Tom Brown's orignial knives

dave,
sorry to hear about your health issues, i do indeed love your work, you make som pretty good looking knives. hope you get it all straightened out and get yourself back to work soon so that we can all enjoy the fruits of your labor. i also hope that you post some of your new knives here so we can get knife envy.

alex
 
LSkylizard,
Sorry you had trouble trying to contact me. I had my website shut down when it got to the point that I just couldn't continue at the capacity to justify keeping it running & my old email address closed along with it. I was getting so many requests from the site for work but just wasn't able to keep up with.
I am making some simpler hunting knife designs these days that are a little easier on me. One of my latest can be seen in the Sept. issue of Fir-Fish-Game Magazine.
 
Beck knives said:
...I had my website shut down when it got to the point that I just couldn't continue at the capacity to justify keeping it running & my old email address closed along with it...
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That explains it. The email links I have found thus far have been fruitless; i.e. Beckknives@outdrs.net & beckknives@aol.com

Do you have a current email?? You can contact me via my email (LSkylizard@yahoo.com) if you are NOT looking to publish.

Wish you all the best with your health issues...those always suck.

Thanks,
L Skylizard
 
Dave - I have long admired your original work on this knife. I wish you well, and am glad to see you back on the forum with us. :thumbup:
 
Mr Dave Beck
Please Please Please email me .... I have been trying to find out how to get a hold of you for about a year now. I had spoken to you on the phone a few years back, and looking back I wish I had went ahead and made the order then. Please email me at joncevans@cableone.net .... I look forward to hearing from you.
 
joncevans said:
Mr Dave Beck
Please Please Please email me .... I have been trying to find out how to get a hold of you for about a year now. I had spoken to you on the phone a few years back, and looking back I wish I had went ahead and made the order then. Please email me at joncevans@cableone.net .... I look forward to hearing from you.
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Beck knives
Registered User
Last Activity: 10-25-2005 10:29 PM

As you can see, he is not really to active at the forums.I would suspect there is a slim chance he will contact you based on posting in this thread.You may try e-mailing him instead.
 
I know... he is a hard one to find....I have tried emailing him at two different addresses with no luck. I was hoping he would see my address and write me. Due to the popularity of his work, and him taking time off to deal with his health I am sure that he wouldn’t want his email address to get out to everyone. Also I am new at trying to use this blade forum or any forum for that matter. I registered a long time ago, but only recently was able to subscribe with the forum. For some reason every time I tried to purchase a subscription the transaction would not go thru. The site would say there was some kind of error and would not process me. Only a few weeks ago it processed my paid membership, and allowed me access to post on the forum. So if you or anyone else knows how to contact Mr. Dave Beck I would much appreciate that information.
 
TOMBSTONE said:
..I would suspect there is a slim chance he will contact you based on posting in this thread.You may try e-mailing him instead.
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I have actually had him respond to me in this forum (once) in the last several months. I have tried multiple emails. Unfortunately, he for whatever reason has not been able to respond to my attempts at direct email. I have asked for email access without luck.

I wish him the best with his current projects and any active health issues.
 
hi dave
i hope you read this. i still have the oringal drawings of the tracker you sent me and the prototype pictures. i don't know if you will remember me. you made me a knife to take to the middle east back 1989. you called it wolverine.
i still have it. it worked great, it did what it was made for and it is still in great shape.
the tracker knife and skinner you made me is still doing fine. i use them every year.i still haven't sharpened it yet.
take care
larry
 
Beck knives said:
I often wondered how long it would take someone to find this drawing & I'm happy to see someone finally brought it up.
For those who are curious about this design I certainly can bring some light to the matter as I know more about the "Tracker" knife than anyone.
I can't speak for the smaller knife pictured below as I've only ever seen a drawing myself but the Tom Brown Tracker survival knife shown was actually produced except that it never went by the name "Tracker" back then.
The drawing you see is the pattern Tom Brown drew. This was his origonal design & went by the name the "Medicine Blade" which was etched into the side of the knife. This was the origonal pattern that took Tom Brown seven years (as he claimed back then) to have designed. It was produced for him by a fellow named Ed Lombi, a machinist who stopped making this pattern in the early '90's after the demand for my knives skyrocketed & Ed went on to other interests.
His knife was made from 01 tool steel (1/4" thick from point to butt). It had a flat ground hatchet edge & a hollow ground draw knife. The top edge of the blade was tapered like the hatchet & had a single row of saw teeth which would only cut a "V" as deep as the teeth.
I handled one of these knives during my standard survival class while at Tom Browns' school back in 1987. Although very crude, I saw potential in the design which gave me the inspiration to take it to the drawing board & re-design the knife with my own improvements. From that point on, all of the changes & modifications made from this "Medicine Blade" pattern to the TRACKER knife as we know it from the "The Hunted" film were developed by myself & not Tom Brown. This new pattern was such am improvement that I was asked by Tom Brown himself to produce them for his students. His students began calling my knife the "Tracker" knife once it became associated with Tom Browns' TRACKER School & I became the first to trademark the name.
Of course there's more to the story but I'll leave it at that, now that I filled everyones' curiosity with some interesting historical facts about the knife that most folks never new.


David R. Beck
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I beg to differ, Mr. Beck. I think I probably know more about the history of "The Tracker" knife than even you. Unless you produced one before 1981, my father was the original designer of the blade for Tom Brown. He just got run over in the game of greed. Read more on this thread: http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/s...racker-Knife?p=14050589&posted=1#post14050589
 
Beck knives said:
I often wondered how long it would take someone to find this drawing & I'm happy to see someone finally brought it up.
For those who are curious about this design I certainly can bring some light to the matter as I know more about the "Tracker" knife than anyone.
I can't speak for the smaller knife pictured below as I've only ever seen a drawing myself but the Tom Brown Tracker survival knife shown was actually produced except that it never went by the name "Tracker" back then.
The drawing you see is the pattern Tom Brown drew. This was his origonal design & went by the name the "Medicine Blade" which was etched into the side of the knife. This was the origonal pattern that took Tom Brown seven years (as he claimed back then) to have designed. It was produced for him by a fellow named Ed Lombi, a machinist who stopped making this pattern in the early '90's after the demand for my knives skyrocketed & Ed went on to other interests.
His knife was made from 01 tool steel (1/4" thick from point to butt). It had a flat ground hatchet edge & a hollow ground draw knife. The top edge of the blade was tapered like the hatchet & had a single row of saw teeth which would only cut a "V" as deep as the teeth.
I handled one of these knives during my standard survival class while at Tom Browns' school back in 1987. Although very crude, I saw potential in the design which gave me the inspiration to take it to the drawing board & re-design the knife with my own improvements. From that point on, all of the changes & modifications made from this "Medicine Blade" pattern to the TRACKER knife as we know it from the "The Hunted" film were developed by myself & not Tom Brown. This new pattern was such am improvement that I was asked by Tom Brown himself to produce them for his students. His students began calling my knife the "Tracker" knife once it became associated with Tom Browns' TRACKER School & I became the first to trademark the name.
Of course there's more to the story but I'll leave it at that, now that I filled everyones' curiosity with some interesting historical facts about the knife that most folks never new.


David R. Beck
Click to expand...

Mr. Beck, although this is now 33 years after the fact, I have some interesting information to share with you that may fill in the gaps. This is the history of the "Tracker", or "Medicine Blade" before Ed Lombi, yourself or TOPS came on the scene. Take a look at the web page http://www.wildwoodsurvival.com/survival/trackerknife/trackermag/thetrackerv1-2pg11.html. The man mentioned, Robb Russon, is my father. He was an independent knife designer and maker who corresponded with Brown in 1981 and gathered ideas about what would make "the perfect survival knife". What resulted was a refined design and a prototype made by my father for Brown, who used it in his classes and had enormous interest from his students to purchase this knife. He verbally contracted with my father to be the sole provider of knife, using my father's design, and then Brown mysteriously cut off all communications with my father and disappeared. I was only a teenager at the time, and an apprentice to my father in his shop, and remember the details vividly. We worked to prepare the blanks to be used for that initial order that never came. Brown just evaporated into the mist like the survivalist he was. We never knew of anyone else's involvement with the saga of the "Tracker Knife" until it showed up on the cover of a Blade Magazine issue in 2003, and I was shocked to see my father's knife was part of a major motion picture (The Hunted). We then learned of TOPS' involvement in producing the knife, and my father was obviously angry and saddened that he had been given no credit for his diligent work to produce the designs for what would become "The Tracker" knife, as well as the Tom Brown skinner, which never went to production. Robb Russon never got any credit or a penny for his work, which is a travesty and revelation of Brown's character. So if you want to tell the real story of the Tracker knife, you need to start back in 1981 when it really began, and give some credit to the knifemaking genius of my father, whose name faded into obscurity in what would apparently become a long tale of copies and lies.
 
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I have one of the first knives that were made by Ed Lombi. He was supposed to make 200 but I understand that at 80 he decided to move on. I like the knife and the deep stamp that they put into the blade. I can tell that it was made to be a hard working knife that one might need in the wild. I have done a lot of serious wilderness work and was a member of "The American Mountain Men". If I just had one blade this one would work fine.
 
Did your father put a deep stamp into the blade or other identification on the knives he made? What kind of handle material did he use? Bob
 
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