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July 20, 2003
Cutting-edge craftsmen: Lane County's knife makers find customers nationwide
By Bill Neill
For The Register-Guard
In the past 20 years, Eugene has become home to knife makers of national caliber. They sell their work to collectors in the United States and overseas for hundreds and even thousands of dollars a pop.
Members of this loosely knit group each settled here for their own reasons, trickling in from states such as Illinois and California.
What has turned the Eugene area into a hotbed for makers of sharp metal objects?
Wayne Goddard, who has been crafting knives by hand for about 40 years, is one of several nationally known knife makers working in the area.
Part of the reason is local knife maker Wayne Goddard, who has been crafting knives by hand for about 40 years. "I'm the old timer here," said Goddard, 64.
More than a half-dozen people in Lane County earn their living as full-time knife makers, Goddard estimated. He rattled off their names - Eugene's Ron Lake, Bob Lum and Jess Horn; Bill Harsey in Creswell; Wendell Fox in Springfield; Richard Veatch in Oakridge. A dozen or so other locals work part time at the trade.
These knife makers are part of a broad network of self-employed people who comprise Lane County's large but hard-to-quantify craft economy that also encompasses potters, glass blowers and others who sell regionally and nationally.
The knife makers are all fascinated by the process of creating highly sophisticated versions of one of man's fundamental implements.
"A knife is man's most basic tool, and many civilized people have forgotten that," Goddard said.
He's made all manner of knives, from miniatures to oversized Bowie-style knives, to tribal knives with an African influence.
"I'm like a volcano," Goddard explained. "There's all these knives welling inside me trying to get out." He's even hammered knives out of logging cables.
These custom-made knives are too valuable to be dumped into the same grimy toolbox as common pliers and screwdrivers.
Eugene knife maker Ron Lake estimated that of the knives he makes and sells now, only about 10 percent are used to cut things. "Years ago they were all used," he said. The rest of Lake's knives end up being treated as objects of art.
Before Goddard went into knife making, he created other implements from metal. He worked for Nielsen Saw & Manufacturing and Industrial Carbide Tooling, both in Eugene. The firms made saws and grinding equipment, including circular saws for lumber mills.
To get paid for their time, hobbyists must focus on quality to fetch top dollar, and there's lots of competition for high-paying customers.
"A saw is a knife with a whole bunch of edges," Goddard noted.
Like many local craftspeople, he got started with the help of Eugene's Saturday Market.
In 1973, he took some of his knives to the market. "I went down there one Saturday and sold a week's work," he said. Later that year, he turned to making knives full time.
Easing the transition was his wife, Phyllis, who held a regular job managing a bakery thrift store. "I wouldn't have been able to do it without her," he said.
She handled the paperwork and balanced the books for the knife business.
"I give my wife a lot of credit for my success," Goddard said.
A simpler, cheaper past
Back in the '70s, the knife field was different. Prices were lower and knives weren't as elaborate.
"When I started out, I never thought I would be making anything but hard-working knives at a reasonable cost," Goddard said.
However, collectors urged him to make better, fancier, more expensive models, and he accommodated the demand.
"He has been making knives since the '60s and he put in a lot of time and he's paid a lot of dues to be in a position to make a living at it," said Robert Golden, owner of retailer Fourth Avenue Knives and Swords in Olympia. Golden owns about 20 Goddard knives.
Goddard traces his fascination with knives to the time when he was a "little bitty kid" with a pocket knife. He carried it everywhere and learned how to sharpen it.
Bob Loveless, a well-known knife maker in California, inspired him.
"He was a real example to me, and always would take time to talk to me on the phone," Goddard said.
In turn, Goddard, a master smith in the American Bladesmith Society, passes on his skills. He has taught techniques in a half-dozen states and continues to teach two- and three-day classes in blade making at his shop.
Hand labor
A custom knife maker's workshop typically contains a bandsaw, drill press, belt grinders and milling machines. A few makers even buy computer-controlled milling machines.
So, what constitutes a hand-made knife? Often, it's made using power tools. The important point is they're made one at a time. Each knife is slightly different, and they are not mass produced.
Making a knife isn't expensive. You don't need a lot of machinery. Goddard said that in his early years, he made 300 knives using only the equipment that fit on a 4-foot-square table. He tells people they can build a knife for $50 or less, and his book "Wayne Goddard's Fifty Dollar Knife Shop" (Krause Publications) shows how.
But making knives for pleasure is very different from making a living at it.
Hobbyists can make and sell knives for low prices that don't reflect their investment of time.
But to get paid for their time, knife makers must make high-quality products that fetch top dollar. And there's competition from the many professional knife makers to snag high-paying customers.
"It's a lot harder for a guy to get into it full time today than when I got into it," Goddard said.
Goddard said he's cut back his output in the past six years because of health problems. At his peak, he said, he produced 60 to 100 knives selling for $100 to $2,000. He displays his work at shows each year in Los Angeles, New York and Atlanta, and has taken his knives as far as Paris to sell.
Goddard had replacement surgery on both his knees in 1997. Now, due to arthritis, he has difficulty working with his hands. Some of the problems have been fixed with surgery and therapy. But knife making requires a lot of hand work.
"I love forging big old Bowie knives," Goddard said. That involves hammering on a slab of hot steel, a process that sends impact into the hands.
"I can't do it every day," Goddard said. For a big knife, he spreads the forging work over three or four days.
He also does hand-rub finishes, including smoothing a blade with sandpaper. Hand finishing requires strength and repetitive motion. It produces fine polishing lines, which Goddard said connoisseurs appreciate over a satin finish or a mirror-polish finish.
"There's a lot a machine can't do," he said.
As to the business side of the work, Goddard, like many other custom knife makers, seems less than enthusiastic. "For most of us, (making knives) is such a passion that we'd probably do it until we went broke," he said.
License to sell
Like a number of knife makers, Goddard has turned to design licensing as a way to make money.
In 1991, Goddard designed a folding knife for Spyderco, a manufacturer based in Golden, Colo. It came in three sizes: the Wayne Goddard, Wayne Goddard Jr. and Baby Wayne Goddard. Spyderco retailed the knives for less than $100 apiece. Goddard earned royalties on the sales until Spyderco discontinued the models in 2000.
The decadelong run was probably the longest Spyderco has done for a design collaboration, President Sal Glesser said. "There were times we were selling 1,000 (Goddards) a month, which for us was a large number," he said.
Such licensing deals seem to benefit all sides. The knife factories mass-produce the items and retail them at a relatively affordable price - typically less than $100. The deals give manufacturers access to fresh designs from famous names, and the craftsmen not only get royalty checks, but also see their name or signature on a widely sold blade.
Goddard has made knives from all kinds of materials. "One of my claims to fame is that I brought knives made from logging cable to the mainstream," he said. This is a raw material that the Eugene area possesses in abundance, and hammering the cables into blades creates an unusual pattern that some collectors admire. Goddard recently finished making one for a doctor in Italy.
A specialty meet
A testament to the Lane County area's knife-making fixation occurs every April, when the Oregon Knife Collectors Association holds a weekend-long show at the Lane County Fairgrounds. With 450 tables of displays, it claims to be the world's largest knife show.
At the event, knife builders exhibit their creations, while dealers offer antique and collectible knives fanned out on velvet backdrops or in glass cases. Handles are of wood, bone, mother-of-pearl. Blades are straight, curved, rounded, pointed.
Goddard and collector Dennis Ellingsen founded the Oregon Knife Collectors Association and put on the first local knife show in the mid-'70s. Starting out in the 12,000-square-foot auditorium, the show now fills all 38,000 square feet of the main exhibit hall.
"The facility that they are in now is about full as you can get," said Linda Roz Smith, sales and events manager at the fairgrounds. Attendance has held steady at 5,000 for the past three or four years, Ellingsen said.
Aside from hosting the knife show and offering a high quality of life, Eugene offers no particular advantages to a knife builder.
"There's not much that we can buy here," Goddard observed. "I get my steel that I forge from Pacific Machinery and Tool Steel in Portland."
Custom knife makers buy only tiny amounts of steel and other materials, not enough to have an economic impact. The cost of the finished product mainly reflects their labor. Goddard is able to sell a Bowie-style knife for $2,000 or more mainly because of the hours he put in making it. "I'm hard pressed to put $30 worth of materials in them," he said.
Goddard and other knife aficionados like writing about their craft.
Goddard has written two books - "The Wonder of Knifemaking" and "Wayne Goddard's Fifty Dollar Knife Shop" - and he's produced a video on making blades from cable. Also, he writes a question-and-answer column each month for Blade magazine.
Collector Ellingsen, meanwhile, contributes articles to Knife World magazine.
Another Eugene resident, Bernard Levine, is author of "Levine's Guide to Knives and Their Values," published by Krause Publications.
But in the broader economy, these people are relative unknowns.
"There's small businesses, and there's microscopic businesses," Goddard said, "and that's what we are."
Bill Neill is a free-lance business writer based in Portland.
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