Zen and the Art of Knifemaking

[Frank J Warner]

I don't know how many of you have read Robert Pirsig's classic "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," but if you can get past the 60's new age baloney and the protaganist's often whiney tone, there's a lot of good advice in the book related to tools and the things we do with them.

I'm thinking specifically of a conversation the protagonist had with his teen-age son about maintaining a motorcycle. A lot of the conversation applies to knifemaking (and anything else). As I recall, the father was telling the son about how you can be humming along, adjusting the brakes, the clutch, tensioning the chain, etc., when all of a sudden you come to a screw or a bolt that simply won't budge. No matter what you do to it, you can't back it out.

The screw is frozen, and you can't do anything else until you get that screw out. So a job that should have taken half an hour takes half a day.

I had something like that happen to me tonight. I'm building four large tactical folders based on a single design. Got to the point where I was ready for the first trial assembly. The first three knives went together like silk on a woman's body. The last one, all because of ONE SCREW, would not go together at all. I don't know why. All four knives were made with the same setups, the same measurements, the same holes, threads, everything. But one screw simply would not do what it was supposed to do.

So I just spent 2 hours fighting with that one screw, which should have taken all of five seconds to tighten. I must not have been holding my mouth right when I drilled and tapped that hole, or the stars had shifted out of knifemaking alignment. Or something.

Two hours later all four knives are together. But I'm a little concerned about that last one. It didn't feel very Zen-like at all.

-Frank J Warner

[Mace]

Frank,
Either your drill press isn't facing North, or you were just not "One with the screw"
Zen and the art of archery is also a good read. I think knife making can be very Zen like. I think it's an opening of the mind. We learn from the masters and they in turn learn from us. The true masters don't put themselves above us, they put themselves next to us. Thats how I see the knife community.

Your experience with the screw and the folders was still zen like, because in the end you learned to overcome your obsticle(that @#$!@ screw) Its wonderfull when every thing just flows when you are doing somethig in the shop. It is zen. You are one with the knife....You are inside it....You have become it.

[whv]

frank -
i occassionally run into a screw (especially if the threads are rolled rather than cut) that just is not to spec for the batch. for me, that screw goes to the recycle bin and a new one is substituted.