Bar stock to knife, four stages.
None of this is unusual — it's how forged blades have been made for a long time. It's worth knowing what you're paying for.
Forge
Bar stock into blade shape, under the hammer.
The bar goes into the coal until it's a bright orange, then gets moved: distal taper drawn out, tip set, bevels started, tang pulled. Forging puts steel where the knife needs it and leaves the grain running along the edge instead of cut across it.
It's slower than stock removal and there's no undo. That's the trade — and it's the difference between a knife shaped like a forged blade and one that actually is one.
Grind
Geometry — the part that decides how it cuts.
Bevels get cut in by hand on the belt grinder. Everything about how a knife feels in a cut lives here: how thin it is behind the edge, how the grind terminates, how much meat is left at the spine.
Two knives with identical steel and identical hardness will perform completely differently based on this stage alone. It's where most of the bench time goes.
Heat treat
Normalize, quench, temper. No shortcuts here.
The blade is normalized to refine the grain, brought to critical temperature, and quenched. Then it goes straight into the tempering oven — twice — to trade a little hardness for the toughness that keeps an edge from chipping out in real use.
Every blade is tested before it earns a handle. A knife that fails here goes in the scrap bin, not into a sheath.
Finish
Handle, fittings, edge, sheath.
Guard fitted and peened, handle shaped to the hand it's going to, finish taken to whatever the piece calls for — satin, hand-rubbed, or left with the forge finish where it belongs.
The edge goes to shaving sharp on stones. The sheath is fitted to that blade and no other.
Want to watch one get built for you?
Every commission comes with photos at each of these stages, so you see your blade at forge, out of quench, and in the white before it's finished.
Start a commission