From about 1975 to 1989 I was a full time professional knifemaker, and had a certain amount of success at it. In 1980 I became the first Canadian voting member of the Knifemakers' Guild (though I gave up that membership in 1986 as the customs issues of attending their show in Kansas City were just too much of a pain.)
I've gone on making the occasional knife since then, but it was very intermittent. Early this year (2023), having become frustrated with the knife I was carrying (not one of mine), I did a bit of online looking about to see what the changes in steels and heat treatments had been since I was last making. That was pretty exciting, in particular the high vanadium "super steel" grades looked very interesting. The fact that some attention had been given to steels actually designed for knives was really great news, always in past we'd adopted steels that had really been forumulated for other applications.
Over the last period I've basically put the knife shop back together (wiring in equipment that hadn't run for a while, getting some fresh supplies and so forth), and making some knives. The initial knives are out of S90V, which is quite difficult to work, but looks great from the point of view of knife performance. I'm carrying an S90V folder to start to get some real world experience and confirm (or confound) my expectations. I also made up a few knives in 154-CM, my old standard, but using Liquid Nitrogen cryo for the first time (back in the 80's I used dry ice or triple tempered). It was great to exhibit recently at the
Great Lakes Custom Knife Show my first show since around 1990 or 1991.
My ambitions in starting back up are the same as they were when I was a kid: to make highest perfomance "using" knives at the highest level of fit and finish in designs that are both beautiful and practical. I'm not targeting the collectors market as such, but I do want the knives to be the best that I can make, which includes holding to standards that will withstand the close examination of knowledgeable collectors.
I recently asked Dr. Thomas to take a look at the article to see if any obvious factual issues hopped out for him. He commented on my use of the word "molecular" several times, which is incorrect for metals. Metals have no intermolecular (covalent) bonds, the bonds are metallic.
I'd also like to cite the source for most of the metallurgical information in the article: the book is "A History of Metallography" by Cyril Stanley Smith. It is a wonderful book, sadly no longer in print.
