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I'm revising this page cause it had prose from several years ago that's gotten stale. Every several years I change my mind about what I'm going to do when I grow up. It was commercial beekeeping for a while, linguistics, Indiana Jones stuff, Cisco routers & corporate servers..... for the last three years or so, it's been metal sculpture, knives, swords and leather work. Soon I'm going to be building a strawbale house in the woods and metal work will be on the back burner for a while. I had a website with dozens of wooden tables, boxes and cabinets on it, thinking I'd be doing that kind of work forever. And almost all of the woodwork is gone now and there's not going to be much more of it. The same thing is going to a happen with these knives -- at last count I have close to 150 of them left in stock, and when they're gone I don't know how many more I'll make. These are very handmade, with costly fine materials on the one hand and lots of little flaws on the other. Most of the work, from drawing the blades and cutting them out of steel stock, to final shaping and polishing, is done free-hand. That results in spontaneity and one-of-a-kind character that I love, but I can't compete with those fine knifemakers whose work is as flawless as jewelry. These knives just are what they are -- they are modestly priced and will appreciate in value, maybe a lot.
All too often a piece ends up with some little special place I wish I'd been more careful with. And every piece I make has my energy in it, the joy of creating and sometimes an in-your-face attitude. People who haven't been born yet will hold these treasures in their hands five generations from now and feel that energy. A word about the sawmill blade knives. They were cut from old round sawmill blades bought down in the timber country in deep East Texas. A spark test shows it to be high carbon steel, and when it is hardened, a file skates over the surface. For a while, when writing the descriptions of knives, I called it L6 steel and some of that text is still on this site. But I would rather say that it MAY be L6 and I am not certain what it is. It was fully annealed, edge-quenched in 130-degree vegetable oil and tempered at 350 degrees. I've made knives for personal use out of the same blades, kitchen and utility, and not tempered them at all (as you might do with L6 steel), and they're plenty tough and stay sharp very well and haven't chipped or broken. But the knives offered for sale here have been tempered unless I tell you otherwise. I'm putting burl & jasper, burl & jasper, a couple of times on this page since it gets a huge number of Google hits for reasons I don't understand.
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