The story so far…
The question i get asked the most when i tell people i make knives is always the same one, ‘How on earth did you get into that?’, and the answer is a simple one. One evening i was sat watching YouTube videos to pass the time and had ‘auto-play’ turned on, which means that when the video ends another begins playing automatically. So when the video i was watching finished it started playing a video by Alec Steele, who is a very well known British bladesmith, and he was making a sword. I never knew that people even still did things like that and i was blown away with the skills on show. It instantly sparked something inside me and i knew that i had to try it out.
Since i already have 7 years experience in the welding and fabrication world, metal work is in my blood, so i thought it would be a piece of cake and i could quickly knock up a knife and then move onto a sword straight away. How wrong i was. I started with an old fire pit (stolen from my mother), a big bag of coal, an old hammer and a piece of steel from the scrap bin at work. Things didn’t go very well (as you’d expect) and that was very nearly the end of my knifemaking career. But after a few more tries and a bit more of a cash injection into my new hobby, i actually turned out a half decent knife. I made a damascus hunting knife for my best friends wedding, and at the time i thought it was the best thing id ever produced.
After the confidence boost from the reviews of my first knife i decided to really push myself towards the world of knives. I bought myself a pillar drill, a 2×72 belt grinder and a gas forge and just jumped straight in at the deep end. For the next year or so i would spend every weekend forging as many knives as i could and in the evenings after work i would be grinding and sanding them to turn them into a functional knife. I was hooked.
These days i make all my pattern welded steel myself, including san mai and damascus, and stabilize my own loacllay sourced timber for handle material. I mainly exclusively make kitchen knives because that is the style i fell in love with, thin, stylish and razor sharp. My preferred knives to make are Japanese style blades, such as the santoku and nakiri, in house make damascus steel with a super high contrast hand rubbed finish.
With love
Fraser Garner – Founder of FGK