots of work done out of their shops. Some argue it's just to save a little time, while others say w"well everyone is doing it" Whatever! Frank
 
I've been following this thread, I guess it's time for me to step back into the fray. :)

I have pretty much made up my mind on where I stand in regards to this issue. This thread did help me sort it out in my mind. I have 2 examples I'll share that I came up with that helped me come to this point since posing the question.

I used to do lost wax bronze sculpture. The first piece I did was in a class. I made the wax figure, affixed the sprues, coated it with slurry. The teacher smelted the bronze, but I helped pour it. I broke it out of the mold, did all the finish work. I even mixed the patina used to color it. It was all my work of art. Around the same time, I was dating a girl who's father owned an artists foundry. People would bring him their works in wax and artisans would then bring them to life in bronze. There was no question who's work it was. The art was the work of the artist. It's pretty much an apples and oranges argument, but I think it still applies.

The second example that comes to mind would be what I've read about Nepalese Kamis. Considered master knifesmiths, they have apprentices who swing the hammers where they point. The also have helpers who polish the blades. The knife still bears their name and mark.

I think I take more pride in a blade that's 100% all done by me; blade, HT, handle, sheath. But if the lines in the CAD drawing David uses to make the blank are mine, I think the knife is mine as well. I'd probably do as Will suggests and use a different stamp for the sake of being upfront with people.

Walter
 
dustin hall you have a very valid point that i do agree with. Making damascus is as far as im concerned a art of its own to make a knife from its material i would consider you a knife maker.I believe a person who turns out some type of blank finished or unfinished to be a Blade smith.
 
I am a stock removal knife maker. Although I cut my blanks from bar stock on a bandsaw I don't think it makes a bit of difference if I had them laser or waterjet cut. I agree that the person who grinds the steel and transforms it into a knife is the knifemaker.

Regarding the Knifemaker's Guild, from the Guild By-Laws;

Section 4:

The Guild recognizes that the term “Handmade Knives” is difficult to define and subject to varying interpretations, but hold that, at a minimum, it requires that a maker personally grind, forge, or knap the blade, and honestly disclose how each component is produced.

That seems pretty simple and straight forward to me.

Using modern tools and technology is simply a fact of life. If anyone wants to make a living, or any money, from making knives they must consider the most efficient way to get the job done while still producing a quality product for a price that the market will bear.

I used to spend hours just drilling and filing a slot in a guard. Then I bought a milling machine and now I cut a slot in a few minutes. I still did it. I guided the machine with my hands and still hand filed the final fit but I did it much more efficiently using modern tools.

For those who insist that every step be done with hand tools there are plenty of knifemakers out there who can oblige. But those who creat a knife using power tools and modern technology are certainly still knifemakers.
 
I am an engraver. When the pneumatic Gravermeister tool came out, there was the same discussion-If you don't push the graver, or hit it with a hammer that it wasn't "real" hand engraving. I saw the quote that "Michelangelo would have used a jack hammer if they had been available then."
 
I'm with you Will.

I have an acquaintance that is a superb knifemaker. He throws away about 70% of the knives he makes........because he finds some flaw in them. Now, that flaw may be invisible to everyone else, but he is such a purist ( or maybe its just OCD) that he goes out in the shop and destroys a knife if he doesn't like the plunge line, or he sees a spot in the damascus welds, or whatever. Several years ago he admired the wood on one of my tanto.It was an extraordinary amboyina burl,dense as marble, and ebony from a 100 year old sunken log.A couple weeks later, I gave him a nice slab of the burl wood , and a block of the ebony ( worth well over $100). Last summer I was at his house and saw the wood still sitting in the kitchen, where he had set it when I gave it to him. I inquired if he had come up with a tanto project for it yet? ( His favorite style). He handed me the wood and said to take it, he would never use it. He only does sole authorship knives, and if he didn't select and match the wood himself, then it wasn't sole authorship, and he could not use it.
This chap would make his own steel (he has in the past) if he didn't live in the city. He makes his own damascus, and hand forges all his blades.

Stacy
 
I think Stacy has kind of hit it. The only one who should judge if your cheating is you. Be honest to yourself. If you feel alright with a water cut blank, fine. If you feel you need to smelt your own steel, grow your own burl, fine. Be true to yourself. The man he just spoke of had made his own set of parameters very limited. Some do not. The line is different for everyone. Very few make their own steel, cut and stabilize their own wood. smelt their own guard material. Did they dig the ore? LOL Yet many claim sole authorship. They are correct and are not cheating, because it is within their lines. It is a hard line to draw. I believe it falls some where in between that distant point and before a sharp bare blade or a kit. Making a knife is making something that won't cut anything but warm butter and making it cut the material the knife is created to cut. I think the most important parts are making the edge. (It is what actually makes it a knife) and being true to yourself and your customers if you even have any. Thats how I feel and I plan to keep that as my line. Good luck to you all and be Honest with yourself. Jim
 
I just wanted to chime back in to make myself really clear as I re-read my posts and want be sure. I hope no one took any of my posts to be degrading in any way whatsoever, especially newer makers. For the record, I think for semi-established makers it’s perfectly acceptable to have blade blanks waterjet from their own designs. In that instance, it’s simply outsourcing a job that quite literally anyone could do at a savings of time, belts, and bandsaw blades.

For new guys, I think it’s also perfectly acceptable to buy pre-designed blade blanks until they have figured out their own style. If they are being sold, however, I really think that needs to be disclosed. After all, if it’s not your design to begin with, you can't really call it your knife, IMHO. This is why people say something is a “Scagel design” or a “Moran ST24” design.

A good example of a commonly outsourced step is heat treating. I think it’s universally accepted that if a maker doesn’t have the right equipment, knowledge or setup to properly harden a blade, he should look to have someone do it for them while he learns or acquires those skills. I think a maker could also decide that he never wants to harden his own blades, but that should be disclosed. In some cases such as with Paul Bos HT, it might actually be a selling point!

I think that regardless of what people think, some buyers are indeed buying the maker with the knife. I know that when I hold something in my hand that I know was toiled over for hours and hours by a single human, it has an immeasurable value added to it. This is why hand carved wood bowls are more expensive than their machine carved alternatives even though 99% of people could probably not tell the difference on a surface level.

"It’s about the final product" is a misleading way of thinking, in my opinion. That may be true of some types of knives or some kinds of knives, but it’s certainly not true of all custom knives. It doesn’t take long to read the customs forum to know this is true. I think the bigger question is: Is a knife that the maker sourced the ore, refined it, grew the wood, harvested it and did everything himself worth more than a mid-tech knife? The market and prices out there say yes, which seems to prove that its not just about the final product...theres something else at play.

I also think with the changing of technology, things need to change to adapt in the way we view knifemaking. We have neo-tribal smiths, mid-tech knifemakers, machinist knifemakers, etc etc. Each adds their own little slice to the variety of knives that are out there today! There’s no way we can put them all under one umbrella assumption of what a knifemaker should and shouldn’t do on a detailed level.

In all I think it all comes down to control. If you are in control of each step of the knifemaking process, you are a knifemaker. How we define the level of control necessary to call the knife our own is something each of us needs to determine, which is why you find a vast array of opinions on the matter.
 
Last edited:
The only wayI would call using blades made by someone else cheating is if the person put his own name on the blades and claimed to have made them. There was one person I saw with tables at Albuquerque gun shows a few times that had knives with obviously factory made blades. I asked him what steel he made the blades from and he answered AUS6. I asked him where he got it and he said Texas Knifemaker's Supply and swore he bought bars from them. He wouldn't answer questions about how he heat treated them, but claimed they were superior to tool steels.

I just walked away in disgust.
 
Quote: "A good example of a commonly outsourced step is heat treating. I think it’s universally accepted that if a maker doesn’t have the right equipment, knowledge or setup to properly harden a blade, he should look to have someone do it for them while he learns or acquires those skills. I think a maker could also decide that he never wants to harden his own blades, but that should be disclosed. In some cases such as with Paul Bos HT, it might actually be a selling point!"

So do you think a knife should have "Cut by GLW" stamped on it as a selling point? This could be a great selling point. I take as much pride in what I do as anyone else does! I consider what I do a great service just like Paul Bos does with his heat treating services. His services are a highly sought after and thought by many to be the best in the business. I'm working hard to hopefully reach that same status one day.
 
greatlakeswaterjet said:
Quote: "A good example of a commonly outsourced step is heat treating. I think it’s universally accepted that if a maker doesn’t have the right equipment, knowledge or setup to properly harden a blade, he should look to have someone do it for them while he learns or acquires those skills. I think a maker could also decide that he never wants to harden his own blades, but that should be disclosed. In some cases such as with Paul Bos HT, it might actually be a selling point!"

So do you think a knife should have "Cut by GLW" stamped on it as a selling point? This could be a great selling point. I take as much pride in what I do as anyone else does! I consider what I do a great service just like Paul Bos does with his heat treating services. His services are a highly sought after and thought by many to be the best in the business. I'm working hard to hopefully reach that same status one day.
Click to expand...

I think its a slightly different kind of service. Knowing a knife was heat treated by a professional offers something different than knowing it was cut with precision on a waterjet machine. Do you know what I mean? One directly affects the quality/performance of the finished knife while another directly affects the maker himself but doesn't necessarily directly add quality/performance gvalues to the final knife. Please don't think this means your service is not equally valuable to knifemakers, though.

I think my Paul Bos comment was more in the context that even a new maker just starting out can send his blades off to paul and at very least guarantee to a customer that the steel itself is properly heat treated, which can alleviate some concerns buyers might have about new guys not quite having the experience with steel enough to nail HT on the first few knives they do.
 
like andrew, i normally dont make the same knife twice but i have made some that look similar. if i decided to make a number of identical knives i probably would have them cut out with with a waterjet or laser cuter. it can take me up to 45 minutes to profile out my small skinners that i make with a right angle grinder. since i never know what a knife is going to look like until i get done, i just have strips plasma cut to the width i want and go from there. to me a blank is just a blank and until its ground and finished by a knifemaker, its not a knife.
 
Well, as someone who has never made a knife, I cannot speak to this issue, not specifically. But , I know metal, I have hot and cold forged copper, brass, etc. as well as silver and gold. But, still I am neither a knife maker nor a machinist nor a blacksmith. But I have the requisite knowledge to do it, just not the money to buy or make a forge, press or a mill. So if one of the posters before me feels sorry for me because I am "girl poor" yes girl poor, I have 11 children and they are all female and I am lucky to be able to buy bic razors, so he/she feels sorry for me and takes his jeep Cherokee that he was going to junk and cuts the leaf springs into 12 in. pieces and gives them all to me and 6 months later I have ,say 12 knives all different all able to be used in a battle tested situation regardless of how they look, all ground to a 30 degree bevel which is the best for combat blade edges anything less for a battle blade is to brittle on the edge, at least for military battle use anyway, so I did not make them. Because I could not heat and hammer the steel/iron. Jeez, I feel like I should not even try. For the record, I fix or replace different peoples long arms and side arms, design stocks and have even completely rebuilt upper and lower receivers using manufactured parts and on occasion machining them my self, they are not my weapons, there design comes from Armalite, Colt, Bushmaster aka Cerberus Capital management who also owns Panther and Remington arms, yet the sidearm/longarm owners still say it is my work. So, should I not try and learn the craft I am being drawn to because it is not practical to own a forge, anvil and other things. One of the things I do is teach art..fine art, all of us learn on the back or shoulders of giants that came before us. Including all of you. And I mean each and everyone of us. It seems disingenuous to say that anything less then the hammer and forge is cheating.

weird. and here I thought you were all here to help...ya know its called a forum.. like in the old roman senate...a place of learning.


Wildthing


Mark

My 5 bucks worth
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top