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I was born in 1972 and raised in Southern California for the major part of my life.  Nothing remarkable, just a regular middle class kid who did ok in high school and went to two years at a community college.

I could never quite figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up, so I worked over the years I worked as a engineering drafter, an ambulance driver, a real estate investor, an insurance salesman (clearly the worst of the bunch) as well as several other totally unrelated jobs.  I've never really had that many passionate hobbies, but I've always enjoyed shooting and of course, making knives.  I made my first knife in 1992 after reading Bob Loveless’ book, How to Make Knives.  I had always loved knives as a kid, but what inspired me to make them then and now is still a mystery.  Knifemaking was an on again, off again hobby for almost 10 years.  I made pretty rough stock removal knives during that time, no more than two or three per year.  In 2001, I told my wife that through all the things I had tried and all the little hobbies I had gotten into, that knifemaking was the one thing I always came back to.  So naturally I said, I thought I should try doing it full-time.  (You probably see the problem here.  I have not met any other full-time maker who tried it quite like this!)  I had not sold but one knife in my entire career, and that was to my best friend almost 10 years before.  So, I had no customers and the total value for the equipment in my shop was probably $200, at most.  Here's what my old shop looked like.

I bought a good grinder, a real anvil, and a few other odds and ends.  At that point, I really started to teach myself to make knives.  I paid more attention to the details and pushed myself to make every knife better than the last.  I had joined the ABS a year prior to this and realized that if I went to the ABS school for the intro class, that I would just beat the requirement to test for Journeyman at the 2002 Blade Show.  I took the class in February 2002 under Jay Hendrickson.  I passes my Journeyman smith performance test with Tim Hancock that May, and by the time I went to the Blade Show that year, I had 9 knives with me.  That represented, near as I can tell, about 25% off all the knives I had ever made.  At the show I received my JS stamp and went back to work.

We continued to live in Southern California until January 2004 when we moved to Bristol, Virginia.  (Long story, but basically we saw an ad for a house for sale in a magazine, decided to take a look and here we are.)  I now have 15 wooded acres and after three years here in Virginia, I finally finished my new shop.  I always enjoyed making knives, but there is something really different about having a designated space that's all your own.  I owe this new shop to my dad who helped me build it, my wife who let me spend a lot of money on it, and my customers who kept the phone ringing and the forge running for all these years. 

I still use very little equipment compared to most.  I have two KMG grinders, a disc grinder, a makeshift buffer, a band saw and a little drill press.  On the forging side, I have a hydraulic press which I built, two forges and one heat treating oven that I also built, a 250 lb. anvil and a few Home Depot sledge hammers.  Besides what I learned at the ABS school, I am totally self-taught with the exception of what I read in books and magazines.  However, Tim Hancock has been probably the greatest help in showing me how to critique my own work.  Little suggestions he has given me on some small areas of my knives have saved me countless hours, and many are things I may have never figured out without him. 

I primarily make four kinds of knives (all fixed blades for now).  The first is my usual stuff: Hunters, Bowies and Camp knives with hand-rubbed blades, polished or textured fittings, and premium-type handle materials.  Blades are 52100, W-2, laminated steel or my own Damascus.  Hunters start at $450 and big knives run to $2500 and higher.  The second category is what I call “Blue Collar” knives.  Most of these are hunters, although many of my knives could be made in “blue collar” fashion.  These knives are basic, working knives with decorative touches left to a minimum, and performance at a maximum.  The little hunters run $175 with the sheath.  These are some of my most enjoyable knives to make because they get used, and the feedback I receive from these knives allows me to improve the performance of the rest of my knives.  Military knives really are a category unto themselves, and as much as the knife, I try to build sheaths that permit flexible mounting options and quick and easy access the knife.  Lastly are my art knives, whether they are daggers or other pure art knives.  Sure, these knives are functional, but they are primarily built as art objects to show what I can do with steel when money is not an object.

Though knifemaking had been a full-time effort since 2001 in terms of hours spent, by mid 2003, it was the only thing I was doing.  Though I have always loved the work of making knives, and the challenge of improving on the performance and the visual appeal of my knives, the greatest thing that knifemaking has done for me is that it gave me the opportunity to bring my family out of the zoo that is Southern California to the calm that is southwest Virginia.  The quality of life here is something I could not have afforded to do, no matter what I did for a living, because there are no jobs here.  Certainly, there are a great many things that will allow a person to earn more money.  Nothing however, I know of that would have allowed me to move across the country to an area where I didn’t have to look for a job and I could just move in and get back to work.  It’s not easy, but God provides…..regularly.