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Some Thoughts... |
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I guess every knifemaker has a philosophy, reasons why he makes knives the way he does. Some I suppose even develop their philosophy and preferred style before they make knives, certainly before they make them professionally. I didn’t, but that’s just how I am.
I’ve developed a style, my personal approach to knifemaking, but I enjoy watching it change, influenced by suggestions from my friends and customers (they’re the same people for the most part), or something new I might have learned on my grinder yesterday, or an idea Simonich or Mayo or one of a few dozen other world class knifemakers might have shared with me at the last knife show. Sometimes it’s an accident, something I did wrong and in fixing learned a new way of doing things. Once, I profoundly changed my style because a particular knifemaker whom I didn’t especially respect bragged about how well he did something. I thought if he could do that I could do better, and now that’s a lot of what I do—double edges. That knifemaker has vanished from the profession, but his legacy lives in my knives. Strange how that works sometimes. |
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And there are things I don’t know how to do, or which require equipment I don’t have, or are something I don’t enjoy doing and therefore don’t. I make knives because it’s a pleasure for me to do so; I assiduously avoid encumbering that pleasure with tiresome tasks or heavy sweat. This must be fun. If not, I might as well have a real job and earn real money. I did that once and it sucked, so now I make knives and find it’s nice to get up in the morning. I work at making knives five days a week, then do it some more on the weekends because it’s also my hobby.
Every new knife is both a discovery and a quest. With each I gain new skill, learning new things, while trying my damnedest to make it as near to perfect as I can, and in failing am pushed to try again. Within each batch of knives I make is at least one, usually more, I didn’t know I possessed the skill to make—until I did. That is the fascination which drives me. I marvel that after thousands of years of making man’s oldest and most enduring tool, we can still create new designs that are demonstrably better than what has come before. You really don’t have to look back very far to appreciate just how very far we’ve come, and the adventure of going further is what keeps me grinding.
I try very hard to make the best knives I can envision, constrained only by my imagination and my ability to render it in steel. That’s what has brought me to the realm of tactical knives, because I find they entail the most demanding standards of any blades. They must perform grueling and demanding tasks, yet they possess sufficient sensory appeal to sell. I find those seemingly conflicting demands to in fact be synergistic, but requiring I think beyond just the two dimensions you see in photos.
Light yet powerful. Strong but quick. Deadly and beautiful. Each attribute in conflict with the others makes the shaping of a knife or sword a uniquely demanding challenge. There are many, maybe even most who believe and argue loudly that the finest edged weapons ever have already been made by Japanese masters or Middle Eastern smiths or Medieval Europeans. I believe otherwise. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t keep trying. The finest blade ever lies ahead on the very road on which I and other knifemakers are now standing. It only requires that we adventure far enough to find it…
Jerry |
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