My family heritage is knives, my great grandfather Stephen Richard started Richard Cutlery back in 1865 in Southbridge, Mass. My grand father Joseph also had his own cutlery making business. My Dad was forced to take over the business at a very young age when they both died and it was bought out by a wire manufacturing company. There's 6 pages in "New England Cutlery" about my family.

I got interested in making knives when I was 14, my Dad gave me a little guidance then but it was pretty short lived. I got re-interested in knives close to ten years ago.

I started out wanting to forge but could find little information on it so I mainly did stock removal with little time spent at the forge. Eventually the stock removal became a smaller part of what I was doing and the forging has taken over.

I'm a carpenter by trade so most of my making was done when I was an out of work carpenter since its one of the more seasonable jobs. After a heart attach and by pass surgery more than
three years ago the carpenter jobs were few and far between for me so in
November of 2002 I decided to go full time knife and forgot the carpenter
thing.

All my work is hand forged. I have no press or power hammer so I do
very little damascus. I make tomahawks and knives that have a vintage look
to them. I like doing a variety of steels, old saw steel being my favorite. My biggest find was a piece of a really old lumber mill saw blade that turns out to be shear steel, something that hasn't been made
for well over a 100 years.