‘My wife Lucretia went to war once,” mused Baron Rikard. ‘Against my advice, I might say. And we fought perhaps half a battle altogether, and won, as it happens. But the whole business proved utterly ruinous even so. Sometimes I think of the decorating we could have done for the same money and it makes me so terribly sad.”

Joe Abercrombie, The Devils

A few years ago I had a pretty bad table saw accident (you can read about that story here). It happened while I was in the middle of making a knife for a gentleman and, although it was a colossal disaster of a time, I did ultimately get it finished. At the time I was using that knife build as a tutorial to help me figure out how to keep making these things with a mangled hand. I was bringing the knives I had on my bench into my surgical follow-ups to show my surgeon how everything was going with the work he had done on me.

There were other things that didn’t go so great. I used to be a decent electric bass player, but with a rebuilt index finger missing a major nerve and fused into one bone I really just couldn’t play right. It was the same for guitar as holding a pick was a challenge with a truncated thumb. You can imagine how well the piano goes, though I’ve never been that great of a piano player. It still takes me forever to tie my shoes, so I mostly wear Chelsea or cowboy boots and I don’t think my sneakers have ever been tied. Getting keys into locks with my left hand is tricky so I usually use my right. Almost anything you can think of was a challenge, from getting my contact lenses in to buttoning my cuffs when I needed to wear a suit. I struggled with all of these things for a solid year. I had to find a new way to do almost everything.

The one thing that wasn’t stressful or hard was the shop. I was going as often as possible, even when my fingers were still in splints. The thing about shops, or practice spaces, or any place one might go to work on things is that it is so much more than a physical space. If you’re serious about what you’re doing, your workspace becomes this unjudging extension of yourself. I would go to the shop and watch my anxieties rise and fall and eventually dissipate. Wherever I was or who ever I was on whatever day never mattered much, so long as I showed up. Throughout this fragile process of healing my hand I would watch in real time as past me died and future me was born and I would grind steel. Invariably this is all a journey and the things that are important to us will inevitably fall away, be it the use of some fingers, or people we love, or most notably time. Even these thoughts would fade away into the steel shavings and sawdust and at the end of it all I would have something beautiful and lasting and functional. And while everything else of the healing process was hard, expensive, and embarrassing, this shop space and the work I created therein was not.

After several months of this rise and fall and dissipate business, I realized that this was always at the bottom of everything and I just hadn’t noticed really noticed before. Sometimes it’s the things we lose along the way that help us to meet ourselves. I still don’t tie my shoes and make no apologies.

…….

A few months ago I got an email from a gentleman looking for a knife and wanting to see what we had in stock. He said he had bought one of our blades 7 or 8 years ago and had absolutely used the piss out of it. I didn’t recognize his name, which was odd because we don’t sell that many of these things and I remember pretty much every customer over the years. He said some stitching had come loose on his sheath and asked if I could fix it and maybe put in a rivet or two.

He sent me a picture, and holy shit, it was the knife I was making when I fucked up my hand. And I remember why I didn’t recognize the name. I had met him at a show and had mostly talked to him over Instagram. I didn’t even have his phone number. But here was that knife that had caused me so much trouble, and also saved me:

The finger knife, as my girlfriend calls it, had been his work knife for the better part of a decade. I re-stitched his sheath and peened some rivets in.

I went ahead and refinished his knife for him and polished up the blade. These things don’s go bad and it didn’t take much to bring it back.

I was a little surprised at how thin the leather was from the original sheath. I went ahead and just made him another sheath. We do things a little better than we did those years ago.

He also asked for an updated take on his original. I truncated the handle a bit. These days we usually taper the tang and do a full flat grind all the way up to the spine, which makes the knife quite a bit lighter. Per his request we didn’t do any of that.

We like Desert ironwood because it is so dense and generally doesn’t warp or crack.

We also picked up some orange G10 material for the spacers. He had requested some orange in the handle somewhere and this would create a nice pop without looking like a Halloween decoration.

We like to work in a handmade material whenever possible. I had some of this flannel/denim material left over from a few years ago:

We like to use 304 stainless pins these days as well. They shine up a bit better, are harder, and don’t cost that much more than what we were using: