SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome to the Good Old Blades Podcast. I am your host, Aaron LeVere, and I'm joined with my co-host Chris Crawford.

SPEAKER_01 0:19

Well, thank you for tuning in to another episode of the Good Old Blades podcast. I am your host, Aaron Levere, and I have with me Chris Crawford, it's my co-host. And we have special guest Derek Melton. So, Chris, if you want to take it away, you can start the interview process. And Derek, uh feel free to ask us questions as you see fit.

SPEAKER_02 0:41

Yeah, we'll do. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_03 0:45

Yeah, thanks for being here, and thanks, Aaron. And so I'll just say a little bit about Derek. I mentioned him in our first podcast that Derek and I have known each other since high school, and we kind of got into knife making together. I'm not going to say too much about that. I'll get let him let him tell how he remembers it, and then we can go back and compare. See if we remember it the same way. We're both getting older, and there was you know, it's been, golly Derek, man, it's been 20 21 years, I guess. If we I'm 50, man. I'm 50 years old. I I just turned 52 this past week. So so we'll see. It'll be like the newlywig game or something. If we remember it right. But uh so tell us a little bit about yourselves out yourself outside of Knives, like what you what you do for a living, um, where you live, and just some general information so that people who don't know you can kind of get a get to know your background just a little bit.

SPEAKER_02 1:42

Yeah, sure. So I live in central Mississippi, right in the middle of the state, uh just west of Jackson, Mississippi. So Jackson is the capital, and I live in uh or just north of a town called Clinton. And uh Clinton is basically a suburb of Jackson, and um I've been here since 1990, I think. I moved down here to go to school and just never left, but um been here, this is home, for quite a long time. I've got uh a wife and two kids. I've got a son who is in his second year of college, and I've got a daughter who is in her senior year of high school. Um, my wife works at the local college here, and uh I work at a hospital nearby as an IT analyst. So primarily my my day job is as a support analyst for a large hospital system. So that's that's kind of my life outside of the making that I do.

SPEAKER_03 2:50

And and in addition to knowing Derek in high school, we went to college together and we worked at a company called Mtel together, and then we worked at that same hospital that he's talking about uh together. But I I left there a long time ago when we moved to Tupelo, but yeah, so we've worked, we we have a pretty good history together, and uh Derek's one of my best friends. So you do a lot of blacksmithing now. We'll get to that in just a little bit. But tell us uh a little bit about how you got started in knife making. Like when when did you get interested in knives? Was that as a kid? Uh and what point did you decide you wanted to make knives?

SPEAKER_02 3:29

Yeah, so I don't really remember as a as a kid, like I really don't remember thinking about making a knife before I was in college. I mean, like most boys, you know, I I had phases where I would like grab a stick and scratch it on the sidewalk and turn it into a spear and run off in the woods and pretend and do that kind of stuff. And um my dad, my parents were divorced at at a young age, and my dad dated this woman for a while, and I remember she had a she had a decorative sword in her house. And we went over there one time, and I remember I got that sword out. It was it was just purely a decorative thing that she had leaning on her fireplace, and she didn't have uh she had two girls, um, but she didn't have any boys in the house. And man, I remember the first time we went over there, I found that sword, and I I grabbed that thing and snuck out of their house and went behind their house, went behind their house with it and started swinging around, and she was so mad because I had beat it up against this fence, you know. But um, so that's my first experience with the sword. But um, yeah, it was yeah, it didn't have a good heat treat. Yeah, it was fairly beat up after I was done with it. But uh, but um I think the first time I really caught the bug to make knives or really, really was ever exposed to the idea of making your own knife was um when I was at Mississippi College, uh, probably my second or third year there, there was a guy named Ramsey Green, and uh his father was my Greek teacher. And uh anyway, uh Ramsey, if I remember it right, Ramsey had a had a handmade knife, and uh it I remember it looking unusual, and so I asked him about it, and he said, Well, he had made it, and I was just kind of blown away. I was like, How did you make your own knife? You know, how does that work? You know, what's that like? And and uh a few weeks later he took me to his house and showed me his little backyard forge that he had set up, and we didn't make a knife that day, he made an arrowhead for me. He took a piece of steel and beat it into the shape of an arrowhead and textured it with a ball peen hammer so it looked like it was flint-napped, you know. But it was steel, and that was the first time I had seen forging in person. And uh, and he gave me that little arrowhead, and I've still got that thing somewhere. It's I think it's in a little cigar box full of knick-knacks around here, but that was my first time to see any kind of forging, and uh, and then I learned about the Mississippi Forge Council group, which is a local Habana chapter, and uh I started going to those meetings primarily because I was interested in knife making, and it was the only place that bladesmiths were were kind of gathering at that time. This was before uh really before internet was big, it was before, you know, there was uh a whole lot of um there just wasn't a whole lot of media out there, so to speak, with it in regards to bladesmithing. So if you wanted to learn it, you had to go and find people that were doing it. Um and and that was the place where I could where I could see it was at the at the Forge Council. So I went to those meetings and hooked up with several people there. And that was the first time I met Terry Vandeventer, who is now a master bladesmith with the ABS here in the state. Um, and I I think I met I met Bruce Evans through that group too, um, by going over to the Batson bladesmithing show in Alabama. Like I think the first time I went to Batson was because I heard about it through the Forge Council. And when I went to the Batson Bladesmithing Symposium over in Tannehill State Park, Alabama, right outside of Birmingham, that was really where I started meeting more bladesmiths and learning more about it. And really, that's where I really caught the bug was after attending uh Batsons. And then from there, you know, I started gathering tools up and uh I bought my first anvil from a from a guy at the forge council and started scrapping around, finding what tools I could get, and put together a little forge uh in our first home. My wife and I were married right out of college, and we had a little house, and I had my first forge was set up on two sawhorses in in our carport with uh with a little single burner gas forge, an anvil, and one cross pin hammer, uh one set of tongs, and a vise that I had bolted down to the sawhorses, and and that's that's kind of how I got started. Um, and then once I kind of got my equipment together, I met another guy here in town, Steve Thompson, and Steve uh allowed me to come over to his place, which was uh he had a bladesmith shop in a U-Haul self-storage facility. So, you know, like one of these storage places where you rent uh, you know, the places with like a roll-up door, you rent a like a 10 by 10 cube and you fill it with all your stuff and pay them a monthly fee. Well, he knew somebody that that owned the place and they let him he had a full-fledged black uh bladesmith shop inside that storage place. And so uh he was probably the first guy to really tutor me in bladesmithing. And I think my first or second knife I made with him in that little shop.

SPEAKER_03 9:47

So this was uh I'm guessing this was probably 2001, 2002. Does that sound about right?

SPEAKER_02 9:56

Yes, like like the first knife I've got any mark on has has 01 scratched in it with an engraver. You know, those little engraver pens you used to get that those those buzzer kind of pens. Yeah, that's how I etched my first knife. Was I uh I engraved the date on that knife. And so, well, it has my initials D E M and O1 scratched into it. It's awful. But um but yeah, that was 2001.

SPEAKER_03 10:30

Going back, so you you met so okay, I didn't realize this. You you met Ramsey while you were in college, so you were exposed to custom knife making even back then, right?

SPEAKER_02 10:42

Yeah, I think it was I think it was either it was my second or third or my third or fourth year at MC. I saw Ramsey uh with that knife, and and he was the first guy that let me see forge work being done.

SPEAKER_03 10:58

And then Ramsey, if I remember right, he learned from Terry. Is that correct? Or or he would he would snake hunt with Terry. There was some between him and Terry.

SPEAKER_02 11:09

That sounds right. Yeah, that sounds good.

SPEAKER_03 11:11

But then I think I was saying on our podcast earlier that um my first introduction to it was when you sent me that link to Jones's cheapskate guide to knife making. Do you remember that?

SPEAKER_02 11:25

I don't remember that one, but I remember um the $50 knife shop.

SPEAKER_03 11:30

Well, I was gonna ask you about that in just a second. I'll ask you about that next. But yeah, you sent you sent me an internet link. It was called something like I I found it the other day, I found it in the PDF, but and I may have the title wrong, but it was something like Jonesy's Absolute Cheapskate Guide to Making Knife. And uh I have I have no memory of that. I'll send it back to you. And so you were I I think I told this on my our podcast, but I'm gonna just I'm gonna tell it again just to bust your chops here. But uh I was working remote from St. Dominic and coming over there, you know, once a week or once every couple weeks, and we're sitting there in your office and you're talking about I'm gonna make a knife, I'm gonna make a knife. And I pulled that one out, the one that I'd made, and I was like, like this? I'd use that guide that you'd sent. But but anyway, so yeah, so beat me too. Yeah, I was trying to chump you. All right, so you mentioned Wayne Goddard, and so that's one thing I was gonna ask you about. Talk about the influence, talk about uh, I don't know if people who have come into knife making now are familiar with Wayne Goddard or his book, The $50 Knife Shop, but talk about how how big of a part that knife played in your getting started, and then talk about uh your first grinder.

SPEAKER_02 12:48

Yeah, so um I would yeah, if most people that have come into knife making since Forged and Fire, let's just say since the first season of Forged and Fire, which they're on season, they're they're starting to film season 10 now. So, you know, that's seven, eight years, I think. Um I th I want to say that he died about four years ago. But and and he had been inactive uh a good while before he passed. But you know, if you haven't come into knife, if you if you've just recently come into knife making in the last 10 to 15 years, you probably don't know who Wayne Goddard is. And uh Wayne Goddard was um well he's a master bladesmith with the ABS, but he wrote articles for Blade magazine years and years ago, and he did a series of articles that he titled Um, I forget what the title of the articles were, but he took all those articles and pulled them together into a book that he called the $50 knife shop. And I don't remember who recommended that book to me, I don't remember how I came across it, but I do remember that it was right around the time that me and Steve Thompson were working together, and I was just getting started in knife making, and I got that book and it changed my world. That book opened up the world of making your own tools to me. Um, because that book, the premise of that book was he wanted to see if he could put together all the tools needed to make his own knife for $50. And so he went around and pulled a motor out of a washing machine and turned it into a grinder, and he used a uh a pawn shop hand drill with a with a flap disc attachment on it to grind bevels. You know, he just very rudimentary basic, you know, equipment that anybody could scrap together. And that was the first time that I really thought, man, I could, you know, I don't have to have all this crazy equipment. I can I can make a knife with with this basic stuff. And so I'll I bet I read that book cover to cover probably four or five times right after I got it. Because it it had everything from how to forge a knife, how to grind a knife, how to heat treat a knife. Uh and then in the very back of the book, there was a section on building your own belt grinder. And um even you know, the belt grinder is kind of the holy grail of knife maker tools when you're getting started. You know, when you're just getting started in bladesmithing or or knife making, whether it's stock removal or or forged blades, especially nowadays, there's all these really nice grinders on the market. You're just not gonna avoid seeing all these people with these fancy grinders. Well, back then, the fancy grinder was the Bader B3 or the Burr King. And those two machines were thousands of dollars. You know, I mean, they were just they were way out of reach of of where I was at. And so Wayne had this section in the back of his book where he built this grinder that he called the grinder from junk. And and um, or he had a maybe uh I think it was the grinder from junk, but then he wound up calling it big red or something like that because it was it was red in color by the time he got done with it. But you know, he took all these weird parts and pieces and put together uh uh a belt grinder, and I I was just fascinated by it. And so I thought, well, if he can do it from this, you know, from these parts and pieces, well, certainly I can do it. And so I started looking around for different things that I could use to make a grinder, and we were throwing a desk away at work, like this office desk. And uh it was the this office desk was sitting in the back room near the near the dumpster, just waiting to be thrown away. And I noticed that it was made out of square steel tubing, and so I took that office desk of the house and took an angle grinder and cut all the square tubing up into you know little short 12 to 14 inch sections, and I used uh the pictures and the guides from the back of that book and put together my own grinder frame. I didn't have a welder, um I did have a drill press. I bought like one of those $49 drill presses at Harbor Freight, um, and so I used a drill press and a ton of nuts and bolts to bolt all those tubes together, and then um I found a I found a refurbished uh I went to Grizzly.com because Grizzly had just come out with their 2x72 knife grinder, and um they had refurbished contact wheels. You could get the eight-inch contact wheel that they had for their grinder, and I bought a refurbished contact wheel from Grizzly, and then I contacted Rob uh Beaumont at Beaumont Metalworks, and they were just starting to make uh grinder parts. They weren't really well known then for their grinders, but and I contacted him and and had him make me an idler wheel, a crowned idler wheel, and I took all that stuff and bought a big spring at the hardware store for tension and made a really crazy tracking mechanism that was basically held together with JB weld, and uh yeah, put my own 2x72 together from that from the back of that book, and uh, and I was off and running. And man, I used that grinder for 15 years.

SPEAKER_03 19:03

I mean, I used it for a long time. Isn't that the grinder that my buddy Brian bought from you? Or was that? It is, yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 19:12

No, that's the that's the one. So it's he's still got it, it's still going somewhere, you know. But that book was so instrumental to me getting started because it was just everything I needed, and it was written in such a way that it was really approachable, and uh it put it kind of into the hands of anybody that wanted to give it a shot, you know. And so it to this day, it's if somebody asks me what they want it what they need to get started, one of the first things I recommend to them is that book. And uh some of the heat treat info in that book is a little outdated, but it's still it's still an excellent resource, and I just I can't recommend it highly enough. And one of my great regrets, my great regrets in my knife making career is that I never got to meet Wayne Goddard in person and and say thank you, you know, because that was just such a such an instrumental book.

SPEAKER_03 20:12

People like him, books like that, and it's probably it'll never be known how many people got their start with that. You know, back then it was I think Wayne Goddard had a couple of books, and then you had Ed Fowler's Knife Talk and Knife Talk 2, and those were those were kind of like the you know popular books to get started, and there were some other books as well. But uh Aaron, do you have that book, $50 knife shop? Are you familiar with it?

SPEAKER_01 20:38

Yeah, I'm familiar with it, uh, but I actually don't I don't have a copy of it.

SPEAKER_02 20:41

Man, I've I've bought that book and sent it to probably a half a dozen people.

SPEAKER_01 20:45

Yeah, well, something that you guys have to realize is that I'm I'm 35, I'll be 36 in April. So so by the by the yeah, by the time I came around, I know I knew how to use YouTube and research the Googles and things. So I mean buying buying books as part of knife making, although I do have a copious amount of books on knife making, uh, that's one I didn't have because there was uh a lot of YouTubers and uh like Walter Sorrel's videos and things that encompassed a lot of those those basics early on for me.

SPEAKER_02 21:16

So yeah, I can imagine it coming into knife making in the last 15 years or so, having access to the internet and like blade forums and YouTube and and all that is just you've got just you've almost got too much information, you know.

SPEAKER_03 21:33

Well, back in 2001, I mean if you remember 2001, 2002, I mean you already had blade forms and you had knife forms. Yeah, but that was it. I mean, that was it that that is you know, there was there was no Facebook, you know, or or Instagram. So knowledge was shared among knife makers in the forms like that. And so so you got your start back in around 2001, um, and you're doing black. Smithing now, but have you been active for the last 21 years, or has it come and gone, or what's how's it how's that gone? Like consistent. Like right now, I would say you're you're a very consistent maker. I mean, you're that's that's what you do. Um but has it always been that way, or has there been times when you kind of got out of it and got back into it?

SPEAKER_02 22:21

So the audience won't know my dad, but you you remember my father, and like my my dad was uh my dad was a maker, for lack of a better word. He was a carpenter, yeah. And so my my dad was a carpenter, um he was a draftsman, he was an architect, you know, he drew house plans and he contracted and and helped build custom homes. You know, that was his great passion was designing and building custom homes. But but his hobby on the side was was fine woodworking. And and so he wherever we went, he always had a little woodworking shop at the house. And so he made furniture, he made all kinds of stuff, and for a long time in the 80s, he was really into military model making, um, you know, like tanks and airplanes, and he got so good at making these military dioramas where you have a tank and like fake grass and you know, like crumbling brick, you know, you basically these battle scenes that you know that he would build together. He got so good at building these these battle scenes uh with plastic models. Uh he was competing in these model competitions in Memphis. He got so good at it, they refused to let him compete anymore. Um because he he was just he was winning every one of the model making competitions in the southeast area, and so they they forced him to not compete anymore, and uh, and so then he turned back to his woodworking, and um for a while he got really into making uh hard really fine hardwood briefcases. Really? Uh custom briefcases, yeah. And I've got one of them in the shop. Um, I'll try to take a picture of it. But but anyway, my point to all that was I always saw him with tools in his hand, either working on his models, painting with an X-Acto knife, you know, shaving plastic or you know, working on those things, or he was out in the shop making a piece of furniture or working on one of his um briefcases. Um he made a bunch of little jewelry boxes too out of really nice hardwood. And so from from a very early, early age, I was around my dad and watching him make things, and and as I grew up, I've just found that that was something I really enjoyed too. And so um I think I've always been a maker. Like I I was making furniture for people in high school, you know, was uh for gifts and things, you know. Um, and I've made furniture pieces around our house, and I've done all kinds of woodwork around our house, but but when I found metalwork, that was kind of what clicked for me, and that was where I felt like, oh man, this is this is kind of my groove here, and um, and so I I would say I've always been consistent in making things, but uh I never really I didn't find my groove until probably my late 30s. Being like, oh, this is what I want to really learn to be good at, and that was forge work.

SPEAKER_03 25:41

Well, speaking of forging, and you mentioned this already, Forged and Fire. So you were on Forged and Fire, uh, was it season five? Is that right? Or season eight, episode five?

SPEAKER_02 25:51

Season season five, season five, episode twenty. Season five, episode. My episode was called The Small Sword. And um at that time, a lot of the episodes were themed around certain movies or shows, you know, and and our episode was themed around Game of Thrones, and our weapon was uh a small sword, which was based around uh a weapon in that series called a needle, um, that a little girl named Arya uses. And so I had to make a small sword based on that.

SPEAKER_03 26:28

Tell us about your experience of going on the show, going out there, about them coming to your shop, and um, and then just give us a little bit about your overall thought of the show in general as to how the influence that it's had on knife making, whether you feel that's positive or negative. Just share a little bit about that because I know you've done, I think you even put up like a webpage or something just about your experience on the show, didn't you?

SPEAKER_02 26:57

Yeah, so um I've got a website, just just Derek Melton.com, where I have several different uh pages out there. Um, and one of them is my forged and fire experience. And I went through and I was detailing, uh, I was really trying to write down my experience as as it was fresh in my mind right after I was back home from it. I wanted to document it because I knew I'd forget it. And uh, and so I went through and started kind of documenting day by day through the process, and I was posting all these pictures, the screenshots from the episode, you know, and one of the people from the Forged in Fire um company or or maybe it was History Channel, I don't know who it was, but they reached out and they said, Hey, you can't use those screenshots, and so they made me take down pretty much all the media that I had put up, and it kind of sucked the wind out of me uh documenting that process. And so there's there is some info out there about my experience from the show um still on my website, but um I applied in season two and uh went all the way through the the interview process, but then just never heard back and then uh and kind of put it out of my mind. I didn't think much more about it. I thought, well, you know, it was an interesting experience trying to get on the show, and um I remained a fan of the show and kept watching, and then uh right before season five, I got an email from the casting people and they they said, Hey, are you still interested? And uh I said, sure. And so I went through the the interview process again and was told, hey, you know, we we would like you to be on this season, and so I got a spot on season five, and uh I think that was that was like in November or December that I found out that I was gonna be on the show, and they said, Hey, we're gonna we're gonna start filming soon and we'll let you know, we'll try to give you two weeks' notice before you have to fly out, and it'll be sometime between January and uh June, you know. And so I was like, okay, well, and so I was kind of on pins and needles that for that whole time period, not knowing when they were gonna call. And so what I did from January until April when I went to film is I tried to practice, you know. I tried to watch the show and see what kind of challenges they were doing, and and practice a little bit as I could in the shop. And then um a couple of weeks before our film date, I got a phone call and they said, Hey, you're gonna fly out on this date. Here's your plane tickets. Uh, and they gave me the the details about it, and and so I flew out in April, filmed the show. It takes it takes a full week to film the first two parts of the show, you know, the until until the last two are standing, you know. Um you get there on a you get there on a Sunday night, and uh they pick you up at the airport, drive you to a really nice hotel in in uh Connecticut in Stanford, and then uh Monday morning they pick you up from the hotel and carry you to the studio, which is this nondescript industrial-looking building right in the middle of a big industrial park. And then you film, you film uh the sections of the show all through the week, and you're required to stay there all week, regardless of when you're eliminated or if you're um if you're not eliminated. If you're if you're the first guy out on Tuesday morning, uh you still have to stay in the hotel there all week. And so we went through uh the four of us and uh filmed throughout the week, got to be good friends with the guys uh that filmed the episode with me, and then we left on a Friday, and then they came back and filmed the the home forge section, which happened over a Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. So I had I had 48 hours over five days. So I had four 10-hour days and I had one eight-hour day to to do my work, and the film crew that showed up was just two people, you know, it's just a guy and a girl, and um it's basically a camera operator and a footage editor, for lack of a better way to describe their titles, but um it was a really fun experience. I I really had a great time. Obviously, winning uh helps with your perception of the experience, you know. But I think even the people that go on the show that that don't make it all the way to the end, by and large, the people that I've spoken to who have been on the show had a good time. I mean, obviously, there's a few people that I've talked to that didn't enjoy the experience, you know, or felt like they didn't do as well as they wanted to, or caught a bad break. And, you know, that's really the that's the one thing uh that I would stress about that show is that uh regardless of of your skill level, anybody can win that show and anybody can lose. Some of the most talented people in the country have been on that show and have gone home in round one or two, and that has no bearing on their capabilities as makers. It just means that the rules or the circumstances just didn't play out in their favor. And I'll be the first to say that uh there was a large amount of luck or things going right that that helped me to make it to the end. But you know, I went into that process with the mindset that I wanted to win. You know, I didn't want to go and and just kind of be lazy about it. I wanted to go in there and be competitive, and so I I felt like I was. And then the other goal was to not do anything really stupid.

SPEAKER_03 33:02

I'd recommend uh anyone interested to go back and watch your episode, um, season five, episode 20. It's a really good episode, and I'm not just saying that because he's a good friend of mine, but the sword that he made was a beautiful sword, and it performed so well, and uh it was just you did a really good job.

SPEAKER_02 33:21

There that the show does get uh a fair amount of hate uh from some parts of the bladesmithing community because you know there are some things about the show that are silly, you know. There's some NASCAR crash aspects of the show where you know they they want people go to a NASCAR race a lot of times to see the crashes, you know, and that or you hear that said, and and Forged New Fire is kind of like that. The disasters and the drama are what people want to watch, you know, they want to see you know the suspense uh of something that could go wrong, and um, and so I think that the show puts people in positions so that at least at least three people are gonna fail at some point in the show, you know. And um and so it it gets a bad rap because uh I think some people feel like it puts a negative light on bladesmithing. However, I can't think of anything else that's brought as much attention to forging blades in my lifetime than forged in fire. And so I've I don't think I don't think there's a good argument there to say that it's been a negative influence uh on bladesmithing. And I think the people that wind up saying things like it's been bad for bladesmithing, are people that are yearning for the the quote good old days, end quote. You know, they're they're they're they're longing for the time when it was a smaller group, and in my opinion, that's a bit of a gatekeeping mindset, you know, and I'm just not a big fan of that. And I think the more people that get into bladesmithing, the better for bladesmithing. Um, because you know, it's a hard craft. And for every 10 people that get excited uh from watching the show and getting into it, really realistically, maybe one or two people are are gonna stick with it once they get into it and figure out, oh man, this is hard work, it's hot, it's dirty, you know, and there's a lot of failure involved, you know. And so I don't know. I think it's been a net positive for for bladesmithing in general. It it I had a I had a great time doing it. I made really good friends through the process and after the process. Like there are people that I've met who are can who are other contestants on the show that I would call really close friends now, and the only tie we have is that we were both on this TV show. And so there's kind of a there's a brotherhood kind of about it.

SPEAKER_03 36:08

Well, that's what I was gonna say. There seems to be a a brotherhood among the contestants, not just the champions, but yeah, just the contestants in general. And kind of going along the same lines that you're saying, you know, it it has it has opened up the world of knife making to people who would have maybe never seen it otherwise, but not just to the makers, but also there's a lot of people who just enjoy watching the show that aren't planning on making a knife, but but they're now exposed to this realization that hey, there's a craft out here that there's there's people doing this kind of stuff where they may have never known that or never realized that before. Let me ask you kind of follow-up with that. So without getting going into too much detail, I I know that there was a that you have definitely benefited from being on the show. Number one, you we you've talked and we've talked about this before, you and I, but just the that week, that week in your home shop, and and the it forced you very quickly to become become a better maker. But talk about some of the extended benefits that have come just just from the fact of being on the show and that may not have come as quickly had you not taken the time to go on the show that week.

SPEAKER_02 37:29

The show will force you to do things outside of your comfort zone. And so that was that was a real positive thing. Um, I I had never made anything like the sword that I made on the show before the show. You know, I had not done that. And um, and so being put in a situation where you have to stretch yourself like that, that's a good thing. And that set me up to to do that more in the future because it kind of inspired me to look back at what I did and say, well, you know, I did that. Why shouldn't I try to do this thing? You know, and so that that's that's definitely a net positive that came out of it. Um, you know, the the social media exposure that happened after the show uh generally happens to everybody that wins on the show. But but I will say this about the exposure, you know, it's what you make of it. Um there have been people that that have gone on the show and have won real big and and they don't take advantage of it, you know, or they may or they may not know how to take advantage of it. And so I tried to take advantage of that brief bit of exposure and and to you know to use it to to get my name out there a little bit more, and and and it did, and so that was also unnet positive, you know. But but also too, there have been people that have gone on the show that have not won, and they've and they've taken advantage of social media and and skyrocketed as well. So it is what you make of it, you know, to a large degree.

SPEAKER_03 39:05

I I have one more question about forest and fire, and then we'll we'll move on. But um, this came to my mind while you're talking about that, because I don't think it got a whole lot of exposure on the show. But share with everybody the problem you had to solve with heat with uh tempering your sword.

SPEAKER_02 39:22

Okay, so uh yeah. The the guy that filmed the episode right before me, episode 19. If you watch that episode, there's a disaster that happens where the guy uh wants to do an oil bath temper on his sword. He he basically has the idea where he wants to build a a pipe, fill it with oil, and heat the oil to 400 degrees, and you know, put the sword into the oil and let it be the temper medium. And and when he does that, the oil boils over, reaches its flash point, and basically he threw a flamethrower at his ceiling and burned his shop down. And so the the very first question that the producer asked me when he came to my shop was, How are you going to temper your sword? And I said, Well, I'm not really sure yet, but I've this is my idea. And I showed him my idea, which was I I bought three toaster ovens from Walmart, cut holes in the sides of them, and and stacked them side by side, and then I built little metal tubes to connect all the toaster ovens and wrapped those tubes with ceramic uh blanket so that I had a basically I had a 36-inch long tempering oven. And uh, and so that was that was the idea behind uh, or that was the idea for tempering. And I can't take full credit for it. I mean, if you know who Salem Straub is, Salem Straub is a phenomenal bladesmith. Salem Straub had done the same thing with uh, I think two little propane ovens, like camper ovens. He had stuck them side by side to get some extra length. And so it had been done before, but I just did it with some really cheap Walmart toaster ovens, you know, and it worked. It it worked perfectly. I put I put little oven thermometers in each each of the toaster ovens and calibrated the ovens so that they were accurately representing the temperatures uh that they should, and uh tempered that 32-inch blade uh made a 5160 just perfectly. And uh I called it the ghetto heat treat three 3000, I think, or something like that. And I was super proud of that thing and super excited about it being on the show, and uh yeah, they didn't show it, they didn't talk about it, they didn't there's not a single picture of it on the show, you know.

SPEAKER_03 41:56

It it was really neat. I did get to see it, and uh it was a good idea. That's that's really cool. All right, well let's uh let's move on from knives and let's talk about blacksmithing. You're you're doing a lot of blacksmithing now. So tell me a little bit about your transition from knives to blacksmithing. What was it that drew you to blacksmithing and why do you feel like that you've gravitated more to that and kind of put knife making? I I know you still make a knife every now and then, but but as a whole, you you've pretty much moved off of knife making uh for blacksmithing. So can you talk about that?

SPEAKER_02 42:32

Yeah, yeah, sure. Um so right after Forged in Fire, um I got I got a bunch of people requesting knives, you know, a bunch of people wanting a knife from me. And I made a few, but I just found out that I wasn't having a whole lot of fun doing it. Right around that time, I was also helping uh Boy Scouts and the Boy Scout troop with the Metalwork Merit Badge, where I was studying to put the metalwork merit badge stuff together, and um and there was blacksmithing involved in that, and so I met a guy who encouraged me to go on the on the show. His name is Lyle Wynne, and uh Lyle is a local blacksmith here in Mississippi, extremely, extremely talented blacksmith, and he's primarily a toolmaker, or he was at the time, he was really into making tools, and he was teaching this curriculum called Tools to Make Tools, which is a uh a tool making curriculum that was popularized and invented by Brian Brazil, which Brian Brazil is a really uh well known blacksmith and very talented blacksmith. But anyway, I met Lyle Wynne at the Forge Council meetings and uh heard that Lyle was teaching this tool making class, and I had never done any of that. And and uh one of the things that that you do in this tool making class was you making Your own hammer, and I just thought, man, how cool would that be to go and make my own hammer? I want to do that, you know. And so I went and took the tool making class from Lyle uh over uh I think it was three and a half days, and uh it changed my world, it was as influential on me as the $50 knife shop was. It's a it's a class where you basically make the tools that you need to make a hammer, and then you make a hammer with those tools, and then afterwards you use those tools to make other things like decorative you know items and um it's it's it's basically a forging fundamentals class, and uh I had been forging blades for years, but not really forging much else. And this class opened up a whole big world of forging and tool making that I had not really been exposed to, and um, and so I went down the rabbit hole of hammer making for about a year. That was all I wanted to do for a solid year, was that's I wanted to do nothing but make hammers, and so I'm I made hammer after hammer after hammer, big hammers, little hammers. Basically, once I figured out that I could punch a hole into a block of steel and stick a piece of wood in it, all kinds of avenues opened up, you know, all these different tools that you can make, uh handheld tools, and then it uh then it veered off into axe making and uh sledge hammer making, you know, and then I got into making tongs a little bit, and uh and so that that was my start of my you know venture towards blacksmithing, and I've just kind of been stuck in that blacksmithing world ever since. I just I love it. Um I've told people a bunch of times that when the forging stops for me, the fun stops. Um, and that that's kind of how I feel about it. You know, when I I I I love forging a blade out, but once I forge a blade out, I'm I'm kind of done with it. I don't want to grind it, I don't want to fool with a handle anymore, you know, and and so um I'm just kind of stuck in this world where I'm doing a whole lot of forging steel, and um it's just what I really enjoy now. And in the last few years, I got into making um barbecue tools, grilling tools, forged grilling tools, and and that took off. And so um I figured out that I could make and sell a lot more barbecue tools than I could make and sell custom knives, and it allowed me to make money to buy tools that I wanted, and so I kind of just stayed in this lane, you know.

SPEAKER_03 47:00

So you're talking about making those barbecue tools. Tell tell the story about the quote Harry Potter wands that you were making.

SPEAKER_02 47:08

Yeah, so I've sold a bunch of Harry Potter wands or steel wands, and uh that came about. I posted a picture or a video of one of my steak turners on TikTok, and uh somebody commented that it was a cool wand. I guess they didn't see the hook on the end of it, and they thought it was a wand that I was holding in my hand, and um they said something like, That's a cool wand, I would totally buy that. And so I went out to the shop and made a steak turner, but didn't put the hook. You know, I just left it to a point and called it a wand and put it on my website as a Harry Potter wand and sold like four of them right off the bat, you know, and so I thought, well, that's a standard product now. And so I just I just used some thinner, narrower diameter steel and did a little different work on the handle and uh called it a Harry Potter wand. And and yeah, man, I've sold dozens of those things now. That's funny.

SPEAKER_01 48:08

Thank you for listening to the first part of the Derek Melton interview. Stay tuned for next week's episode where we finish up with Derek. And remember, you are loved, and God bless.