how did ya'll start

[doublearrow]

I was just kind of curious as to how ya'll got started in knifemaking, your first knife, how you started selling knives, ect....

[canyonman]

Have not sold a knife yet. I started by grinding down a planner blade from a mill. Absolutely THE butt-ugliest knife you have ever seen. I still carry it on every hunting trip. I've made some since that have turned out much better, and given them as gifts.
Hope to get a logo together and start making knives for some extra money, who knows maybe someday.....

[Jason Cutter]

Got interested through a combination of collecting, "boys toys" stuff, Boy Scouts etc., martial arts - sword work mostly Japanese-oriented, then decided in 2000 or so that all those custom knives were getting expensive - started customising kitchen knives, factory stuff, and got onto some kit blades. Ground my first blade in late 2001 from an old file - Looked pretty awful too. After 4 half-assed attempts at HT, got it right and wrapped the handle with cord. Still have it.

Worked hard on HT and techniques. Managed to pull together 35 knives to attend my first show in 2002 in Melbourne, Australia after 7months of making and sold 13 knives that weekend. Thankfully have made further progress since with techniques and more importantly - fit and finish. I now look back at unsold knives and regard anything prior to August-September 2002 to be inappropriate to sell. I am literally "forging ahead" (pun intended) !!

Have a look - website stuff - http://www.jcbknives.com

Its been fun, and met heaps of great folks along the way. Cheers. Jason.

[Davis]

heya Jason,

Just spent half an hour looking at your knives and I'm sorry I didn't do so long before ....
Those are nice.. very nice, hard to believe you have been doing this only a short while, it doesn't show in your work.

Especailly like your FLKs, they aren't funny-looking at all, they are exactly what .... well, like I try to make most of mine, "try" being the operative word there ... *g*

I got into making knives because I love to cook and NO ONE makes a decent kitchen knife. Me included .....

Trish

[Osprey Guy]

If it weren't for Darrel and Alex's knifekits, I'm fairly certain I never would have discovered the latent affinity I have for this...Hell, before I happened to stumble onto Darrel Ralph's website late one night about a year ago, I didn't even know how to use most tools, other than the absolute basics...hammer, screwdriver, that sort of thing...had no idea I could do any of this!

It's now become an all consuming passion...I'm feeling real comfortable with my embellishment skills, and my blade grinding is finally beginning to take shape, albeit slowly...(too many new embellishment ideas constantly floating in my head...just itching to come out )...

The past few months I sold a fair number of my kitknives...and they are now fetching very good prices...more and more customers have actually started seeking me out, which only encourages me to press forward. Fortunately I'm back at work and no longer have to depend on whatever extra money I take in with my the sales of my "fancy" kitknives... I can now afford to spend more time focused on making my own...

When I finally begin creating my own knives, ...thanks to what I've learned from the kits, and the reputation I've already been able to establish with my embellishment work,...I'll be able to hit the ground running.

Thank you Darrel and Alex,...and everyone here at the CKDF who's constant support and encouragement enables all this to happen.

Dennis Greenbaum

Yeah Baby!

[JimmySeymour]

there's a knifemaker in denver city i met at a gun show in lubbock. He's an older fella. I can't find his business card right now, but as soon as I do, I'll send you his address and phone number. He's a nice fella, and I'm sure he will help you out a lot, if your starting out.

[ragnik]

Thought I would share why i started down this road! I am very very new to all of this and I have completed only one knife at this point, and for the record it was made of the wrong steel! but i finished it anyway just to see if I could, I am now onto bigger and better things finally having the proper steel to play with, and it all started from me sitting around one day wondering how knives were made and if I could make one. From there I found CKD on the internet, and begin reading reading and reading! I have no idea if I will make 1 knife or a hundred, but I am having fun that is for sure!

Thanks to everyone on this forum, all you need to do is ask and someone will respond with an answer! Everyone on here should be proud of what they have been able to make and how they have been able to help others to improve their craft as well!

Happy knife making to everyone regardless of how you got your start!

Ross

[whv]

i received an a.g.russell catalog in 1971 announcing that he had taken over the manufacture of morseth knives. since i couldn't afford one at the time, i started making my own the same way harry morseth had 50 years earlier - by cold grinding brusletto laminated steel blanks from norway and putting handles on them.
.
since then, i had only made knives for family and friends until a year ago when i decided that i needed to find a source of income for retirement. this has become such a serious hobby that i may consider full time in the future.
.
i must be crazy

[Kelly Carlson]

Interesting thread - I'll try to keep my 40 years of trying to make knifes abbreviated:
Attempted to forge my own knife from a railroad spike in my teens - the ugliest thing I'd never want anyone to see!
While in SF in the '60's, tried to buy a Randall, but was told by Bo Randall he was too far backordered to deliver a completed knife, but he could send me a finished "kit" blade if I could put the rest of it together. Challenge accepted, and the knife looks pretty much like what Bo Randall intended, plus a whole lot of parachute jumps and survival type of abuse to its credit.
Now I'm hooked, and started assembling kit knives as contest prizes for a financial services sales force I was developing in the '70's and '80's, then grinding my own fixed blades in the '90's, again as gifts and prizes.
Meanwhile, I accidentally stayed at the same hotel where the Guild show was taking place in the early '80's and became instantly became an addicted collector of folders, which I didn't have a clue as to how to make with my very basic skills and tools, at that time.
Thanks to discovering Darrel's and Alex's kit knifes, (which provide an excellent learning tools) and a lot of tips from CKD forum members, I've been focusing most of my efforts on making my own folders for the past year.
At this point, having retired early from my former profession a few years ago to buy a NH horse farm and make knives, I'm focused on making knives as a very satisfying new career.

[PaulD]

I was having a hard time carving a floor tile with an X-acto knife for an arts & craft project. Started thinking I could make a handle that my arthritic hands could control better.

As is my usual method, I let the idea ferment a while before I actually started anything. A couple days latter I saw some cheap throwing knives at the local Flea Market. I thought "I could assemble a real knife with one of these" I bought 2 blades for 6 or 7 dollars.

More fermenting. Then I needed a gift for a relative who is a Pagan. Now what do I have on hand to make some scales? Common wood? No, too common, nothing else. Then I remembered that broken marble door sill. Now that's not common. No tools for working stone, No problem, put a "wonder wheel" in the old table saw and slice it down, some small stone grinding wheels for the hand drill to get in those curves, sandpaper to 800 grit, buff,

Cool, I made a knife, and it don't look half bad, the Wife likes it, the neighbor lady won't put it down and keeps rubbing it with her hands?????

Made it more "pagan" by attaching a pendant from the local sterling silver shop. Happy relative. Her friend sees it and orders the two Heart daggers. (now you know why all the daggers) I'm a knife maker. OK, an assembler for now but I have a cable damascus blade I helped make at one of our NECKA Hammer Ins last year.

Never did make the X-acto knife handle.

See my pics at My First 3 if you haven't already.

[doublearrow]

Thanks for replying, it's just kinda neat to hear how other people started out in this lil obsession. By the way Jimmy Seymour if you find the Denver City man's name and number I'd sure like to see it. There aren't many people in this town so hopefully I'll know someone who knows him and I'll be able to talk to him.

[Ed Caffrey]

My tale starts when I was 12. A friend and I worked all one summer putting up hay on Indiana farms, so that we could both buy new Buck 110 folder for the next trapping season. Our first "catch" that year was a 52 lb. beaver. He sharpened his knife 4 times and I sharpened mine 5 time to get through that one beaver! I was on the search for something better......grinding down old power hacksaw blades in the farm shop, stealing my Grandma's kitchen knives.....anything to try to make a better blade. Right after I joined the Air Force, I met a young man who was a third generation blacksmith out of Colorado who taught me the basic of the forge....from that point on I was consumed by Bladesmithing.

The first knife I sold was a cable damascus blade (really crude by my standards today) that a guy offered me $50 for! After that, people started asking me to make them knives, and it's still going today! The best part about being a Knifemaker is all of the wonderful people out there in the knife world! You couldn't ask for a better bunch of folks!

[JimmySeymour]

The knifemaker in Denver City is R.H. Gayle. His address is 219 n. Main Street, Denver city TX 79323. We met at a gun show in lubbock tx. Right after the USS Cole got bombed. We were both ex-navy so we talked about that for a while. He's a good guy, and next time i'm in the lubbock area I plan on looking him up. He can probably show you his shop and equipment. He was starting to do his own engraving as well. Hope this works, I have no phone number from him. Good luck.

[Stormcrow]

Jimmy Seymour - Are you in Lubbock? I'm pulling together a blacksmith group here, and we have some folks interested in knives. If you're here and interested, give me a holler.

[JimmySeymour]

Hey Stormcrow, No I'm no longer living in lubbock. I accepted a job in Corpus Christi to support my knife habit. Sometimes I think drugs would be cheaper, but knives are more fun. I would like to check out the blacksmiths thing you have going on when ever I go back up to lubbock to visit though.