I have been using knives for as long as I can remember. When I was little, I was always helping my mom and dad in the kitchen, helping my uncle fillet fish, or finding small jobs to complete with my knives. When I was young I almost always had a knife in my pocket and may have forgotten to take it out once or twice before going to school!
I went to college for Mechanical Engineering Technology at Purdue University and was always interested in manufacturing and metallurgy. While I was there, I got really interested in a wide variety of knives and started buying more unique, expensive knives. During summers and winter breaks I worked at a machine shop that was in my hometown as well. Working there, I learned how to make many different things and expanded some of the skills I still use today.
My first job out of college was the same machine shop I worked at in college. I always enjoyed being able to stand back and look at what I made at the end of the day. When I got married and moved to Chicago in 2010, I started working at a job where I am able to work with my hands some, but not as much as I was accustomed.
While there, one of my coworkers introduced me to bladeforums.com and told me about Fiddleback Forge. Andy, the owner, was an electrical engineer who started making knives. He did many different forum posts on how he made knives and things he did that helped me learn what to do. I was hooked! I had been looking for something I could make without a lot of specialized equipment, and decided this was it.
Soon after, my wife and I went to the Blade Magazine Knife Show in Atlanta, GA. I was able to meet many of the knife makers that I had been following on the Internet, who were extremely nice and told me some of their tricks of the trade. One of the guys, Dan Eastland (an apprentice of Andy Roy at the time), invited me to come and see the shop and some of the things they did to make knives firsthand. This was extremely helpful, and I decided right then I would start making my own knives.
With my wife’s support, I started saving up money and buying the necessary equipment. My first purchase was a drill press, then a small band saw that I found on clearance. Next, I built a grinder in a box from polar bear forge, table saw, and so on. I made my first knife and gave it to my wife for Christmas in 2014. Since then I have been pursing different knife patterns and designs.
Without these people, I would definitely not be where I am today and want to give credit to them for all their support. This is not an exhaustive list of people, but are some of the people who have helped me and supported me the most.
What has been going on in the shop this past months? It has been a crazy few months at KHDaily Knives. I feel badly that these blogs were one of the things that just had to get cut out with all that was going on. Hopefully, I can keep up with it going forward. The […]
Continue ReadingWhat has been going on in the shop this past month? This past month I have been finishing up a couple of knives for special people I know. One is going to be going on an elk hunt with some of his family and another for his father. For the elk hunt, he wanted a […]
Continue ReadingWhat is Around the Grinder? Around the grinder is a type of blog post that I talk about what happened during the month. It will be some knife making stuff, some stuff about life, and other miscellaneous things. There was a lot of cool things that happened this month. This month started off with not much […]
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