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The real beauty of a good handmade knife is that below the surface of the hand rubbed finish, the intricately folded Damascus steel, the exotic handle materials and all the attention to detail, you still have a knife that has performance at its heart. Non-functional knives are not really knives at all. They are just shiny chunks of metal. A knife is a cutting tool first and a thing of beauty second. There are a
whole contingent of knife makers who are good at crafting knives, but even
better at crafting tall tales about their knives' performance.
I have personally tested knives by renowned makers who seem to
claim that their knives will carve a fifth face on Mount Rushmore and then
shave the hair off your arm. Many
of these knives are average, most are surprisingly sub-standard. The
sad thing is that there are apparently enough people out there who want to
hear great stories about performance that they will pay ten times the real
value of a knife just because they buy the line that someone gives them.
Someone will show me a $5000 knife and say, “What do you
think?” I will say, “You
got just what you paid for. You got a $500 worth of knife and $4500 of good fiction.”
The reason that many of these legendary tales of unearthly performance
persist is that the knives become so expensive that most customers never
use them, and therefore are not in a position to refute the tall tales. You will
find that I’m a pretty straight shooter.
I will tell you exactly how it is without any sugar coating.
I will (and do) lose a sale on a knife because I refuse to mislead
someone into believing that a knife is more than it is.
I had a potential customer look at one of my Damascus hunting
knives at a show and ask, “Now I’ve heard that Damascus will get
sharper the more you use it.” This
guy didn’t come up with that on his own. Some shifty maker fed him
that to sell a blade. When I told him the truth, he was so disappointed that he
didn’t buy the knife. That’s
ok. I would rather under-promise
and over-deliver than the other way around.
Guess that’s why I’m not a very good salesman. Now when I
say performance, I mean that if I design a knife for a particular task, it
will perform remarkably in that capacity.
You’ll tell your friends about it.
If you chose to use the knife for what it was designed for, I
guarantee you will not be disappointed. That doesn't mean that a
small caping knife will excel at cutting the roof off a car. I have
a section on my design philosophy that
explains that more thoroughly. Since I
value performance above all other things, I have to devote part of my
working time to devising realistic tests for my knives and putting them
through those tests. I
don’t get paid for that time, and I have to spend money to make the
knives, then destroy them in some cases.
The trade-off is that I know my knives are superior to most knives
available, either handmade or production.
Since I am always experimenting and testing, my knives continue to
improve year after year. The
improvements now are not monumental, but are constantly pushing the
boundaries of extreme performance. Below are several performance tests that were done here in my shop or by customers. I need to add many more, but I usually forget to photograph them when I do them. The knife is required to cut several different mediums without chipping, bending or breaking. Some tests are gross abuse of the knife, far beyond what is required of a blade in real life. If you ever perform destructive tests on a knife, do so at your own risk.
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