metalworking

Knifemaking: playing your hand and The Wild Card

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“Like I said, I’ve got mixed emotions about wild card games.  In one sense, they tend to bring out the gamble in your opponents.  They often create a carnival of excitement in which players give away a lot of money painlessly.  On the other hand, it’s hard to calculate a strategy for a game the dealer has just invented.”

Doyle Brunson- According to Doyle

I think the best definition of a wild card is something that can be what you need it to be, when you need it to be.  I have a friend like this- his name is Fred and I’ve written about him before.  I worked with Fred at the warehouse dealing with restaurant equipment.  During the tenure of our professional and personal relationship, Fred has set me on fire, twice, helped me fix my car, helped me fix my friends’ cars, helped me fix my girlfriend’s house, and showed me how to fix things I had no idea could be fixed.  The man has infuriated me beyond belief and has also made me laugh till I cried.  Fred is a wild card, a deus ex machina, the kind of person who can accomplish incredible things and can do it, most of the time, without having any sort of concrete plan.  Which makes it that much more infuriating to work with him and can also result in being set aflame…

I’ve always had this paradoxical sense of simultaneously feeling incredibly safe and slightly on edge whenever I worked with Fred.  We would go into jobs and everything that could go wrong would absolutely go wrong.  Somehow Fred would figure it out.  There was the time a one day job turned into three at a federal office building near downtown Washington DC.  A Japanese restaurant on the floor level of a building on Glebe Rd was going out of business and they had a very short amount of time to have everything removed.  The loading dock was in the basement and the bay door was two inches too short to get our tractor trailer in to load all the equipment out.  The only way to get everything out was through a single door at the front of the building onto the sidewalk.  We couldn’t get the truck there till two days later and we had to hot load it on the street, one of the busiest streets on the east coast.  The truck would be there at 3am.  In the mean time we had to dismantle everything in the restaurant, including a walk-in freezer, a walk-in cooler, fifty tables, and twenty hibachi grills.  I never want to move another hibachi table ever again.  Fred orchestrated the truck to get there half an hour after the door people removed the five thousand dollar custom glass door so we could get everything out of the building.  The truck was late and there was maybe two hours before the police would get there and make us move, but not before they asked up why we had a semi-truck, a forklift, and a truck with a tilt deck trailer in front of a government building with no permits.  Fortunately that didn’t happen and we got out of there in an hour and a half, smelling of old fish and rotten bok choy.

A lot of jobs happened this way.  None of this is an exact science.  On my better days I felt like a part of a black ops crack team.  On my not so better days I seriously questioned my life decisions.  None of it was ever boring, though.  Not with Fred.

There was an Italian man who had a few restaurants around town.  Crazy Frank we called him.  He had just opened up a new restaurant and had an emergency with his ice machine and a pizza oven we rebuilt for him.  Fred and I head over there at lunch.  The kitchen is insane.  I go over to the the oven and start to drill out holes on the door to put a handle on- bear in mind the oven is roaring at 600 degrees and has pizza in it.  Fred is reprogramming the thermostat on the ice machine.  It is the lunch rush and there are ten people running around, screaming in Italian.  Fred asked me if I had a ‘big ass college word’ to describe the situation.  I told him that I believed the word he was looking for was ‘asinine’.

“Right,” he says.  “This shit is asinine”

The most memorable job I was on with Fred was a three day bakery extraction.   Fred, myself, and our colleague and good friend Aaron were to fly to Nebraska, load an entire bakery into two tractor trailers, and then fly home.  Adventures started at the airport.  Fred and I are not fans of flying.  At the airport bar I had forty dollar margarita with a cornucopia of liquor in it and Fred had two double shots of Jack Daniels.  We got on the plane and promptly went to sleep.  We arrived in Nebraska that evening, picked up a swanky rental car and went to look at the job.

The first thing I noticed was that it was cold.  Like unbelievably cold.  It hadn’t really hit me at the airport.  This was January and I had never been anywhere that flat, windy, and cold before.  The second thing I noticed was a gigantic rotating bread oven.  Our client told us that it bakes 100 loaves an hour when loaded to capacity.  We would spend the majority of our time dismantling that hulking behemoth.  We got steaks for dinner, because that is what you do in Nebraska, and went to the hotel.

The next couple of days were stupidly cold.  The forklift we rented wouldn’t start most of the mornings until the sun came out.  We had to disconnect and extract the oven exhaust system, which meant going onto an icy sheet metal room.  We had to take that oven apart, which had nearly a thousand 3/4″ screws holding it together.  Fred was confident in his ability to get it all back together.

Everything went as it should, got loaded, and sent back to Virginia.  Our travels were slightly rockier.  There was an ice storm that closed the Chicago Midway Airport and we got diverted to Indianapolis where we sat on the tarmac for seven hours.  Seven hours of Fred without a cigarette.  Seven hours of Fred saying we should have rented a truck and driven to Nebraska.  Seven hours of Fred telling anyone who would listen that no one could keep him on that plane.  I was sitting next to a mother and her small child on their way to Disney World.  The husband and another little one were sitting behind me with Fred.  These little ones had a better grip on the situation than Fred.  Finally they let us off to catch a different flight, on a plane that wasn’t covered in ice.  It was all Aaron and I could do to keep Fred from using the company card to rent a truck and drive back to Virginia from Indianapolis.  Two double shots of Jack got Fred back on a plane.

Left to right here is myself, Aaron, and Fred after three long, flour covered days in the cold.  Happy to be finished, thank you very much.

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Wild cards only work when you play them.  They do what you need them to do when you need them to be done.  This is Fred, and also the lesson of the Wild Card.  I wanted to build something to be sent in when the job needed to be done.

I started with a big hunk of 1095 spring steel- 3/16″ thick

The blade is close to 8 inches long…
 Rough grind:   

I used a clay hardening technique to create a Hamon

  Hardened…

…and tempered

Sanded to about 600 grit and ready to for a dip in the acid….

Curly Maple.  You can faintly see the wavy bits of curl…

Clamped.

To get the curls to burst I had to go through many cycles of sanding and staining and sanding again.  With each cycle the stain becomes more stable and prominent.

I cooked up a concoction using various finishes I have…

You can start to see the curls as the grain becomes more stable.  This is after maybe two cycles of sanding and staining

This is after maybe 8…

The Wild Card:

It’s always good to have a Wild Card in your hand- even when you want to kill them sometimes.

Thanks for the lessons, Fred.

Knifemaking: light and dark, and the Guardian

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 ‘Call them up and tell them they’re all full of shit’

Lt. Col. Daniel F. Gilbert (1925-1996)

My grandfather died when I was twelve.  People come and go quickly in this world and often their stories and the good things they do are lost and forgotten.  I wanted to tell his.

He and my grandmother moved down the street from us when I was five so they could watch my brothers and I grow up.  I would ride my bike over.  He had an attic workshop .  He liked to make jewelry and often I would find him flattening out nickels that he had been soaking in sulfuric acid.  He gave me hacksaw blades and sat me in front of a bench grinder and showed me how to make small knives.  He used one of his shotguns as a template and made me a wooden one that looked so real my mother made me take it back to him to paint orange so that I wouldn’t become a police statistic.  We watched cartoons.  We could both agree on Popeye and Tom and Jerry.

I remember my grandmother getting really angry at him for things that I thought were hysterical.  One time I went over there and he had hacked the head off of a snake with a shovel and hung it from a tree.  I remember my grandmother yelling at him and all he said was, very quietly, that the only good snake is a dead snake.  I have no idea why he hung it from a tree.

Often times during the summer in his back yard he would build a smudge fire if the mosquitos were bad, which they almost always were.  We would go in for dinner and my grandmother got pissed at him for making us all smell like a campsite.  He just laughed.

When I was seven he gave me a Swiss Army knife for my birthday.  I went back to my parents house that evening with bandaids on every finger.  When my mother called him and yelled at him for leaving a seven year-old alone with a knife he just laughed.  “Every boy should have a knife,” he would say.

He had the most elegant way with profanity- his inflection on a simple ‘goddamn’ could run the spectrum, from utter joy to total frustration.

Most of what I know of him before those times I learned from my grandmother after he passed.  He was born in Stephensville, Texas.  His father died when he was 5 years old and he immediately started helping to provide for the family.  Their family was dirt poor and then the Depression hit.  He set up a trap line that he would check everyday before school.  One time he caught a skunk and he got skunked so badly that the teachers sent him home.  Another time he slaughtered one of his chickens but didn’t clean the innards out before he put it in the oven and stunk up the entire house.

He joined the Navy at seventeen, lying about his age.  What would follow was a pretty incredible military career with so many brushes with death that he earned the name ‘Lucky Gilbert’.  While in the Navy during WWII he was a gunner on a warship, a position that carries a notoriously short lifespan.  Many of his fellow gunners didn’t make it but somehow he did.

After the war he joined the Air Force.  It was here that he met my grandmother, a young officer.  My grandmother said he was stubborn but persistent, and a terrible driver.  They got married and lived all over the world- Florence, Italy; Wiesbaden and Rammstein, Germany; and Casa Blanca, Morocco, where my mom was born.

He fought in the Korean conflict and was then stationed in Roswell, NM, where he witnessed the the UFO crash.  He told my grandmother he didn’t know what in the hell those things were but they weren’t of this Earth, and the whole thing gave him the heebie jeebies.

By the time the Cuban missile crisis came around he had a pretty high security clearance.  He was privy to information that many others weren’t.  At the height of tensions, he gave my grandmother a map marked with a safe location to go.  He said it was getting bad, and he would call her and tell her when to take the kids and go.  He handed her a pistol and told her to use it if anyone tried to stop her.

In the seventies he went to Vietnam where he should have been dead several times over.  The was an incident when a rogue Viet Cong rocket obliterated his barracks in the night.  The only reason he wasn’t there was because he had chosen to stay with his troops in the field.  Then there was another time when he was waiting on a bus to go to headquarters to do paperwork.  He waited and waited but the bus never came, so he walked.  When he got to the office four hours later, everyone looked at him as if they were seeing a dead man.  The bus had been hijacked at the stop before his, all the passengers executed and the bus blown up.  My grandmother said the man had a Guardian watching over him.

While he was in Vietnam, my grandmother went out for dinner with a friend of theirs, a general.  After dinner, and knowing that my grandfather was off at war, he tried to force himself on my grandmother while on their front porch.  Grandma had none of it.  She never told my grandfather, because he would have killed the man.  He always had a shotgun nearby.

The man was a warrior but even warriors have their faults and flaws.  My grandmother told me he was a difficult man to get close to and even more difficult to get to know.  He could be spiteful, and had a mean streak that didn’t come out too often (I never saw it), but it cost him several important promotions within the Air Force.  My grandmother told me that when she moved her dying mother into their house much later in life, my grandfather resented her for it, a resentment that she said burnt like a red hot rod of iron.

Still he loved deeply.  He liked to listen to Patsy Cline, The Beatles, and Tchaikovsky.  A quiet man, his actions generally spoke louder than words.  He brought my grandmother coffee every morning (Lady coffee he called it).  When chemotherapy for ovarian cancer left my grandmother with neuropathy in her hands and feet, he rubbed lotion on her feet most nights.  After he passed, my grandmother found an account he had never told her about and she never had access to, with $30,000 to be paid to her upon his death.  This is incredibly touching and rather impressive considering this was a man who was notoriously bad with money and grew up dirt poor during the Depression.

In his late sixties, doctors found an embolism in his heart.  The surgery was risky but the alternative was six months to live.  They performed open heart surgery and he survived but was never the same afterwards.  He had been dealing with early onset Parkinson’s symptoms and the surgery exacerbated all of that.  He couldn’t go up to his workshop, he couldn’t work with his hands, and my grandmother had to get a home health nurse.  He went downhill slowly over the next two years, never complaining about anything.  He died on Palm Sunday in a VA Hospice unit.

I remember sitting next to my grandmother at his funeral, which had full military honors.  As the officer presented her with the flag that had been draped over his casket, she told me that his Guardian was watching over me now.   I just nodded and smiled and didn’t pay much attention.  I figured it had something to do with being bereft with grief or the Xanax my mother had most likely slipped her.  Maybe a bit of both.

I have a few of his things: His Rolex, a bolo tie that he had fashioned and a belt buckle he made, set with a silver dollar:

I think on this Guardian that kept my grandfather safe and allowed him to live his life as he saw fit, even after all of the darkness of war and poverty that could have consumed him.  This blade is a nod to that Being and acts as a vessel to hold the darkness that inevitably penetrates all of our lives at some point or another.

1095 spring steel

 

Hardened:

Tempered:

  This is the brightest article of clothing I own- and it’s too small…
Soaked with fiberglass resin… 

Kydex spacers.  The light contains the dark…   
    

Well shit…let’s clean it up on the grinder…  
This blade is a nod to that Guardian that kept my grandfather safe and looked after.  A couple years ago, when I felt myself surrounded by darkness, I found myself thinking about this Guardian, whom I was told watches over me.  I drew a sketch of him.  It’s still hanging on my refrigerator.   Sometimes, when you find yourself in dark places, you can imagine that darkness being held by light.  Because there can’t be darkness without light.

The Guardian: 1095 spring steel, homebrewed cotton Micarta scales, Kydex spacers and brass hardware.
  
At the time of this writing it has been 20 years since he died.  Time is indeed a sly magician because it hardly feels like that.  I miss the man deeply and think about him just about every day, and always with fondness.  By the time I came to know him he was in the twilight of his years and had dealt with his darkness, and wanted to give his time and love to a curious little boy.  For this I’m grateful.

Knifemaking: appearances, politics, and the Buffoon

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‘Mr. Croup smiled. “You find us funny, Messire Marquis, do you not? A source of amusement. Is that not so? With our pretty clothes, and our convoluted circumlocutions—“

Mr. Vandemar murmured, “I haven’t got a circumlo . . . “

“—and our little sillinesses of manner and behavior. And perhaps we are funny.”

Mr. Croup raised one finger then, and waggled it at de Carabas. “But you must never imagine,” he continued, “that just because something is funny, Messire Marquis, it is not also dangerous.”

And Mr. Vandemar threw his knife at the marquis, hard and accurately. It hit him, hilt first, on the temple. His eyes rolled up in his head, and his knees buckled. “Circumlocution,” said Mr. Croup to Mr. Vandemar. “It’s a way of speaking around something. A digression. Verbosity.” ‘

Mssrs. Croup and Vandermar- from Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere

1095 spring steel

  
I hardened this after grinding about 2/3rds of the way through.  I planned on grinding him rather thin and didn’t want to risk warping during hardening…
Deepening the plunge…

I have this buffoonish shirt that I don’t think I’ve ever worn…

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After the fiberglass resin…

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The Buffoon:  1095 spring steel, homebrewed linen Micarta handle scales, Kydex spacers, and brass hardware

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buffoon

Be mindful of how we present ourselves to the world, and be wary of what those presentations may conceal.  There could be something deadly underneath.  This is the lesson of the Buffoon.

Knifemaking: surprises, overthinking, and the Persuader, Mark II

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“Don’t think of what you have to do, don’t consider how to carry it out!” he exclaimed. “The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise.”

Eugen Herrigel- Zen in the Art of Archery

(You can read about the crafting of the original Persuader here)

From the age of about ten to seventeen I went to boy scout camp every summer.  It was there I learned many skills crucial to developing into a balanced and well-rounded man.  Anything deemed flammable was generally set on fire.  Coffee cans were made to be hammered into camp stoves.  The person who showered the least won summer camp.  We put crawly things in each others sleeping bags.  We dealt with wolf spiders the size of small paper plates.  There was a Warhammer race every year.  Think of a track and field baton passing event, but substitute a baton for a 20lb ‘hammer’ built from logs by pubescent boys and humped around the five mile circumference of large lake.  We had a contest to see who could go the longest without using the latrine, which was all fun and games until one of the boys went to the hospital for a bowel obstruction.  Then the contest was to see who could use the latrine the most.

I learned firsthand that the boom of a sailboat mast was named so because when the wind changed direction it would swing around and boom, crack you on the head.

Then there was the summer I got dehydrated and learned that nobody is joking when they tell you to drink lots of water.

I snuck my Walkman with me.  At 12 years old there isn’t a whole lot better than being on your own in the woods with nothing but you, the trees, and your Tears for Fears cassette.

I took a rifle shooting class.  The counselor was one of only two women at camp.  They called her ‘Books’.  Or maybe it was “Boots”.  All the counselors had silly nicknames and any semblance of political correctness was blatantly disregarded.  Books had glasses.  To be fair, there was also a counselor with non-congenital dwarfism that everyone called “Oompa”.  He got fired for sneaking liquor on to camp…

So anyway, rifle shooting class with Books.  Turns out Books was a zen master.  For a class with a bunch of pre-hormonal boys, there weren’t many rules.  The only rule I can remember is never point your gun at anything you don’t intend to completely obliterate.

We were then given rifles.  Books sat us down at the rifle bench and showed us how to load and aim.  She told us to find our target in our sights and then, most importantly, to relax.  Inhale deeply, she said, and on the exhale squeeze the trigger.  This was also very important: squeeze don’t pull.  Slowly.  We were told that when the shot goes off it should surprise us.  If we missed our target, Books told us not to worry about it and just compensate for it on our next shot.

I wasn’t a very good shot and I haven’t shot a gun since then.  But I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

For one I am generally not fond of surprises.  I like to know what I’m going to have to do and how to best prepare for it.  Even at the age of 12 I was not fond of any surprises involving a death-dealing boom stick and shooting always made me kind of nervous.  As I’ve gotten older I’ve realized that life can be a death-dealing boom stick, for better or worse.  In trying to anticipate the shot, you are trying to control something outside of your control.  This results in you getting in your own way instead of letting things be what they are.

I think Books was trying to get us to let go and trust ourselves and to let the shot fall where it may.  This is the lesson of this incantation of the Persuader.

I made the original Persuader without thinking too much about it.  The main grind is a sabre grind.  I grind all of my blades freehand and as it turns out it is really difficult to get a uniform, symmetrical grind on a 2in wide piece of steel.  But I didn’t know this the first time round- I just did it.  When I tried to do it again I kept overthinking everything and ruining it.  There were two or three between the first one and this one that got scrapped.

When I think about the times I have been most successful in life I realize that those were the times when I wasn’t overly attached to specific outcomes or trying to manipulate the experience or anticipate every bump or snag.  In those times I was dog-ass tired or I was just enjoying myself.  I squeezed rather than pulled, I was surprised, and the shot ended up where I intended it to be.

1095 spring steel

Ready for the forge:
  Hardened:
  Chisel grind up top
  

I made the handle material out of an old pair of jeans:

After a bit of time, pressure, and fiberglass resin…



 At around 400 grit or so….

This stuff takes about twice as much sandpaper to polish than wood…

The Persuader, Mark II: Etched 1095 spring steel, homebrewed denim Micarta, and steel hardware

  

Relax.  Squeeze, don’t pull.  And it’s ok to be surprised.

Knifemaking: the profound in the mundane and the Snow Fox

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“There’s something admirable about finding satisfaction in the simple, everyday pleasures of life, and it’s becoming harder and harder to do. We’re bombarded every day: here’s the brave soldier who saved a school bus full of kids with nothing but a crowbar and fishing line; here’s the 30-something billionaire who is going to cure aging so we can all live forever; here’s the 12-year-old who can play Stravinksy’s Rite of Spring on seven different instruments with her feet. “

Mark Manson- Being Special Isn’t So Special

A few weeks ago I was talking to a production manager for a touring symphonic show.  She was telling me how she had always been a rocker chick and worked for rock bands.   This was a different thing for her- the glamour and indulgence had been stripped away.  But after weeks of hearing classical music the tour had really started to grow on her.  She said it sounds silly and that on the outside it might sound boring and repetitive and maybe it was.  But she said it didn’t feel like that.

I know this feeling.  I have a gig where I’ve played with the same people in the same place for almost nine years.  The music isn’t difficult, the other musicians are like my family.  Still, there are waves of time when I feel like I would rather go do something else.  Like any wave it passes, and I show up and do my job.  I’m always glad that I did.

Because buried in these normal, routine jobs are special things, provided you are paying attention.  In playing this gig I’ve ended up making very close friends, meeting lots of people, and learning about myself- mainly that I am capable of much more than I often give myself credit for.  All this comes from a job that, on the outside, may look routine, tedious, and repetitive.

There are people who get up everyday and spend their lives doing their work, not making much fuss and emanating a quiet satisfaction.  I know some of these people.  The man who worked in retail middle management for two decades has the most wicked sense of humor and powerful observational skills.  The service tech who has fixed restaurant equipment his whole life and can look at anything that is broken and immediately know what is wrong with it.  All these things take time.  We don’t see the work that these people have put in.  There isn’t a whole lot of flash or grandeur, and it’s not packed up in a tidy, three minute clickbait video.

I fall into the millennial generation.  The media likes to describe us as entitled, needy, whiny, afraid of work, and abhorrent of responsibility.  Many of us were told growing up that we were special, that some things were below us, that we didn’t want to end up flipping burgers or being construction workers.  You can blame baby-boomer parents for saying these things, or you can blame millennials for believing them.  Regardless of where the blame may lie it falls on us to make our experience.  Some of us developed self-worth issues when we found the world wasn’t as we were promised it was and that we weren’t so special.  Others of us did the shit that we were going to do anyway.  Once you let go of the idea that maybe you aren’t so special, it opens you up to seeing the value in the things that you are capable of, even when these things appear to be rather ordinary and mundane.

This is brings us to the Snow Fox, also called the Arctic Fox.  Just another warm-blooded mammal chilling in the tundra trying to survive.  To catch its dinner (which is often buried under up to three feet of snow) the snow fox makes these beautiful leaps headfirst into the earth:

Rather ordinary on the surface.  But according to studies there is something deeper going on.  In a study done in the Czech Republic, as researcher found that in nearly all cases of leaping, the Snow Fox does it in a north-easterly direction.  That would put them leaping toward magnetic north, which is some twenty degrees off of north as a compass would point.  By using the earth’s magnetic field and the sound of their prey beneath the snow, scientists believe this is how the foxes triangulate their prey’s location and compose their leap.

They aren’t always successful.  Sometimes they come up with a face full of snow and no dinner.

This is the lesson of the Snow Fox.  It’s knowing that beneath our silly jobs and the boring things we have to do come profound understandings and insights.  There is always something special to be found in making your dinner, or raising your children, or quietly putting something beautiful into the world.  There is something profound is these ordinary things.  Sometimes they feel like a burden and doing them comes with a lot of resistance but no one is perfect.

This blade started out as something else.  In making and fixing some mistakes early in the process, I ended up with something new.

For the handle I wanted to try out the spalted Pecan wood my Texas cousin had milled: 

Ripped down…   

Bookmatched: 

The Snow Fox:  etched 1095 spring steel, spalted Texas Pecan, Kydex spacers and steel hardware.     

Remember the special things that are going on under the surface of the ordinary.  It’s ok if you end up with a face full of snow.

 

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Knifemaking: prayer, calm, and the Snowjumper

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“Blessings always beg for calm
In spite of their silvery arms”

Maritime- Calm

I pray a lot.  I really started about a year ago.  Growing up I thought it went along the lines of “Dear Jesus, please give me a pony.” I didn’t really understand prayer until pretty recently.  You can pray to Jesus, or whatever divine being you have faith in so long as it is bigger than yourself.  I talk to the Universe.  I didn’t talk to the Universe for a long time.  I found that I really needed help with the simple things.  There was little help in books, on the internet, or from people (books and internet both come from people, and nobody REALLY knows what’s going on).  So I started asking the universe for help.  This has never been easy for me because I try to do everything myself.  Instead of powering through everything, I would try (the operative word is try) to be quiet and still and ask.  The first thing I asked the universe for was guidance.

“Universe, please give me guidance.”

A week later I lost my job.

You have to be careful what you ask for because if you are expecting something specific you are probably going to be disappointed.  Once I got over the shock I tried to find more quiet spaces and ask for more simple things that could help me.  Universe, please help find peace.  Universe, please help me to trust.  Universe, please help me to know strong boundaries.  In certain situations I kindly ask the Universe to help me not fuck up.  And so on and so forth.

Most recently I have been asking the Universe for calm.  And the Universe has given me calm but something hasn’t been quite right.    The calm is there, I can project it, but I don’t feel it in me.  In areas where I find the calm but don’t feel it, I gently ask the Universe to help me to accept it.

None of this is overnight.  There is no flash of enlightenment or instant nirvana.  So I ask the Universe to help me find patience.

A few weeks ago we had a giant snowstorm.  There was somewhere between 12 and 18 inches.  I love snowstorms.  It is calm embodied.  Everything slows down and gets very quiet.  Many people stay home, the city shuts down, and nothing has to happen.  It happened on a Friday and all of my work got cancelled.  My girlfriend and I decided to get snowed in together.  We went to the store and stocked up on supplies and then headed to her place to batten down the hatches.  Then after a little while we noticed the heat wasn’t working.

I love this woman deeply.  I love how she makes things nice.  I love how she plans things.  She is talented and good at many things I am not, and will help me with those things.  She owns every bit of herself.  She is vulnerable and I see how empowering that is.  She is kind to my various maladjustments and occasional dysfunctions and the other parts of my being that I don’t love so much.  It’s far from perfect but it continues to bloom and makes me a better man.  Throughout all of this she is exquisitely beautiful and profoundly elegant and quite often gives me butterflies.  There are also things I am good at that help her.  Situations like heat and snowstorms are two of those things.

Back to the heat.  It was a full on snowstorm and it was glorious.  We went and picked up a kerosene heater from the warehouse where my workshop is.  We helped a couple of people get their cars unstuck.  We saw how beautiful everything was.  I have a 1997 Nissan Pathfinder with good four wheel drive and strong heat and we slid around a bit.  I found it to be very calming.

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I have a friend who does heating and HVAC work and he is a great guy.  He is also a workaholic.  I gave him a call to see if he could talk me through troubleshooting the system and he was actually up the street working.  He said he would be right over.  His wife must be a very patient woman.

Sure enough he got the furnace fired up.  I asked him what his price was for coming over and all he asked for was a couple bucks for gas.  That didn’t feel right so I offered to make him a knife.  He was down.  He likes to hunt and seems rather unfazed by the elements so I designed a skinner and named it the Snowjumper.  It is a winter blade.  I found some spalted Tamarind, which is a bright wood.  I used tin spacers: they are nearly the same color as the steel of the tang and are concealed in the way that the snow conceals the earth.  I also used steel rivets to match the spacers.

1095 spring steel:

 

    Hardened

Tempered:
Spalted Tamarind:  Those dark lines are actually where a fungus has eaten it’s way through the wood.

Time lapse of the handle fitting:


The Snowjumper:  1095 spring steel with a phosphoric acid etch, Spalted Tamarind handle, tin spacers, and steel hardware:

 

  Hidden tin spacers…

Be careful what you pray for.  Calm may come in a way you least expect it.  Accept it.

This is the lesson of the Snowjumper.

Knifemaking: being where you are and the Whiskey Jack

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 ‘There are a lot of good places,’ said Whiskey Jack. ‘That’s kind of the point. Listen, gods die when they are forgotten. People too. But the land’s still here. The good places, and the bad. The land isn’t going anywhere.’ 

Neil Gaiman- American Gods

A couple months ago I was working a Christmas show for the Ballet in town.  About midway through the three week run they started planning for next years show.  They were redoing some of the backdrops, which are gorgeous, and they had flown in an artist who paints them.  I was the one to pick him up from the airport.

I didn’t know any of this.  I was told to go pick up a gentleman at the airport and given a phone number.  A large French gentleman got into my rental car.

He apologized for his delayed flight.  I’ve heard that the French appreciate bluntness so I asked him what he was here for.

He told me he was a painter and that he was here to look at the scenery backdrops.  A backdrop is a large painted background that the dancers perform in front of.  They set the scene for the different locations in the ballet’s story.  Here is one from an opera rental company in Utah:

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The French gentleman said he sort of stumbled into this profession.  He was a painter living in France.  He fell in love with a ballerina and they married.  Sometime after this he was asked if he would paint for the scenery department.  Gradually this became his livelihood- painting settings for the theatre.  He now lives in New York.

He told me that it wasn’t always like this.  He said his passion was painting monsters- not the horror movie kind but something a bit more fantastical.  Since he was a child he said he’s always loved monsters.  He struggled to sell his work.  He went through a divorce.  He moved to a new country.  But he was always painting, be it monsters or backdrops.  He said that he went ten years without doing any scenic design, but he was always painting.

It’s these things that help keep us sane and help us to be where we are and to get through the hard things that we need to go through to grow as people.  They help us to remember that we don’t have to go anywhere or shy away from our experience as long as we have something to ground ourselves in.  This is what I got from that conversation with that gentleman.  This idea is also where the namesake of this blog comes from.

This is also the lesson of the Whiskey Jack.  ‘Whiskey Jack’ is an anglicized version of Wisakedjak, a trickster deity with a strong heart in Native American Folklore, specifically of the Cree tribe.  Whiskey Jack is a character in American Gods by Neil Gaiman, believing that no matter what happens the land is still there regardless of what we do to ourselves or others.  There are things we do and make and say and write that exist outside of the tedium and mental minutiae of our modern world.  Things that help us to keep our center when our hearts are breaking or it feels like everything is crumbling.  Things to help us be with our joy and to be with our grief.  They don’t go anywhere.  Remember these things, the beautiful things we do, when the world has made you weary.  I try to remember this when I am exhausted, when I don’t want to get out of bed, or if there are jobs or conversations that I really don’t want to do or have.

This large French gentleman’s name is Alain Vaes.  Please check out his work.

I started with 1095 steel and worked out a 6in bowie style blade:

 Full flat grind

 

HardenedLots of sanding… 

I like a heavy blade but I put these big holes in to lighten it just a bit.

This is one of my absolute favorite shirts.  I’ve worn it all over the country.  There are kind souls in my life that told me while the armpit stains are endearing, I probably shouldn’t where it out in public lest I scare small children….

….so I made it into handle material.  It’s not going anywhere either.

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The Whiskey Jack: etched 1095 spring steel, homebrewed Micarta scales, brass liners and hardware.  Shaving sharp, he is built to be used.

 

Be where you are, and keep doing whatever it is that helps you to stay there.  This is the lesson of the Whiskey Jack.

Knifemaking: going deep and the Kingfisher

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“When a needle falls into a deep well, many people will look into the well, but few will be ready to go down after it”

-African Proverb

I went to music school.  I was shown many ways to teach myself to be good at things.  I spent many hours in a practice room by myself, many more hours in front of a piano composing and arranging, and even more time listening.  To everything.  The education I got reached far beyond any classroom or practice space.  Life becomes those spaces.

Learning how to listen to things was the biggest lesson I learned.  When you listen, really listen, not just hear, your world opens up.  You notice all the nuanced bits of wonder.  As life gets busier and more complicated I still have to remind myself that it’s all still there, that it hasn’t and won’t go anywhere.  That within a world that holds a good deal of pain and sorrow for everyone there are also things that move and stir the soul, but they don’t always sit on the surface of our awareness…

There was one class that really opened things up and is sort of the inspiration for this writing.  It was called World Music, which is a rather vapid title for an experience that was so much more that.  It was taught by a very wonderful and kind man, one of the more enlightened people I’ve ever met.  Classes started off in silence and darkness, with the ringing of chimes.  Sometimes ambient music was played, or Tuvan throat singing, or guitar players from West Africa with rhythms I had never heard before.  There were many books to read, records to check out, and some of the most real discussions on being and the human condition that I have ever experienced.

It was during one of these discussions that something came up, and I don’t quite remember the context but it has stuck with me.  In the course of the discussion, it came up that our professor’s spirit animal was a dolphin.  He said that he was at the beach surfing when he was sixteen and nearly drowned and shortly thereafter found he related deeply with the dolphin.  The dolphin is able to dive very deep but always returns to the surface to breathe.  He told us he built his whole philosophy of teaching on that premise.

This is something that has been with me for awhile.  Sometimes you have to take a deep breath and go deep.  When you are exhausted, when it feels like life is more than you can handle, when you need to heal.  You can handle a lot more than you think you can but the tools and nourishment you need don’t always sit at the surface.  That doesn’t mean the process of finding these things doesn’t hurt like hell or isn’t terrifying at times.

Take the Kingfisher bird, for example.  To get the food it needs to sustain itself, it has to dive far beneath it’s comfort zone.  They sit on their perch overhanging the water and when they see their prey they dive, eyes closed, into the deep.  I think about this and wonder what is going through his little bird brain before he hits the water…

kingfisher

This is the lesson of the Kingfisher.  You close your eyes, you dive deep, and you come up with something nourishing.  Repeat as necessary, adding faith and a bit of courage as required.

I wanted to make a filet knife, something to help me dive.  I made her out of a thin piece of bedframe steel.  She has a 6in blade.

I initially ground two of these, but one didn’t turn out.  I left it soaking in the acid too long (for a deep etch) and there wasn’t much blade left….

My very dear friend James did the handle on this one.  She has Mora wood scales and brass hardware.



 

My good friends Mike and Jen using the Kingfisher to de-bone a goose… 

Sometimes you have go below the surface of things to find what you need.  This is the lesson of the Kingfisher.

Knifemaking: soldiering on and the Rio Bravo

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“Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.”

― John Wayne

soldier on: phrasal verb with soldier. to continue doing something although it is difficult

  • –Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary and Thesaurus

This blade was a commission for the father of a gentleman who is a professional videographer.   I came to know this gentleman after building a knife for him.  He called and asked if I could make a blade for a very special person- his father.

When I first met with the client, we talked for about an hour.  He showed me a short film he had made about his father, his father’s deep love of football, and how it brought the two of them closer as adults.  The film was quite stunning.  The NFL thought so too- it won their family tickets to the Super Bowl.

In the film, he told his father’s story of how he lost a chance to play for the Baltimore Colts, losing out to Johnny Unitas.  What followed was a strained relationship where the client really didn’t get a chance to know his father.  The film documented how football brought bonding and healing.  He asked if I could make a blade with an element of the game that his father loves.

I felt quite a bit of anxiety in making this blade.  I had to design it and give it a life for somebody’s loved one whom I had never met before.  It took a very long time because I really wanted to make the right statement.  The recipient of this blade is a man’s man, stoic, and has taken his licks.  He has a bit of cowboy in him- John Wayne was mentioned during our talk.  I named it the Rio Bravo after the John Wayne film.  Wayne was 51 when he starred in the film but still kicks a lot of ass.

I write this from a man’s perspective.  As a man I have a hard time dealing with difficult emotions and I think most men would agree that it is a bitch coming to terms with them.  They don’t go away, they just sit and fester if not dealt with.  In dealing with them we often fall apart, have meltdowns, withdraw, avoid, and sometimes leave a path of destruction.  You want to succeed, to have a purpose, to leave your mark on the world, and make things right.  When that doesn’t happen you can find yourself questioning your self-worth.  I don’t have children but when there are little ones looking up to you and watching you I imagine it adds that much more pressure.

The lesson of the Rio Bravo is that no matter what you soldier on.  The only way out is through.  You show up, you do the work, you laugh, you cry, and you take the bitter with the sweet.   I crafted this blade for a man who has done all of that and serves as an inspiration of what soldiering on earns you.

The beautiful part of this commission has been seeing how inspiring the healing can be.  A son did this for a father where there was pain on both ends.  The client showed me, a stranger, this incredibly vulnerable and moving film.  It’s hard to imagine the courage it took to make that film and to put an intimate story out into the world.

I loved working with this client.  There were multiple conversations about designs and materials.  He is an artist and we can talk about concrete things in abstract and obtuse ways.  At the end of it he always told me to do what I thought and that he trusted me.   This is where I started:

 

 

Some jimping for grip, and a nod to the laces of a football. 

Rough Grind

Hardened…

….and tempered

I wanted something with the feel of a football…

I cut it into strips and glued it together….

…and it failed miserably.  Still, I really wanted to work the leather in.  That’s the spirit of football even though it isn’t pigskin.  I was also really into the idea of having a part of something that once walked the earth be a part of this blade.  I wanted this to be a very masculine blade, with a southwestern theme.  For me it doesn’t get much more manly than the combination of Texas Mesquite, leather, and steel.  I put in some thin tin spacers for a bit of sparkle.
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I have a cousin in Texas who is a woodturner with a sawmill.  He handpicks cutoffs with the most gorgeous figures and sends them to me.  When I’m using his wood for a handle it’s like Christmas morning- think of opening your favorite Christmas present, only you get to do it for two and a half hours.  Thank you Bill Cockrell.  You are a very good man.

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The Rio Bravo: etched 1095 spring steel, Texas Mesquite handle, leather and tin spacers, with steel hardware.  
    I carved in some laces:
   

Soldier on, cowboy.  You never know what tomorrow may bring.

Knifemaking: armor, mobility, and the Archer II

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“ARMOR, n. The kind of clothing worn by a man whose tailor is a blacksmith.”

― Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary

(you can read about the crafting of the original Archer here)

We all put on armor everyday.  Some of us put on more than others.  Sometimes it physically manifests.  Hard hats, steel toes, wingtips, neckties.  Some ladies refer to their makeup as war paint, another type of armor.  Other times it’s more subtle and subdued- the way we carry ourselves, our use of vernacular in particular situations, and the image of ourselves that we present to the world.  All these are things we do to protect ourselves.

A few years ago I had a temp job working construction over the summer.  The company I worked for had a contract to build all of the temporary structures for the Boy Scout National Jamboree.  I spent almost four months driving to a military base in the middle of nowhere.  I use the term base loosely.  It was really just a giant campground guarded by military police, and all of the campers carried semiautomatic weapons.  In four months I used a flushable toilet maybe three times.  The cast of characters I worked with were a colorful lot.

My boss was a Brazilian Jui Jitsu master.  He got to work before everyone else and ran five miles on base.  Some people have coffee before they start work.  Our mornings with him consisted of tapping out of sleeper holds, arm bars, half nelsons, and doling out mollywhops of a variety I’ve yet to experience again.

One of the other gentleman did a ten stretch for first degree murder, which nobody found out till the work contract was almost up.  The base knew he had a twenty year-old felony and vetted him for a base pass.  I’m not exactly sure what this means, but military bases generally don’t mess around.  He did good work and kept to himself.  He was married to a florist and had a house in the country.

Then there was the gentleman who had just gotten out of jail for beating the the hell out of a guy with a tire iron.  He was drunk and thought the guy was stealing his car.  He was there trying to pay off the lawsuit and lawyer’s fees.

Another gentleman I worked with had severe anger management issues and was there because he was dating the company owner’s daughter.  He had a degree in English and was trying to get into law school.

There was Jose from El Salvador who had four children and was still madly in love with his wife.  He taught me filthy things to say in Spanish.

There were two football players on break from a small conservative college.  They said they were there earning beer money.

Then there was me.  My car had died and I needed to buy a new one.

I spent four months with these guys, riding around in the back of a decommissioned deuce-and-a-half, building things, and hearing stories that I’m still not sure if I believe or not.  In these sorts of work environments a decent amount of posturing and exaggeration is to be expected from almost everyone.  Despite their checkered backgrounds, these guys were not terrible to work with.  Nothing felt unsafe except for the blistering heat, the bird-size mosquitos and the morning mollywhops to which I became adept at parrying.

Just to be safe I would put on some armor everyday- a bit of bravado, a bit of flash, a bit of the grandiose.  My nicknames reflected that.  The Viking.  Sledgehammer.  Red Devil.  I was lifting a lot of weights and I was not a small man.  It helped enforce some social boundaries.  At the end of the day I could usually take it off, or so I thought.

The type of armor a lot of these guys wore- they couldn’t take it off.  This was how they lived and you could feel that they had worn this armor for a very long time, so much so that it became a part of their being.   There were scuffles, gruff talking, machismo.  Everything was laced with an extra scoop of testosterone.

When you wear heavy armor you are shielded from many things that can hurt you.  The drawback is that you shield yourself from the things that help you as well.  You block out grief but you also block out the serenity that in time comes with it.  You block out pain but you are also blocking the healing that follows.  You can become a shell of yourself.  The armor becomes limiting.  You can’t move and you become horribly stuck.

What happens when you do decide to take the armor off?  When you aren’t hiding behind any sort of bravado or grandiosity or gestures or facades?  There comes a point where it becomes more painful to live with the armor on than off.  You take the armor off and let the world in.  All of it.  The world becomes overwhelming.  You’ve put on a different set of armor, something that allows you to breathe and move and serves you in a much deeper capacity.

This is the lesson of the Archer.  To lightly armor yourself so that you are protected, yet you can still hit your marks with a deadly precision.  You can move farther and faster and feel much more deeply.  You become more aware and but find that you require a different sort of care for yourself and this may feel foreign.  You feel pain more acutely but the healing becomes more available to you.  The things you put out into the world feel more genuine.

For this blade I wanted something long, sharp, and elegant.  I designed her for the kitchen.  She is ground thin and a bit more fragile- at one point I dropped her on the concrete floor and the tip blunted a bit.  After a bit of grinding she was alright.

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The Archer, Mark II: 1095 spring steel, Sapele handle, brass hardware

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Take your time and adjust to this new armor as the world opens up to something beyond posturing and mollywhops.  This is the deeper lesson of the Archer.