Thank you very much! I genuinely appreciate the compliment.
I do indeed have the maker account so that the option to sell a knife on the forum is available to me if I want it. However, I don't make my living making knives so I'm not trying to sell them very often right now (only about 8-10 per year). I have been very fortunate in that people have responded quite positively to my knives on Instagram (@Xplorer42) and so far I've always had more people asking for knives than I have knives to sell, so I haven't needed to advertise any for sale yet.
Since it came up here, I should probably explain my situation regarding selling my knives or taking orders for knives because I get questions about ordering knives on Instagram often.
Except for a couple of very rare exceptions I don't take orders for knives and I only sell a few each year.
For me the progress and the journey are the whole point. Hopefully one day (maybe 8 or 10 years from now?) I'll be satisfied enough with my abilities to sacrifice progress time and be willing to spend more time re-making knives to sell but it's not likely to be any time soon. I have HUGE admiration for those knife makers that are truly great makers. Guys like Bob Loveless, Michael Walker, Bob Terzuola, the Sobral brothers (CAS Knives) and many others inspire me to keep working until I can do what they can do. But things like developing a new design, executing a new construction technique, or learning a new skill take a TON of time and I find that when I have the pressure of an order to fill or I spend time repeating a design my progress slows to a crawl. So, I sell just enough knives to buy more materials and consumable supplies for the next knife and hopefully help me pay for the next tool(s) so I can remain focused on doing the next thing I haven't ever done.
There's roughly a million more things left on my list of things to learn...the world of knives and knife making is DEEP.
A lot of the time, "learning" results in a less than perfect knife on the first go-around so along the way I am developing quite the closet full of "ugly ducklings and mis-fit toys"
.
Here's an example...this knife was my first attempt at a partial tang, first time making a metal guard, first time using antler, first time doing a fuller, and first time making a pommel. The guard and pommel are also Titanium. With all that was new to me, it took me waaaayyy toooo long to make this knife and in the end I messed up the handle (wrong size antler - had to grind away too much and even ground through to the porous core), messed up the fuller (too skinny), screwed up the tang angle (blade enters the handle at the wrong angle) and under-engineered the pommel construction (it's blind-tapped but too few threads holding it together).
I learned a LOT though. I learned what I needed to be able to build a life-time reliably strong handle with this type of construction method and as a bonus I now have a Z-Wear "beater" knife with a Ti. guard that I can use as if it were a $30 Gerber
, and I'm ok with that. The important thing is I would not have been able to take a month to "learn" and screw up this knife if I needed to make knives to sell for money in order to keep going. So I stay focused on progress for now and selling knives intentionally remains a low priority.
It was (of course) painful to have to completely start over on that project but once it was all done I had moved my abilities forward and the my customer was happy.
(Obviously there's shrink-wrap on part of the "good" version above but that knife is pictured in a previous post here anyway.)
Thank you for the opportunity to explain all of that here, even if you didn't intend to ask for ALL that
. If I'm going to go on talking about myself too much it's best that I do that
here on my own thread
.
Best regards,
CK
