SPEAKER_00 0:00

My name is Aaron LeVere, and welcome to my podcast. I explore the deep reaches of space and time to talk to the people influencing or influenced by nice. In an effort to unpack the rich and complex culture and history surrounding hedge pools and adjacent crafts, I jump off into the abyss to talk about all things nice with special guests all the time. Join me as we reminisce of the good old days on the Good Old Blades podcast. I find that every time I talk to the old guard of knife maker, how fortunate I am to be in a time where knowledge is so accessible. For the pioneers in custom and handmade knives, every ounce of knowledge could be attributed to an egregious amount of want-to in order to get anything done. For the OG knife maker that stood the test of time like Jim Sornberger, that want-to has been married with an undying passion for knives and art that's managed to weather a lot of storms since the 70s. Probably best known for his California gold rush period style, San Francisco dress knives, canes, and native golden quartz work, Jim has carried a legacy of an aesthetic that could have easily died out had it not been for him and a few like him. Additionally, Jim has been a bastion of supporting the craft through his historic research, documentation, and education for the better part of 50 years. Magazines, books, videos, social media, podcasts. He's adopted whatever medium he can to breathe renewed life into the craft. And that's why I wanted to talk to him so much. We all as knife makers take for granted the information we can get on learning how to make things, but we often forget that context of information matters a lot. And someone like Jim, even for growing older, has a mind like a steel trap for details. Jim, I am really honored to have you on the Good Old Place Podcast.

SPEAKER_01 2:14

Thank you. It's been a while to be able to get to you, but uh I'm here.

SPEAKER_00 2:19

Yeah, yeah. I think we've probably been planning this for almost a year now, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_01 2:26

Yes. Well, a lot's gone on in a year. You know, I got new great-grandbabies and I travel quite a bit. So and the shows and engraving and working, so yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:39

And uh your your travels abroad. I mean, uh all of your work in Cam Cambodia and everything, uh uh takes up a bunch of time too. Yes. Yeah, well, I mean, it is it is a pleasure. Um I I really wanted to have you on the show because you're just a a wealth of knowledge, um, and and you're a phenomenal knife maker and you're a great person. On top of that, I mean you're kind of like a Renaissance man. And um, you know, I I I foresee, based on what kind of what we've been talking about through all of this, that um um I'll I'll have you on multiple times to try to get through the breadth of some of the knife history that you have stored up in your noggin and you've been um um you've been writing about uh for as long as you have, and I'd love people to be able to hear it from the horse's mouth um especially. But um for for those who are not familiar with you, and if they're not, shame on them. Um can you give a kind of like how you got into knives and what you know what it is that your focus is and everything like that, just kind of like a a a brief biograph, uh as it were.

SPEAKER_01 3:49

Yeah, probably the thing that led to the knives. Uh I was in law enforcement and I was injured and I was off for quite a period of time at one time. And anyway, one of the big gun shows in the country in those days was the San Jose uh gun show. Bill Wacker had a show there for many years at the fairgrounds. And many of us attended. I'd uh gone back from the service and I've been into guns all my lives. My uncle had a gun shop and everything when I was a kid. In fact is on that point, my uncle had a gun shop, like I said, in Redding, California, right after WW2, and on is still is still operating today with his son. But uh I spent a lot of time in a gun shop, and uh I remember meeting Harry Morseth. He used to stop there, he had a display of knives there, and I thought it was pretty interesting. I was a kid, I was 10 or 11, but I thought it was pretty interesting that somebody actually made their living making knives. So but anyway, uh continue on with the conversation. Uh at the Bill Wacker's San Jose gun show at the fairgrounds, uh, I had met Dave Pitt. Uh Dave was a uh had an archery shop in Fremont, California. And or he worked. And he introduced me to Ed Henry, Ed was at the show, and Les Berryman and Ron Richard. And this was 1972, and I was looking for something to do. I'd been making jewelry, I'd been doing a lot of things uh into lapidary work since I was a kid. But anyway, after meeting them, I decided, wow, this knife making looks interesting. So I hooked up with Lesberryman. Uh uh, he was in Fremont, California at the time, but I used to go with her in the evenings. He worked on the day. But anyway, he showed me some of the basics, and anyway, that's how it started.

SPEAKER_00 6:10

When like what what did the scene look like in the early 70s as far as uh knife making equipment and things like that? Was it similar to what you were using in jewelry making or lapidary? Or was there uh what you know, I guess what what does the evolution look like from those earlier days?

SPEAKER_01 6:28

Um you know, Les built his grinder, and later I bought it from him, but uh he built a grinder using an elevator motor. And uh he had got a 12-inch uh elevator wheel, aluminum elevator wheel, and had it rubber coated in Oakland by a place that did that back in the day. And anyway, that was our original grinder, and we can I ground uh many hundreds of knives on that grinder. So the the equipment was pretty crude back in those days. Most people tried to figure out something to use. Um when the Barney Loveless book came out, How to Make Knives. Richard Barney was a good friend of mine. He lived in Mount Shasta, north of Reading. But uh and he doesn't get enough credit for that book. Uh Richard Barney actually did all the photography and the writing for that book. Uh you know, Bob l lent a tremendous amount of time and knowledge to it also, and should have credit for it also. But Richard actually did the the hard work on that book and the photography and traveled around uh to Bill Moran's and he spent time with all the knife making shops and lived several months at Bob's, and he was a heck of a knife maker, too. But he was very instrumental in the early days of knife making as a black and white photographer and as a writer. The first book, a gun digest, uh that Bill Cassidy wrote out here in California. Um Richard did many of the articles and all the phot photography work. So and he did a lot. There was a lot of photographs published in different uh places that that Richard did. So he was instrumental in the early days. But anyway, that book uh got into built grinders that Bob used and on down the line a lot of the equipment. And most of us use that as a guide. That that book has still got all of the very basics you need to make a knife. Uh Richard Barney even made a knife and they're using files and did a really nice job making that knife, and it's pictured in the book. So so you don't need anything really high-tech to get into it. And I made some knives with a file just to see if you could do it. And following his example in the book, it was really easy to do.

SPEAKER_00 9:23

So yeah, I I think my uh my first knife, well, first several knives were on files. Um, they didn't look that great, but um but you know how it goes. And then I I graduate like uh it basically is like the the the standard progression now is like if you want to get into it to see if you like it, maybe you start with files and maybe make a little filing jig for the bevels, and then maybe progress up to the one by 30 that Harper Freight sells or a few of these other um like Delta sells one. And then if if you're if you're feeling like you still want to progress further, you get like a two by 72 or was a two by 48 or whatever. Um, but um I I've noticed there there is kind of like this uh fringe society of knife makers that still do like the build your own grinders and whatnot. Uh, but by and large, uh if you factor in time and materials and everything like that, some of these uh lower cost grinders that are out there that are two by 72 are actually you know pretty phenomenal to be able to clip in or buy into a um a a two by seventy two and do you know the the work on those things. So it's interesting uh because you know, like Bruce Bump had had built his like was it like a World War II era like tank tire or something like that. Um and and and his is like twenty twenty-two or twenty-seven inches or thirty inches is something insane, uh how how large the circumference is on his.

SPEAKER_01 10:51

Yeah, Frank Senafonna used uh cam grinding wheels, uh uh stone wheels, uh wet. And that's how he made his knives forever. Um so there's a lot of equipment that can be used. Some of the lampidary equipment uh actually works for the stone grinders, uh uh obviously buffers are fairly common in jewelry, knives, all kinds of things. So but uh but I know Harbor Freight, I saw a grinder in there uh not long ago in their advertising, two by seventy two, and I think it was six or seven hundred dollars, which I don't think you could really build one. Uh it would be close. Okay. You know, if your time is free, yeah, you could do it, but uh otherwise that's a pretty good bargain for a grinder to start with.

SPEAKER_00 11:53

Oh yeah. Yeah, the uh the Grizzly uh style buffer, or sorry, it's like a buffer and uh and grinder combination. So it has a shaft for a buffing wheel, and then the uh the other side drives the um the drive wheel for the for the two by 72. They have one that's uh you know a fairly long horizontal, um, and I think it's under $700. But um, I've seen a lot of knife makers well that originally bought that as an investment and still use it today. So I mean those uh it's interesting, uh at least to me, to look back at uh some somewhat of the humble beginnings in um in knife making and the difference in in equipment.

SPEAKER_01 12:36

Well, yeah, in uh early days. Um fact is before that uh Barney Loveless book came out, David Boy had written a book uh on making knives, uh Blacksmith Approach. Uh there was a couple books around, but on the equipment, uh nobody really knew. So it was kind of an experimental thing. Um Loveless had an advantage. He was in the Southern California area, and there were several grinding shops and everything going on. So uh, and a lot of equipment manufacturers, Burking and others down there that that made a lot of high-tech equipment. Uh I say high-tech, it worked really well for uh for knife making, but most of us didn't uh didn't know it existed at the time until that book came out. And that's still a good Bible for uh anybody in a knife shop. Is get the Barney Loveless book. It's it it's common sense. Uh most of the stuff is still good basic knife making information, and you can still make knives uh following the directions in that book and see some of the equipment that's used. Um you know, it may be a little bit outdated as far as some of the metals for making knives, etc., uh, and some of the equipment, but basically it's it's still a good solid library book. Every knife maker should have it.

SPEAKER_00 14:22

Yeah, and that's the how how to make knives. Um, right.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

Correct.

SPEAKER_00 14:27

Yeah. Um well one thing that I um there's there are two sides of kind of like my my knife making journey. Uh one was um making fixed blade, and the other was wanting to get into uh pocket knives. And so um I had the how to make um um how to make knives uh by Barney Loveless, and then I had the uh how to make folding knives, which uh had Ron Lake, uh uh Frank Santafante and Wayne Clay. And um a few things that I really appreciate about um uh the transfer of knowledge was that you know when you're grinding or when you're uh using buffing compound, uh the the use of you know uh PPE or like masks and things like that to keep all that out of your lungs, which um I I haven't seen in a lot of other uh literature is the is the safety component of you know the respiratory system and whatnot. So I I mean I th those are some of the first things that I tried to um espouse was uh making sure that safety um in in the knife shop was a primary focus. Uh so that way downstream I didn't have anything like silicosis or those you know those standard lung diseases that you get from grinding a bunch of steel and breathing it in.

SPEAKER_01 15:43

Yeah, I think probably the buffing compounds and stuff like that, you know, the polishing and all that are probably even more dangerous than the grinding. I mean, metal's fairly heavy, it falls. Uh but a lot of the dust from grinding handle materials uh uh andor buffing compounds and the wheels that uh you use for buffing. That stuff floats around everywhere in a shop. And you know, I think if you have some sort of an exhaust system, it doesn't have to be really elaborate. Uh a stand-up fan and an open window or an open door. Um the grinding and the polishing is uh and wearing a mask. You got you you really need to wear a mask. And you can tell you wear a mask very long, and there's lines on your face from where the mask fits uh that show all the crap that's floating around in a knife shop. And it's not good for you.

SPEAKER_00 16:50

Yeah. Well, um, I was I spent a little while as a uh a jeweler's apprentice, and uh one of the first things that they had me do is uh uh all the buffing. And um in in jewelry at least, you know, you're we're you're working with some pretty volatile things like the vapor from flux and uh buffing compound and different things like that. And we never used masks like ever. Um it was it was actually kind of surprising to me that uh to go from you know in in jewelry where that stuff is done, you know, repetitively, to knife making where buffing is just a component of it, but there's such a focus on the the health ramifications of it. Um But yeah, I I it's uh you know, you you can't you can't uh replace your lungs very easily. So I think that's uh it's a point to note that even today, um, you know, good ventilation and uh proper protection for your uh face face uh and eyes and lungs is is you know almost goes without saying.

SPEAKER_01 17:54

Absolutely. Bob and I had a conversation, Bob Loveless and I had a conversation about that. His lungs were pretty messed up, but uh contributing factors. He smoked and he uh also didn't wear a mask a lot in the early days, so but I think that uh most of the knife making in those early days was a learning process, and you didn't know what uh like I said, there wasn't a lot written on that. Um you know, just a buffing machine alone sort of got got enough danger with all that stuff flying around or coming out of it flying around, uh, or getting caught up in a buffer. If you had experience with jewelry and you ever tried to buff a bracelet or something, I'm sure you got your your hands spanked pretty hard.

SPEAKER_00 18:52

Oh yeah. Yeah, I had one, uh I had one wrap around uh wrap around the uh the drive shaft. And luckily it was uh, I think if I remember correctly, it was the owner. Um he had me uh uh uh buffing his Cuban chain. Uh it was like you know, a bracelet, and uh it got caught up in there, and he was like, Yeah, it's okay. So I think there was like a dent, and then I had to sand it out and redo everything all over again. He was cool about it, but um, I'm glad it happened on something where I had a little bit of forgiveness than a customer's piece.

SPEAKER_01 19:22

I didn't want to like every machine yeah, every machine in the shop that goes around or you know, has got a motor-driven uh wheel or drill bed or whatever it is, everything in there is dangerous, and you gotta use your head all the time. You really do, you know. A lot of people try to hand hole things when they're drilling uh a larger sized uh hole in a in a metal uh blade or a in a handle in handles or whatever. And those things get caught on a drill bit or a um a uh carbide reamer or what whatever you happen to be using in there, and it can spin that around and it will cut you badly. Uh things get away in the buffing machines, things get away on the grinder. So you always got to use some safety features. Getting back to what got me interested in the knife making and all that, um I think growing up in the area I did, it was Northern California, um pretty rural. Uh and after World War II, uh uh nobody had any money, so everybody was uh pretty poor anyway, but dependent on um meat as a food source. Uh we hunted, we fished, uh and all that was pretty common with most most families. If dad got he dad was a contractor in those days, uh if he got a good job or something, we might get hamburger from the store, which was kind of a big treat. Um but otherwise it was, you know, we we hunted deer, we hunted uh uh bear, uh squirrel, rabbit, whatever it took, uh, to keep uh some food on the table and a lot of fishing. Uh but you always used a knife. I mean when I was a little kid, uh and when I say little kid, I mean seven, eight, nine, I was already using knives and stuff to uh uh to clean uh fish and and waterfowl, ducks, geese, all that sort of stuff. So the Introduction to the usefulness of a knife was pretty common knowledge with young people back in those days, as was firearms and stuff. So you know, they even had classes in school, if you can imagine, for elementary school, on teaching gun safety and stuff. So yeah. But it teaches it teaches you a lesson that, you know, a knife is a tool. Yeah, it does a particular job, uh, and there's different designs of blades and shapes and stuff. Uh, you know, they've been using them for ranching and farming and and like I said, hunting and fishing for forever. So I was used in my one of my grandfathers, uh on my mom's side, AJ. He uh brought me back a knife from Rudy Ruana. Uh he'd hunted up in Idaho and Wyoming and stuff early on. And I think I was uh I think just started Boy Scouts, I think, so probably 12 years old, something like that. I still got the Ruana, so it's been around and through the horn. My uncle gave me a Morseth uh during the Vietnam days. So anyway, I've been around knives pretty much all my life and recognize them as usable. Being able to make them was pretty cool. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:37

Well, and uh, you know, two two names that you mentioned with uh Rwanda and uh and Morseth. I mean, we're talking, you know, early, early American knife makers in this in this era of you know post-turn of the century, right? And uh and it's interesting that um I'd say more so Rwanda than Morseh has kind of made a a sort of collector's resurgence. And I'm not sure if it's because of the the the style um um and and the fact that you know it's uh it's still going today. But uh Morsef knives is especially I got familiar with because how I was mentioning that how to make uh lockbacks. Um one of the one of the uh models that um Wayne Clay uh made in there actually uses a a coil spring uh for the uh for the locking mechanism, for the spring mechanism. And that's something that as far as I know um first appeared with uh uh with uh Morseth. And it was actually something that was in A. G. Russell's catalog when they were working together for quite a while before I guess um uh people don't really like coil springs anymore for the uh uh for the folding um you know spring mechanisms. Uh but um I thought that it was interesting because when I was looking at some of the um the physics and wearability of coil springs versus um you know tension springs with spring steel, it looks like the uh the coil spring actually outlasts most um spring mechanisms uh that you'd find in in lockbacks today. And so, you know, it's it's uh it's interesting to me when you look at some of the pedagogy of knives, um, how how much we really owe to you early pioneers and to uh um you know Rwanda and Morseth and uh all these early knife makers, which you you know were able to um make along with and rub elbows with.

SPEAKER_01 25:39

Um like I said, it was experimental and I'm sure for them also, you know. You look at Skagel's knives and stuff, uh or uh of course Morseeth's Morseath was very interested in steels. Uh you know, what would hold an edge and and how well and stuff, and uh he settled on uh coil rolls of steel, I think. I think Brusseletto. It's been so long I don't remember all the but he was very interested in laminated steels and on down the line. And most of his knives, uh the late ones were all laminated steel. Um they held a heck of an edge. They also rusted really easy, or you know, because it was mild steel on the outside of them.

SPEAKER_00 26:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:39

Uh Rudy Ruena's they were uh made from Studebaker springs, and he just about went out of business when Studebaker did. And I think Bill Hold at Pacific Heatrade kind of guided them on uh spring steels. Um so it they continued on afterwards, but but he liked Studebaker. He said they made the best knives and they get some interesting ideas, you know.

SPEAKER_00 27:11

Yeah, well it's a it's the mother of invention uh um invention as necessity, right? I mean, um what what's interesting, I think, too, is how we see that a lot of uh service members that were um using kind of what they had in the theater, knives and everything at the time, uh, brought that um home and started to make knives um post-World War II and and found a lot of scraps and things um that, you know, I mean uh but that's that that was like a a convention of the time, right? Is to recycle things and to and to find ways to use um materials and equipment and things that might have been used for other purposes, but in the vein of knife, knives and crafts, right?

SPEAKER_01 27:59

Yeah, and to see what actually worked. You know, there was uh a lot of military a lot of the guys in the military and they and they made uh service-connected knives, uh mostly out of boredom, probably. They were stuck on an island somewhere or uh on the continent in Germany or uh in Korea or whatever, and they had uh time to do some things, and whatever the military used was their source of metal, you know. So it might have been a car spring or it might have been uh a bolo knife that uh uh or machete that the military had. And um uh they had uh many of the places that had a little machine shop with a grinding wheel, et cetera. And when I say grinding wheel, I mean hard car bite wheels. That's what everybody used back in those days. Uh but anyway, they'd end up making a knife out of that and uh laminated plastic handles and leather and whatever else that they found uh in the area. I did a story on uh Bo Randall, I think it was in the December issue last year of Knife Magazine, and I met him up at his family home in on Lake Walloon in uh Michigan, and that's where his entire story started. Um he'd met a guy scraping the bottom of a boat with a Skagel knife, and anyway, he really, really, really liked the knife and uh got involved and talked to Skagel and everything and went back to Florida. And uh the family home was up on Lake Walloon, but uh of course the orange groves were the big money crop for the Randall family, and uh the knife shop was kind of a hobby thing uh initially, and then W-2 intervened and they started making knives for uh this GI and that GI. And you know, pretty soon it was hundreds of knives and more people working in the in the Randall factory making knives. And he used uh O1 or O2 uh steel mostly.

unknown 30:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:29

Semi-fore hang ground.

SPEAKER_00 30:31

Yeah, and that's uh that's also a uh jumping off point for Bob Loveless, too, right? I mean, he uh he was seeing that uh Randall knives were being carried um in in the service and started uh forging knives and things like that. And he became a peter a competitor to Bo Randall in the Amber Crombie and Fitch catalog, as I uh remember it.

SPEAKER_01 30:56

Uh yeah, it would Bob's stuff early on was pretty crude, okay. Uh you know, uh and I don't mean it in a bad way. Bob was a good guy, and we were friends for many years, you know. Uh but he was trying to figure out how to solder and stuff like that. And it was it was it would that was a challenge for him, you know. So some of the early pieces had holes drilled in the guard to touch the blade that was poured lead or whatever, and to uh try and make a solder joint. Uh so scagle knives and Bo Randler and stuff. I mean, they had the they had the handle on the at a crombie and finch for had a crombie and finch for many years. Uh but again, okay, Bob did compete and but when Bob came out to California and he uh his I met him in uh hmm God, I think Hawthorne, California or something. There was a sporting good shop there uh that I met him the first time. And he had some knives there, and I couldn't believe his knives were like $110 or something at the time. And you know, most of us were making $50 to $75 knives in those days.

SPEAKER_00 32:28

Yeah, and well, it's it's so it's interesting to me, I think, uh, from a knife history perspective, because you see this like um you see people emerge um inside of an industry that are really good salesmen, right? That um that they they interpret the value of their work, and then that's kind of sets the stage for the rest of us to um, you know, play a little bit more with higher prices and whatnot. And it's it's definitely not anything to disparage um um Loveless's memory or anything or his work, but what I uh what I see from examples in early work versus when uh people like uh Steve Johnson and Jimmy Merritt and them were working in there, that there's a difference between the you know the original works of Bob Loveless and then when he uh you know expanded his shop and he had other uh you know protege knife makers and other established knife makers that really kind of applied their craft to his um design principles and things. And then um what we know or see today as you know the examples of Loveless are really uh those where he was collaborating with other you know people in his shop that that did the the finish work and whatnot.

SPEAKER_01 33:45

Well, Steve Johnson uh he ha Steve Johnson had a lot of experience uh by the time he went to work for Bob Loveless, and he was still a kid. He was still a young man when he went to work for Bob, I think 19 or 20. Um but he'd worked for uh uh Gil Hibbon and Hibbon shop, and I think from the scout, Boy Scout days on. Um he worked there and he helped Rod Chappelle set up a shop in in uh Washington and worked with him. Um so by the time he came to Loveless's shop, he was a he was a pretty pretty great knife maker already, pretty well established knife maker, I should say, already. Um and contributed greatly, I think, to Bob's success. Now, when you said sales, Bob could sell snow to Eskimos, okay? Bob was a great salesman. I'll give him that, no matter what. You know, he was a he was a great salesman. Um pretty much a great founder of the of the modern knife movement, actually. You know, I we talk about Randall and you know on down the line, but as far as you know, handmade knife makers and um their contribution and their research in steel, Ed Henry was big into researching steel back in those days, too. Um and they often argued about you know this steel being better than it's the same thing that goes on today. You know, this steel's better than that steel, but you know, uh 154 CM, uh ATS-34, and RWL 34, which is Robert W. Loveless 34, is still ATS-34 and still being manufactured and used today, you know. Uh I remember we had a lot of trouble with 154 CM when it first uh was being made by um crucible steel. Uh the American steel standards were pretty rough in the early days. And you know, if there was inclusions and pits and stuff smaller than pea gravel and a piece of steel, it was acceptable. Uh and there were a lot of inclusions, and you know, when when they quit doing a vacuum remelt is when ATS-34 came on the scene from Hitachi Steel in Japan. Because they said they had the vacuum remelt process, but our steel companies were turn of the century and uh at that time, you know, everything was 1900 technology. Yeah. Slowly that's evolved, and now we got some great steel companies, small in uh in the US. So Bob was a great contributor to that. And Bob was a great organizer. I mean, he obviously helped uh form the knife makers guild with uh A. G. Russell. Uh the book that came out, you know, with Richard Barney and him uh collaborating uh did a lot for knife making. A tremendous amount for knife making. Uh the forming of the guild. The guild was a great deal back in the early days. And could be again. It's it went through through some uh growth problems and politics, but I I'm not gonna get into that right now.

SPEAKER_00 37:58

Well, yeah, I mean we can we can kind of talk a little bit about the guild um um a little bit later on. Um I'm interested to know, like um it's apparent every time that I talk to you um that you have a lot of uh reverence and knowledge for you know the the history of knife making. Um you know, obviously this being your episode and talking about you, I I do want to you know focus more on um you know your own knife making and the uh it it really is like an inspiration that I don't know that enough people uh really truly um give give credit for. Um but you know, so when you were you know early on you were making knives and things like that. Um how did how did your your time in the service, if you want to talk a little bit about that, um how how did that uh uh I guess uh influence any of your knife making?

SPEAKER_01 38:59

I think uh I gotta go back farther than that. You know, my grandfather got me into lapidary work uh when I was a kid. The families, both sides, came to California, done the gold rush. Uh both grandfathers were uh one of them pretty pretty pretty good blacksmith, the other one a fair uh blacksmith. But back in those days, again, this is uh after World War II, most places, most cities didn't have a machine shop, uh, so they had a blacksmith, and you took your whatever kind of work you wanted to have done, you took to uh the local blacksmith shop, and they were capable of boring or drilling a hole for you, or fixing or welding something back together that you broke. Uh and they were very inst instrumental in the in the mining history of of California and stuff. And I was always into that. So uh but cutting the stones and doing all that, I got into uh some jewelry making so you could do something with a stone chicken. Um I was always into carving and um some artistic bent, I guess all the way back to being a little kid, you know. I think I got a 410 shotgun from my great-grandfather, passed down, you know, through the family and stuff, but uh the old single-shot 410 I used to shoot quail and stuff with it. I was pretty good, but uh and again it was a food source after the war, but uh I carved uh a bear in Oakleaf in the stock. I still have it, so it's a whole Harrington Richardson single shot 410, so you know. But you know what, it still shoots good. I still got the 22 rifle my dad made for my brother and I. He cut down a stock, and it was a Marlin model 1895 lever action. And I I got black and white pictures of both my brother and I shooting at. We were I think I was eight or nine, and my brother was ten or eleven, so at the time. So pretty pretty neat stuff from from those days. But like I said, we were using knives all the time in those days, okay. And like I said, my uncle had the gun shop and he carried uh you know the factory knives and case with early stuff, and he had a Morseth display and a Randall display. And so I probably the the seed of all that was in my brain forever, you know. And like I said, I had a Morseth that I took overseas with me. Uh it rotted really fast. I had to have it. Uh the copper liner was still there, so I had to have a uh web belt uh sewed into a sheath for it for the copper liner for the bore set. But it worked good. It was a good knife, it rusted really easy over there. You know, the humidity was a a heck of a problem. That was probably planted the seed that uh stainless uh material later on would be much better to to make a knife out of than something that rusted really easy.

SPEAKER_00 42:47

Oh yeah. Yeah. And uh when when you were carrying that, um you you were you were were you in Vietnam? Is that uh is that correct?

SPEAKER_01 42:58

I was in uh Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos quite a bit. And Thailand. We are one of the bases we will operated on. I was in Thailand. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:12

And what uh what branch of the service were you in and kind of what did you do um uh when you were I was in the army and I was an advisor over there.

SPEAKER_01 43:19

This is early way back time. Okay. 63, uh came back in 66. So it was a long time ago, early part of the war. Um you know, actually I think what Vietnam started basically '65. Yeah, I mean it started long before then, but we got involved heavily in from early '65. But uh we were training troops over there or uh trying to recover our cr aircraft that went down and stuff. A long time ago. In places we weren't, you know.

SPEAKER_00 44:00

Yeah, no, I get it. Um well so um how how long had you get been getting into lapidary and things like that before you started uh your first knife? Did that did did your your knife making um experience start after you came back from the war or was that something that you did while you were um kind of like in conjunction with your jewelry stuff?

SPEAKER_01 44:23

Um actually I made a tomahawk uh I think was the first piece that I made combined with the jewelry stuff that I was doing. Um but I got in the lampidary work. That was my grandpa got me in that. I was like six or seven years old. Uh he was always a rock nut, and uh at the time we were using what they call mud saws. They didn't have diamond blades and that sort of stuff in those days. So basically you used uh a metal blade and you uh coated it with abrasive like uh valve grinding compound, and you just kept adding it and it would slowly cut through. Might take most of the day to cut through a rock. But what a great hobby after WW2. Send the kids out to collect rocks, you know. There's a cheap hobby. Makes them makes them strong. But anyway, we you know, I cut a lot of rocks with him. He was uh early into the lapidary thing. Uh and Northern California was a great place for it. There was a lot of different types of stone up there, including gold and gold quartz and stuff. But uh but anyway, I made jewelry uh when I got back uh from the service. Um th through most of my law enforcement years, I was still making jewelry. It was a it was a good hobby, and then I got into the knife making uh uh I think it was 26, 27 years old, something like that. Got into knife making. I'm still doing it uh 50 years later, so yeah. I guess I enjoy it. I guess I enjoy it. But the uh that was one of the other great things about the San Jose Gun Show in the in the 60s. Um that show was attended by many collectors of the California stuff, and that's really how I got interested in uh California style knives and uh gold quartz stone and uh the materials and techniques they use for making the knives. Hugh Hayes got to be a great friend of mine, uh, and he was one of the early pioneer collectors of uh the California knives uh and the canes and the jewelry and there's a great book, uh California Pest. Uh that probably has got the m a variety of the things made in California um in oh gambling and uh saddles and you name it. Every everything that was made in California and collected, um and including a lot of advertising. But also there's a great section in there on California knives and the styles. Um and that was Brad Witherall, and Brad was around in those early days too. Um Greg Martin, uh Chris DeGuini. Um anyway, there was a most of the early California collectors attended the San Jose show, the Cow Palace show, and all that back in the in the in the 60s, and that was kind of my introduction into the the California knife styles and stuff. Hugh Hayes, uh, like I said, got to be a friend, and he and his wife, Marianne, and they invited me to their home in Stockton, and I went out there a couple times from San Jose and had lunch with them. And uh anyway, got to play with the collection and the knives and everything. And he said, you know, you should make some of those. And I said, Yeah, yeah, it looks like it'd be a good challenge, you know, on stuff. And he said, Well, take some with you. And I go, No, let me let me take some pictures and some measurements, because they were valuable in those days, too, you know. I mean, now some of them bring over a hundred grand, you know, for one knife. But back in those days there was still a thousand to three thousand dollars for a San Francisco knife, and that was a lot of money in uh you know 1969 or 70.

SPEAKER_00 49:21

So yeah. Um I wanna I want to go back to the California's best book. Um I was doing a little bit of um looking up. So is it the California's best old West Art and Antiques um book that's yeah, it's a Brian Brian and Brad Witherell? Yeah, are they were they brothers?

SPEAKER_01 49:40

No, uh father and son.

SPEAKER_00 49:42

Father and son. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 49:43

Yeah, I'll have yeah, and uh uh Brad's a good friend. He's still uh uh involved somewhat. His son runs the business that's in Sacramento now. Yeah, that's pretty and they were instrument instrumental too, and part of the um Grass Valley show, which is uh originally kind of it's been going on I think since uh 90s or so, up in Grass Valley every year in the summer. And typically the dealers up there handled uh San Francisco or California items, um mining equipment, all that sort of stuff. And all that was really interesting to me because like I said, the grandparents on both grandparents and great grandparents on both sides are involved in mining in Northern California during the gold rush. So Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:42

Well, uh, you know, something that's interesting, I think, um, is uh my my wife was doing gene genealogy because she, you know, they uh they have an oral tradition of uh of sharing family uh connections and whatnot. But um uh she didn't realize in doing her genealogy that she is like a seventh generation Texan, right? And um, you know, something about that uh because I'm I'm kind of a mutt, like uh, you know, I grew up in the Appalachians in Pennsylvania, and I uh until I started doing a little genealogy, the the most that you know my family go back, like certain people, is uh maybe three generations, something like that. Um but you know what I what I recognize about uh Californians like you is there's a lot of similarities in in California pride and Texas pride, and uh the in the in the rich history of those states and the things uh that um naturally came out of both type of um um you know societies and cultures, as it were. So I mean I can definitely see where when you have the um the very uh rich history of prospecting and uh pioneering out in in uh California, and you'd been you know exposed to it for so long, it seems like a natural progression uh to use the materials and to pick up uh some of that art and things of the time and to do your own thing with it. You know, combine all of these, uh, you know, your your own history in um in in your craft and knives.

SPEAKER_01 52:14

Yeah. Uh like I said, uh the grandfathers and great-grandfathers. Uh there's a couple of mines up northern California that are historical landmarks, a couple of the family homes and stuff. So I was born and raised around all of that, you know, in Weaverville and uh the Trinity River area and uh uh Junction City and Reading. So good part of good part of my family history.

SPEAKER_00 52:44

So well, yeah. And you know, something that even even today is not um used an exceptional amount inside of the knife craft is is gold in quartz matrix. And I'm interested to know, um, is there a specific reason other than like the the the relative rarity of the of the stone matrix and everything that keeps you know makers from from using it? Or is it just like an aesthetic thing that you don't see a lot of that anymore?

SPEAKER_01 53:15

Well, gold quartz in itself is uh a very fairly rare collectible stone if the gold is visible in it. Okay, so uh when I say visible, uh a working mine that was uh crushing a ton of rock and getting one ounce of gold was profitable. Okay. Uh the mines like the original 16, okay, uh they had pocket areas where there were 16 ounces of gold to a ton of rock, which was a tremendous amount of gold and very visible. Um aesthetically they used that in California jewelry because it was part of the uh I'm from California and uh I'm involved in gold mining. Uh they sent home uh back east or to foreign countries uh where they came from. Uh they sent jewelry and things made in California with the gold quartz stone. And the gold quartz ran from basically white to black uh stone with uh whenever stones were found in the in the mines that had good visible gold to them, uh they were high graded. And this high-grade material uh a lot of it went to jewelers and watchmakers and stuff. So that's kind of where it it came from and was very, very collectible. Okay. But nowadays, very good gold quartz, um like from the original 16 mine that's still operating up in the Allegheny, uh that material runs about twice the price spot price of gold. Well, the spot price of gold yesterday was around $2,400. Okay, so you're talking about a rock that costs $4,800 an ounce. Um so very few knife makers use anything like that. Uh number number one, there's not very little of it around it you can that you can locate. Uh most of the one of the best sources I ever had was uh a gal, and she wrote a book on hydraulic mining in Northern California and stuff. And anyway, she passed away a uh uh it's been three years ago now, I guess. And she had made contact with all these miners in Grass Valley, uh Auburn, Nevada City, and La Trobe and other little mining towns in Northern California. And she was able to get some stone on occasion. I bought a lot of it from her, and so did uh uh Phil Lowbred to give to Buster to work on some knives. Um Steve Rapp uh got some of the material from uh uh through that source also. But anyway, after she passed away, it's been it's been very difficult to find much in the way of the material. Uh and it was actually never used in knives. There were some knives, a uh few folders, small folders, uh that used um actually the knives came from England in the Westonholm uh folders. And they came with skeleton-frame knives uh to California, and they were uh had gold panels put on the side with inlays of gold quartz and other stones. Uh but that was the only uh I think Hugh Hayes had two Will and Fink knives, larger ones, uh folding knives also that had some gold quartz in them. But other than that, there were no no full-size San Francisco dress knives with gold quartz. Uh typically they used the materials that were available in California, which was walrus ivory, uh corn, and uh abalone shell. Abalone in those days there were some big shells. I've still got a couple around here that are 10, 12 inches in diameter. So there were there was large abalonia in those days, and you could get some flat areas out of them.

SPEAKER_00 58:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 58:09

But but anyway, I was fascinated with the jewelry because I made jewelry and I saw the gold quartz and jewelry, and I said, wow, that'd be really nice. So uh I made a lot of jewelry uh with gold quartz. Uh and I started putting it into uh some San Francisco knives. Um probably the I'm thinking the credit for that goes to Jim Hardenbrook. Uh I think about 197 three or four or five, somewhere in that in that area. Uh at the Las Vegas antique arm show, they had a section for knife makers. Actually, we got the room they used to store tables and chairs in at the back of the stairs. So after the entire show was set up in the big room, we got the little we got the little room where they s they stored all that crap, and that got to be the knife makers' room. But but but you know what, those were some amazing shows. I mean, you talk about uh there were Loveless and Horn and Henry and uh uh Gil Hibb and you you name it. Everybody that was in life, just Steve Johnson, uh Jim Hardenbrook, uh Ted Dowell and Dwight Town and guy could go on forever, you know. They're uh anyway, there's some early really good knife makers at that show. I was there uh not saying no, I was I was a young guy in those days, and not the best knife maker by any means. Not one of the best knife makers by any means in those days. But uh Jim Hardenbrook made a uh uh pushdagger, and he used uh gold quartz um for the handle, and the gold quartz was from Colorado, a little different than the California material, uh dark color, blackish brown, uh, with uh like grains of sand that were gold in it, little tiny flakes pieces inside the inside the stone. Uh different type of stone. Um but anyway, the handle fascinated uh myself and uh uh Buster, and we talked to Jim about it and everything, you know, and that kind of led to the idea why not the gold quartz and the in the knives, you know, full-size knives. And of course the full-size knives were based off the California dress knives that had silver sheets and hair scabbards and uh engraving and fairly uh fine-looking embellished work. And they cost about a hundred bucks back in the original days. So um, you know, that was expensive even doing the gold rush days. That was a lot of money. Um but people bought them as gifts to send back home, see how successful I am as a uh uh gold miner in California. Everybody wanted to relate to the the gold rush, and San Francisco was kind of like the Paris of uh of the uh of the U.S., you know, it was a very wealthy city and the very successful businessmen, not too many of them were miners, most of them were the guys that supplied hardware and equipment to miners, and they dressed up fairly fine every day. Uh and they might have a gold quartz pocket watch chain with a face on uh a cover of the watch being in gold quartz, maybe a gold quartz cane, gold head, um, and maybe a silver knife with uh abalone or ivory or walrus ivory or uh Elkhorn handles uh and maybe some engraving on the handle of the knife. So it was an elegant thing, so and kind of showed the money you were part of the m history of mining in California and important and wealthy because of the mining.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:53

Yeah, that makes that makes sense. And you know, something that I look at um well, I think about the um if if anybody understood the economics of of mining and you knew that like you know, to crush stone, you know, maybe you could get an ounce, like in a really a really good claim, you could get an ounce out of a a ton. Um for you to kind of flippantly have like these pieces of quartz matrix and whatnot, it was to show that it was so abundant. Um, and then you know, as a result, quartz matrix was a status symbol because of the rarity and also the um um the the the clay's producing that type of gold at the time.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:37

Well, everybody kind of thinks that you know the big gold rush and and the and the money in California came from the gold nuggets in the river and stream, you know. And that was pretty much exhausted after a year or two uh as the gold rush started. You know, they found gold in the streams, but some of the miners said, hey, you know, why is it what's this white stone or brown stone or whatever color it might be? What's that embedded with the gold? And anyway, that's how gold quartz uh was basically discovered. They they wanted to find the source for where those gold nuggets came from and find the source for how that gold uh grew. And the Sierra Nevada Mountains, you know, where the Pacific and the and the continental plates came together, uh, where those rocks slammed together, and there was a lot of fractures, and in the fractures, quartz formed. And quartz is very abundant, it's all over the world. But in that quartz, in certain areas, if the chemical uh composition and the heat and the fumes and the whatever, whatever the magic potion was, gold would form in the fractures of the quartz. And some areas, there was some in California, some in British Columbia, and northern uh Washington, and uh on up to Greenland and stuff, and uh in Australia where you know where there were big gold discoveries and then Alaska. But but basically in California it was uh the gold forming in the fractures of the uh um of the quartz rock that was formed in the fractures of the the slate or uh granite. So anyway, like I said, it w it's a rare material and good visible gold was difficult to find. Um there's still a lot of it that it can be found. The mines never quit producing gold. Uh the area I live in uh are Main town is Jackson, and oh, between Macomy Hill, Jackson, Cedar Creek, uh, Amador City, uh, and Plymouth, some of the richest mines in the world. And they never quit producing gold. The government shut them down uh during World War II. And once you shut a mine down, it fills with water. And then the water gets polluted from the asbestos and the rock and the mercury and on down the line. So by the time the country kind of recovered from or was recovering from World War II, they got into some hydraulic mining and stuff, but environmentally it destroyed large areas of land, leaving nothing but bear rock. So when the environmental thing got really impacted into all of that, the mines were not it wasn't worth the amount of money it would cost to try to reopen a mine. And that's what the the problem is today. There's still plenty of gold in the ground, but the environmental impact and the permit process and the safety uh aspects of reopening the mines are much too much too expensive to really be involved in.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:34

It gets it gets more involved, you know, when the price of gold is like where it's at right now, uh it gets more interesting uh and more possible to do it. But but I don't know if it'll sustain the prices at now, you know. It gets it gets complicated. The gold, there's gotta be uh jewelers and jewelry shops like Macy's and Emborium and cost going on down the line. Uh they can't sell gold uh jewelry at a reasonable cost that the public can buy uh when the prices get too high for the source.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:19

Yeah. Well that was that was one problem at the time. So um at in the last last recession, um that's when I was doing uh uh my apprenticeship and everything. And you know, we could we could reasonably um do silversmithing and and you know make jewelry that way, but most of the uh gold and platinum uh jobs were all custom jobs that you know you know, people came in, they had the money, they wanted to custom um order something, and then we could make it that way because you you could pay for the uh uh for the raw materials out of uh usually a deposit or whatever. But it you know it got it got so bad that you know if you wanted to make any new pieces, um, you know, there I don't know, there's just like some really great stuff that was coming out of the shop because uh the guy I worked for was you know custom jewelry, uh jeweler for you know 30, 30 plus years before uh the recession hit. But you know, like large, large amethyst stones, like beautiful uh uh turquoise and things like that, all of these uh exhibition style pieces, um, you know, we put them out there, but you know, people couldn't pay uh what the you know the the gold price um at the time. Right. And and we couldn't make any it's restrictive, yeah. Right, yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:41

I think we're gonna start to see that a little bit with silver too, because it's the same deal that's uh gotten to be I think it's twenty-eight dollars an ounce or something when I was making a lot of silver jewelry. It was uh between a buck and went up to three dollars and something an ounce.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:00

So yeah, well, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:04

Now nowadays it would be hard for a startup, you know, a startup maker or whatever.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:10

Well, yeah, and that you know, at the time, I I can't remember what silver was at the time. A little over a hundred dollars or so maybe an ounce. Um but you know, the downstream effect is that you take something that is between 75 or $100 an ounce, and then you want to make sterling silver uh wire or uh sheets or things like that for you to to you know turn into other things, it's like that becomes more expensive because then you pile on the manufacturing for those uh fabrication. Yeah, yeah. And so it just became prohibitive. Like, you know, um you you could you could make um jewel like uh silver wedding bands or things like that for relatively inexpensive, but when the sheet price of uh of silver went up, and there's also a connotation with silver where um you know in in inside of like the uh the Arizona or New Mexico style, like the the the turquoise and and more of that, I don't know if you call it um Native American style, but definitely the the Southwest style of uh jewelry making. Uh there was there was a context where silver uh did really well. Um, but if you tried to swap out the same aesthetic that you'd have in jewelry for silver, people just wouldn't pay for it because they're like, well, it's silver. You know, I remember when that was only a few dollars an ounce, uh whereas gold has always had an intrinsic um uh uh value and attraction. So it's kind of interesting, uh, you know, how these things, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:37

You say that as funny, but you know, gold was thirty-something dollars an ounce for uh God, up until the sixties, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:48

Well, yeah. I mean, you gotta think like I was born.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:50

It was government controlled, but yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:53

Yeah. I mean, for somebody who's born in the late 80s, um uh the the prices of gold and and and whatnot were uh untouchable for somebody like me when I started collecting bullion and everything. Um, you know, I started uh early early on, um my my exposure to silver and whatnot actually came from a little bit of my my dad um who collected coins, um, but also we had a a good family friend that was a a very avid coin collector. I think that he only uh the only um American minted coins that he didn't have was like a few of the very rare v-nickels and things like that. So his collection uh basically from the time of minting and before was uh complete, except for a few very rare ones. And so uh uh understanding bullion prices and things like that was something that I got into very early on. And I was collecting silver silver um ingots for a while, which you know, if I had an extra 15 bucks um that I got for uh you know, lunch money or something, if I was like because I was uh you know, there was a uh jewelry and bullion shop uh that also did uh coins inside of a town where I played. Um I was I was playing for the uh local symphony orchestra when I was uh a young teenager. And um, and so I would I would take the opportunity between practice sessions to walk down about a mile uh to the coin shop, and I would just take my money and I would put it into coins and bullion. Uh it was very obtainable, but gold was just like something I couldn't uh couldn't do at the time. I think maybe maybe it was uh $170, $180 an ounce, something like that. But you know, quite a quite a bit different than in the 60s for sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:39

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:41

Uh you know, that's one of the things. See, like the San Francisco knives that I do now, people don't realize that there's between $10,000 and $20,000 in the materials. So it gets very expensive to build a piece like that. You know, four or five ounces of gold is uh, you know. It gets there pretty fast. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:11

Well I can see how that is uh in the gold quartz.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:14

And the gold quartz, like I said, it's it's very expensive for good quality material.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:21

Yeah. Well, I mean, I I can see how that uh holistically would be cost prohibitive to anybody who wants to try to get into it. Because I mean you gotta think um, you know, some of your prices um, you know, for for like a Michael Price style dagger might be, you know, $30,000 to $45,000. Um, but like a large portion of that is actually going into the raw materials to make everything.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:46

Yeah. Uh you know, it's like I said, there can be uh yeah, like if you used uh some of the early pieces I did, got they were pretty reasonable, but gold was very inexpensive during the day, you know. So, you know, a knife that was ten or fifteen thousand dollars, uh maybe had seven or six, seven thousand dollars worth of material in it. Now that same piece might have twenty thousand dollars worth of material in it, so or fifteen thousand.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:21

So yeah, not not to mention that that style of knife with those uh materials and that price, um there's fewer and fewer collectors that are willing to spend um that that kind of uh money on a on a knife, you know. I mean it's uh it's definitely like museum quality and museum materials, but the it seems like the the kind of collectors are shifting from that older style of like um guns and antiques and knives and things that were made by you know the old guard of makers and shifting that to other things. I mean, I don't know, cars and houses.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:59

I think a lot of that I think a lot of that's exposure. Uh you know, once they see the quality and uh the workmanship in a piece, um I mean they're still collectors, obviously. I'm still in business. I've uh been doing this for 50 years, and I'm still uh making and selling some uh uh San Francisco knives and gold and gold quartz and stuff. But a lot of makers I think they've they've kind of lost that concept of these collectors that we have, that I had that Buster had, that uh Loveless had uh on down the line, okay. Uh these collectors invested as much in the maker as they did in the product, just like any kind of any other kind of art form, uh paintings or jewelry or uh uh bronzes or whatever. Uh the collector maker interface is extremely important. Not so not so much to the maker, because I don't think they understand that. But many of the collectors that I have or have had through the years that have passed away always said to me, I wish I knew how to do that. I don't, but I know somebody that does, you. You were able to do that or uh come up with that idea for me. You know, I made a miniature gold ore car for uh a collector friend uh George Cross. He passed away, but uh he wanted something exceptional out of the way. But this isn't the kind of thing that you can uh sell or sell the concept or the design or anything online. You know, that's for semi-manufactured stuff or or lower end stuff. But if you want a true piece of art, you need to talk to the artist. And that's what most of the the collectors want to have that one-on-one relationship with who makes the product for them. That's why I got involved with the Solvang Knife Show again and became one of the uh promoters of the show. Is that show was one of those where many collectors came to and they came to the show for one reason that was to talk directly with the artist and get to know the artist and see his work, and maybe come up with a project uh to do. Okay. COVID changed the knife scene tremendously. A lot of people found, well, I can sell my hunting knife or my uh fighting knife or my tactical or my so-called everyday carry knife online. I don't need to go to a show. But for the true hard knife maker and hard knife collector, you do need that show and you do need the interchange between the collector and the maker to come up with with projects. That Gold War project that I did, or car that I did, um, you know, that caused uh people came from all over to the Las Vegas show to see that project that I did for him. And that was an idea that him and I had by sitting at a show and talking for a couple hours. Um and that's I think where we're losing some of the growth in the in the knife making, is we don't have enough interchange between makers and collectors, and we need more of it. Uh the guild show used to be a great example of that back in the day. Um Las Vegas has always been. There's a lot of money in the in the antique arm show in Las Vegas. There's millions of dollars that change hands every show uh between collectors of antique guns and engravers and uh makers and things. And uh these people are collectors, and my experience with collectors are they might collect uh oil paintings, they might collect bronzes, they might collect uh pottery, they might collect this or that, but they hadn't been exposed to knives, and once they were exposed to knives, they became a knife collector also. And you can't do that online, it looks like going shopping on uh Amazon, uh as compared to sitting down and talking with the artist that's doing your work.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:30

Well, yeah, and I hmm I I have a lot of uh mixed mixed feelings on knife shows, um, like the current scene in knife shows, because you know, I'm I'm I'm a big fan of like Blade Show because of what it does for the the knife making community at large, but I also dislike it in some ways as a custom knife maker because it always feels like um the uh competition, as it were, is kind of uh the wrong word, but um it seems like it's always a fight for dollars. And it's a it's it's not it's not evenly balanced between uh the different discipline and knives. There's you know the custom knife makers are kind of uh uh uh fighting for the pool of money that sits with the buyers uh for customs, and then you have the same people that are coming in for uh you know production knives or things or tactical knives or things like that. And it seems like if you want to swim in that pool, you have to do the same thing that everybody else does. And I I I feel in some ways that uh a maker's individuality and uh artistic ability kind of gets lost in that pool of just, you know, everybody trying to fight for the same dollars that are, you know, um really kind of tribal at this point. You know, ever everybody is kind of grouped into the same uh same room, but there's so many different profiles of customers and collectors and whatnot.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:11

Yeah, I I think that's true. I anytime you have a show that uh involves factory, uh foreign factory, uh machine made, handmade, uh supplies and on down the line. I think there's too much going on. Uh there are good good shows to go to, good fun shows to go to, and you can find maybe some supplies that you hadn't found, uh but for the handmade knife, uh it's pretty difficult to find a show that's uh concentrated on handmade knives anymore. Uh again, that was the concept for uh bringing Solvang knife show back together. And I'm I'm not pushing advertising on Solvang, I'm just saying that uh the Knifemakers Guild originally when we had our own show uh tremendous growth in uh Kansas City days. Uh you know, we had I want to say somewhere between 300 and 350 uh custom knife makers at that show uh near the near the end run at Kansas City, which came in eighty eighty five. Um eighty six we moved to Dallas. But people came to that show from all over the world because they wanted to meet the maker and see the work that they were doing. And it really wasn't uh and I'm not knocking progress either. Uh you know, the the world there's a lot of uh CNC makers now, designers on down the line, but most of them are competing for the same dollar too. They're trying to come up with a uh design uh for a factory to make. Uh and they might be competing with fifty other or twenty-five other designers that are submitting designs to that factory at the same time. You know, one of my very good friends, Ken Onion, been in the business for God way back many years, okay. Um when I say many many years, many years for uh uh the designers being involved with factories, okay. He was one of the originals that that designed stuff and his stuff went into production originally with Kershaw with his uh speed safe operating mechanism. Uh so probably the first guy that was really successful in uh bringing custom work into the factory with knife. Uh but nowadays there's I don't know how many designers there are uh and I think C RKT has twenty five or thirty designers making designs for them and and they're coming out in in limited quantity and stuff. Uh and I I don't know where you know you're chasing the tread tail of the dragon, I don't know how far that goes until it's uh pretty soon the the designers just working for the for the knife company and not out there uh actually trying to make a knife on his own. Yeah. Um but uh you know uh i like I said, it's very hard to find a show now that where it's all craftsmen. So you know, hopefully Solvang reintroduces that, maybe the guild uh gets involved, and uh they're big enough now again to have a show of their own, they could. Uh combining a show with uh with the Bladesman. This made sense. That was the biggest mistake the guild ever made was uh and I think the knife makers too. That was the biggest mistake. Uh you know, it was an ego problem and the bladesmiths uh separated from the uh uh fabrication makers, you know. The it was sad because we had a great group of people together and it could be again. You know people have to learn what works and what doesn't work, and you know, the guild suffered. I think ABS suffered for many years too, the same deal. And we lost that attendance from as many collectors as we did have in those days. We had a lot of people fly in for those shows. And it's you know, it so slowly faded out. Uh and again, uh most of it was just decisions that weren't the greatest at the time.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:13

Yeah. Well, so um which what you're speaking of is um there was there was a time uh where the ABS and the um and the guild combined um combined efforts to have a show. Uh was it in Kansas City? I can't remember where it was uh originally located.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:33

It was a knife makers guild originally uh started with uh 20 something makers in Las Vegas, went to Houston uh uh for a couple shows, then to uh combined with a gun show in Overland, Kansas for a couple years, and then moved to the Crown Center. And uh Knifemakers Guild show at the Crown Center, that was the biggest growth, I think, in the guild uh guild's history. And when I say the guild, that included both uh fabricators and uh uh blacksmith uh bladesmiths. So uh yeah. And that's just about equally represented, and it was uh a great combination for collectors, too.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:32

Yeah, and then after after that they kind of um I I can't remember the I don't think the ABS actually had any show, right? Like that uh that show moved down to Dallas and was just uh the ICCE show eventually, and then uh Blade Blade Show bought the rights to um to that, and that that's turned into Blade Show, Texas, if I if I remember my lineage correctly.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:56

Yeah, but old Blade Shows, I mean, and it makes sense for them financially, obviously uh Blade Magazine and the Blade Shows represent the entire industry, handmade factory uh suppliers, uh promoters, on down the line. So you have to have all of those people at the show. But for collectors of custom knives, um it's hard for them to go to a uh a Blade show and wade through everything else that's there. I mean, there's foreign manufacturers, American manufacturers, uh suppliers from all over uh CNC makers, uh designers, and some custom knife makers. Yeah. And the number gets smaller, I think, every time I see it. But and uh again, uh Blade Magazine, uh they represent all of those elements of the knife world, okay. So uh their concept was true. Back in the day, okay, with the knife makers guild, that concept was true. If you put some wonderful craftsmen only in a building and you invite people to come to it, uh pretty soon that develops into uh a great art exhibit, uh call it what you want, okay? But it it's craftsmen and collectors you you meeting, okay, and not involved in site stuff like uh flashlights and pendants and uh whirly gigs and you name it all down the line and uh uh in manufactured stuff, okay. So you get back to the artist collector concept. That's where the the guild needs to go. Okay. Uh whether they will or not, I I don't know. Uh I'd like to see that. But uh only I'd like to see that because that gives the young guy the opportunity to enjoy the same life that I've had, okay. Uh you know, being a knife maker, uh you're never gonna be rich, okay? Give us a million dollars and we keep making knives until it was gone, kind of deal, you know. But but I've been I've enjoyed everything that I've done, and I've spent 50 years doing it. The opportunity for young people to be able to do that again will basically fall to um if we can get the collector and the artist back together.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:22

Yeah. Well, and that's that's something that I think about a lot, as especially as a a member of the Knifemakers Guild that is really focused on um I don't know, uh supporting supporting uh the guild with modern technology and things, but with a a respect for the past, like what you what you guys had uh propagated and um invested in. And um, you know, like I think that one thing that looms over the knife makers guild is this uh um this specter of uh the the drama and everything. You know, when I was getting into knife making, there most of the old uh guild members that had since uh bounced from it were like, you know, you don't need the guild, there's the internet, right? And then, you know, you go uh like me as a knife maker, I was like, okay, I know the internet pretty well. Uh let me go ahead and sell on there. And then I find that there's a disconnect and the avenues to sell online are becoming more stringent because um a lot of social media platforms and things are limiting uh the kind of wares that you can actually sell online or get exposure to. Like there's some banks that um will shut you down if they know that you're selling um knives at all, uh, not even in association with guns. And then, you know, you um uh what I've found is that the guild exists in a space where they're trying to figure out where um where they belong in a world where um everybody is looking for that sub-thousand dollar um knife that really does it it's a it's a it's a hard uh value proposition for a knife maker to put a lot of themselves in something that they know when they go to a show or whatever um very well might not sell. And so then they have to transition to making what the market wants, and uh and then uh they they change from um becoming a knife artist to a knife, you know, a handmade knife manufacturer, and they're competing in a pool of um you know machine manufacturers that uh can do it cheaper, um, which has a larger value proposition with the people that are uh collecting. And I I use air quotes and collecting because uh for me, um if you can have if you can have like um more than one of a certain type of knife or whatever, um if if it's a obtainum all the time, then the collectability of something kind of loses a little bit of its luster and um and people are just looking to um you know bolster a collection of these kind of knives or whatever that if you talk to the the guy who's making them, you could probably get them in a few months from uh being on a waiting list or whatever. Like to me, I don't really know um where we go from here to try to rebuild um uh a you know the the handmade or custom knife uh market in an era when everybody wants um easy, easy wins and uh you know a quick climb to the top. It's like, you know, I I I don't want to necessarily make knives in a in an IKEA crowd where everybody you know makes stuff for super cheap and then they have it for a little while, and then all they really care about is uh you know being able to sell that right away if they want to and make a little bit of money on the aftermarket. It's like where where do you actually sit as an artist when nobody really cares about the artistry that goes into something or the blood, sweat, and tears of the maker itself. And that's kind of where I I sit in a very confused spot as to like what you know, how do you change that and make it where it is a you know a one-on-one connection with the people who are you know buying from you or investing in you as a maker?

SPEAKER_01 1:38:21

Well, that's where the interchange with the collector and the maker come together. And that's the kind of show that you need. Okay. A collector can look online, and this knife is $49, and this knife is $4,000, and that collector doesn't really know the difference. And the only way he's gonna know the difference is talking to the maker or artist, and having him explain to it why this particular knife and uh what went into making it, uh what it takes, what the materials are, uh how he learned the craft, his history. These guys are uh collectors, and uh thank God I've had many, okay, over the years. Uh uh they're developed, and they're developed because, like I said, most of them will come right out and tell you if I had that skill, I would be so happy, but I don't have that. My skill is in banking or uh building construction or or whatever, okay. My uh I don't have the talent to see something in a in a rock or in a um a piece of metal or whatever, okay. But I see it in you. And now you've told me that, you know, I make this by hand. There's no machine involved in in this part of it or that part of it or whatever. Uh or there are machines involved in it, and I'm turning this little dial to make this cutter go this way, and turning it back this way. Okay, that's still done by hand. Or if I'm designing it on a screen and pushing a button and the machine's doing the cutting, uh there, yeah, is there a cost difference? Yes, there's a lot of cost difference because I'm spending many hours doing it where the machine may be able to spit out two or three every 10 minutes. But without that interchange, and the only way you get that interchange is at a show where the knife maker and the collector can talk.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:43

Yeah. Well, I guess uh my question to that, right, um, is do you think there's enough of a market that actually cares anymore? And um what I mean is um I look at the difference between um antique style furniture, right? And when you have a an a hardwood uh piece of furniture that you look, I mean you look in the drawers and everything is dovetailed, everything is you know uh perfect in all of its parts, and you think about the craftsmanship that went into making that thing, you can easily see where um doing everything by hand is worth um maybe maybe the $1,400 or $3,000 or something, you know, depending on what kind of furniture it is. You know, you apply French polish and uh cloth feet and all sorts of things from different, you know, you look at different eras of of antique furniture and you're like, well, if this has l lasted a hundred years, you know, definitely there's a value in craftsmanship. But it seems at least that as a culture, um, we don't really think about that as much collectively, and we think more about, well, this I for the price of that antique furniture, I can buy and throw away a hundred pieces of IKEA furniture, right? Rather than having one that lasts forever, they think about, well, I can just replace it when it gets dingy, right? I don't have to worry about dinging it out, just throw it away and buy another one. Do you think that there's a place in the mod in that m modern uh zeitgeist of you know um ephemeral um, you know, throw away utilitarian furniture and things like that for uh a custom knife maker and that investment exchange to happen uh as a collector to exist.

SPEAKER_01 1:42:27

Yeah, absolutely. Uh like I said, you need the the interchange between the collector and the maker. Uh and I don't know how you get that without actually having shows or just like any other art form, okay, uh, or any other collectible item. Uh all you have to do is pick up some auction catalogs and you can see uh that there are still many collectors in the world. It got easier. I can go online and I can look at the the catalog if I want to buy, let's say, Colt firearms or um antique uh black powder pistols or rifles or you know, a variety of things, just spurs and on down the line. Uh but are there still collectors? Yes. Are there still collector shows? They're getting limited, okay? Uh there's not too many around. Uh and maybe if we want to grow the collectibility, then we have to provide that same opportunity to the collector that we had back in the day. You know, Kansas City and the Guild Show was unique, okay, but there were several factors that made it unique, okay. Number one, it was located in the central part of the country. Number two, it was a hub city. It was an airport that was easy to get in and out of from the East Coast to the West Coast or around the world, okay. Uh if when the guild moved to Orlando, it was probably the it was probably the beginning of the slide down the hill, okay? Now and nothing against Orlando, other than it's not an easy place to get to from the West Coast or the central area. Okay, you got to go through somewhere to get to Orlando. It was good for people who lived on the East Coast. It was a a simple shot, but we started losing the collectors and the makers from the West. Okay. And the same was true if we had uh if we would have had the guild show in San Francisco or in Las Vegas or in Long Beach, California, okay, we would lose that East Coast faction. So you still need to go back to the central part of the country, someplace it's um convenient for a collector. And you gotta remember, most of these collectors are workers, okay? These guys put in long hours, long days, uh, and their their whole goal is to make that money so they can collect what they want to collect, okay? But you gotta make it easy for them to get to the collection, okay? And that's why uh auction houses are pretty successful. But if they had the opportunity, a lot of the collectors used to come from the East Coast to the West Coast for one day to Kansas City, and it was a three-day show, okay? But they came, they bought what they wanted to buy on the first day, they got back to work on the next day. It was easy to do. When the show moved to Orlando, if you were a West Coast collector and a hard worker, okay, you got on an airplane, you tied up 12 to 14 hours to get to Orlando. Uh a fast flight would be eight hours, okay, because you had to stop in Dallas or or Salt Lake City or Denver or or Chicago or Atlanta or some other place to get there. Okay. So that tied up one day of my. So I had to go the day before. Now I lost a day of work. So, like I said, you gotta make it convenient for the collector and the maker. Yeah, no, I know all that makes sense. But are there still collectors out there? Yes, there's still collectors out there. I you know, I found I think two or three collectors in the last couple years at the Las Vegas show. That's another thing that makers don't do, is they don't stick with the show. If they go to a show and they don't sell a knife, they go, well, I don't want to do that anymore, okay? Uh but people have to see you and recognize you. Okay, I've been going to the the Las Vegas Antique Arms Show since uh early 70s. And I've missed two shows, I think, once uh or twice, okay, when uh my late wife got sick and uh passed away uh once when I lost a family member or or had a medical problem of my own. But otherwise, I always made that show, and I still make that show every year. And I still get collectors out of that show, okay? And it's the same with people that go to Wanna Maker's show and Tulsa, okay? Uh it comes at a bad time for me. I don't really have time to do that, right? But I I'm gonna start one of these days. Um I'm gonna go do that show. But you got to go to a show and you gotta be there. People got to see what you do, okay, and talk to you about it, pick up one of your knives and play with it or whatever. And yeah, you may not sell any knives that particular year, but that guy will probably come back, or that gal will probably come back a year or two later and say, hey, I want to get one of those, you know. And okay, so and pretty soon they become a regular customer. And that's the only way you're gonna make it in this business. Uh if you want to make manufactured stuff, then you're gonna compete with a lot of people, uh, and you can be on the internet all you want. And you can sell your stuff on the internet. Uh when you start making it it's hard to sell an an art piece on the internet, in my experience anyway. Uh and when I say art piece, if you want to sell a knife that's $30,000 or $40,000 or $20,000 or $10,000, people want to pick it up and handle it. They want to look at it and feel in their mind that it's really worthwhile. And you can have people sit there with a pair of blue gloves on and flip a knife 47 directions and in 10 seconds on a video ad, and it's not going to have that effect on a collector. Of actually handling it and talking to the maker.

SPEAKER_00 1:49:33

Well, yeah. I mean, and I I I uh there's lots of different uh people that we um as as a you know podcast show and everything get to um interact with. Um and you know, you have everybody down from the um you know the hand forged or uh or stock removal knives that are sub three hundred dollars all the way up into, you know, your range of you know twenty twenty, thirty, forty thousand dollars. I I do agree that the there has to be a certain respect for the collector that when they're spending their hard-earned money, and it doesn't matter whether it's $300 or $30,000, that you have a due diligence in remembering that they work hard for their money, and uh you have to work hard to prove that that money is something that should be invested with you. Um I think one of the reasons why I've moved um kind of kind of moved around with my show schedule and everything has to do more with the fact that I'm really searching for an area of knife making and of where I can exhibit my work that there is a value there versus trying to cast a wide net and do things that are um you know marketable to a crowd just to get that instantaneous reward of sales. Um I really do value um, you know, the the collector and um and the user and their uh their desire to spend their money with me. And so I want to be able to nurture um that show activity and being um uh being regular in a show circuit uh where I I think that that's being nurtured and cultivated. Sometimes I feel like I'm just a very, very small fish in a large pond at large knife shows. And then area other ones I go to see on small knife shows and um may maybe my knives are priced you know several hundred dollars uh above uh other makers, and um and it's not something that a the you know the the general uh showgoer can purchase, right? Um but for me it's uh I think it's as a maker, it's about finding that um that avenue that best represents the kind of um work that I do and the customer relationship that I want to have. And so um I'm not as focused on like the instantaneous sale as I am the relationship that I can build with people that go to those shows. So that's kind of where where I'm at is figuring out where that makes sense based on what I make.

SPEAKER_01 1:52:10

Yeah, I again, like I said, I I think uh a lot of makers they go to a show and they don't sell something and they decide they're not gonna come back to that show, uh, where they see some other knife maker selling some things. Well, if that knife maker can sell his work, you can sell your work, okay. Um but you have to actually talk to people. Um I think I mean I look at it in my mind, okay. I made knives for sixty-five dollars and seventy-five dollars and eighty-five dollars, okay. Uh Mel Ferris and uh uh Nate Posner at the San Francisco Gun Exchange and uh Nordic knives in the early 70s. Uh they kind of started me in the knife business, okay? Uh I made tons of knives for San Francisco Gun Exchange. I'd go up there every couple months and deliver some little bird and trout knives that I made that I sewed a leather sheath for and everything else, you know, and they were $72 or $76 or what, you know, they went up slightly every now and then. But I paid my dues, okay. A lot of people don't want to pay any dues and would like their knives to be instantly $1,000. And that may work for some people, okay? But uh in reality, almost any craft or work that you get into, you need to pay your dues and you need to learn the uh uh the skills required to sell your product and to make your product, you know. I mean I'm very fortunate. I'm uh all-around artist. I mean, I do engraving and carving and um have experience with jewelry and bronzes and on down the line. Uh and that sells a lot of my work, okay. Just the people come by and they look and they go, wow, I really like this part of it, or that part of it, or tell me a little bit more about this, okay. Well, you can sell your product the same way. I mean, I sold hundreds of those burden drought knives, and I sold hundreds of a combat knife I made in the 80s, a Vietnam commemorative thing. So uh, but you have to be at a show and you have to be out there in the public, and they have to get to know you. You know, you can uh the internet, I don't know. Okay, it's not it's not really my experience. Okay, I see lots of stuff on there, how successful it is. I haven't got a clue. I know there's some of the uh um knife designers that uh you know they come up with a new knife or a new design or something, which is getting difficult. I mean, technically start thinking about a folding knife and how many variations you can make of that knife and the handle shape and the blade shape. And after a while, number one, it's been done before. Um and number two, how many uh changes can you make to that handle to where it's no longer comfortable or uh no longer functionable? Uh you know, it's pretty limited. If you look at the the current stock of uh what's the favorite terminology now? EDC. Okay. Everyday carry, you know. Well, some guy's version of everyday carry may be something that wouldn't even fit in your pocket, uh, or the next one has got six finger grooves and you only got five. You know, how are you gonna handle that? Okay. Uh and and there's some very successful people doing that. Uh but you know, for the average knife maker, um pay your dues, do your work, improve the quality, okay. Uh originally one of the great things about Kansas City, every one of those collectors that came in there, man, they picked up that knife and they looked at the way the grind tapers came together, they looked at the uh straightness of the blade or the straightness of the double grind on the dagger. They knew what to look for in a knife. And so it was very competitive to become successful uh and to grow grow your business. But the way you did that is you made it fit better, finish better, and the quality of the work stand out to somebody who walks in a knife show. I mean, some of the stuff I see online staggers me that some I mean, I don't even want to get into that because that's the artist in my head talking about somebody else's work, but you know, a straight piece of steel that's got two little clips on it, you know. Okay. And it's a straight handle and a straight blade and no guard and no nothing, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:58:26

I mean, uh like a I I'll say it if you don't. I mean, there's there are a lot of knives that intermingle out there um that really have no dimensionality. And one might one might wonder um with those knives, like how marketable they really are. But you know, there's this weird paradigm with uh with uh you know uh forge and fire and kind of the resurgence of uh of the knife craft where knife-shaped objects and knives that have been made um purposefully and with uh with a lot of investment in ergonomics and usefulness and things like that are being compared with lower quality or cruder knives that you know are knife-shaped objects. They have they have an edge and everything, but uh they really kind of fall short of the um the craftsmanship and artistry and self-expression that really can be achieved through the medium. And I think that that's one thing that we have a hard time with is that um not everybody who makes knives is uh is focused on knife making as a an uh uh a craft where they improve themselves on. They kind of stay stuck in in making crude knives and selling to their market and everything. And I think that um there's there's definitely a place for everybody, but uh sometimes um arguably it makes it really tough because um I don't I don't value knife-shaped objects the same way as I do uh well-crafted knives. And uh it's not a you know, it's not a knock on people for making their things. Uh but at some point in time, you know, crude knives just have they're a commodity knife instead of uh an investment or heirloom. And if you value that, then you can, you know, there's definitely lots of makers out there who do that. But I'm really interested in trying to push uh I'm trying to push the limits on uh the way that I think about knives and the um and the um capturing something that evokes an emotion uh versus you know the emotion just being, well, I can you know, this is a pretty shank or whatever. I'm really trying to look at uh um the aesthetics of of my work and everything and and push that. And I think that there's you know that falls short sometimes with people. And arguably it's it's something that we're we we are competing with in a market uh where you know knife-shaped objects objects and shanks and things like that are being equally compared in value uh with uh collectors because they really don't know the difference.

SPEAKER_01 2:01:01

Well, I think that's again, that's the uh shows and our failure to um create those shows and and make those shows happen. Um you know the knife makers guild show was a great example of the market will take care of itself. Okay. If you brought crude work to the guild show, um typically you went home with it. Um the knife buyers or collectors themselves uh pleased that market pretty well uh because they knew what they were looking for, because they had some great examples in there of uh of work that they read about, saw in magazines and came to the show and actually handled the knife and actually saw what it does, um, or what the craftsmanship was. And again, that's that's hard to do where you've got uh um very mixed media shows, okay. Uh if you can walk in the show and look at um uh a good example would be a Jeff Park uh have I got one laying here. Okay, Jeff Park Bones type knife, okay? Uh this is one of my favorite knives in the in custom knives, okay? Because you talk about a knife that's a really good everyday carry. Uh ergonomically, it fits in the hand really well, male or female, big hand, small hand, doesn't seem to matter too much. It opens and closes, uh, and that's everything you want. And uh a knife, okay? And a carry knife, all right. So and a folder. Okay. So now if you take that same knife and you go to let's say Blade Show in Atlanta, you can see it on uh CRKT's table for $39, right? Or on Jeff Park's table at $1,000 or $1,200, and you don't know the difference. The only difference that you can tell is to actually pick up and feel the knife and look at the workmanship in it. And that's that's difficult to do because the customer doesn't know the difference between that $39 knife and that $1,000 knife and the materials and the and the workmanship and the and the quality of it. And uh you know that's like I said, uh it's the shows the we need to c if we want to have the collectors back in the business and we want the makers to have the opportunity to be a handmade knife maker, um quality knife maker. Skip the handmade thing because we all use tools one way or another, okay? Uh and you can't stop progress, you know. If if I was 30 years old and starting in the 20 years old and starting in the knife business now, I'd probably have a CNC to do some of my work for me. Okay. Uh I'm old and hard to train, so I don't have. But um but I still I still I've enjoyed the light that I've had in the knife making, and I would like young people to have the same opportunity that I had. And the only way we're gonna get that is again, like I said, we have to have some shows that collectors or or the general public, okay, because I keep saying collectors, but we make collectors. We made collectors in the knife makers guild, I made collectors at the antique arm show in Las Vegas, the San Jose Gun Show in the early days, or whatever. You make your own collectors uh who like your your piece of work. But the only way you can do that is you've got to have a place where you can actually show it and talk with them. And I think if we failed anything in the knife making thing with the guild or uh ABS or uh whatever organization, uh it's it's having that type of show. We need more of them.

SPEAKER_00 2:06:01

Yeah. Well, and I think that makes sense. Um by the time this air, Solvang will have been uh done and and over with um end of April, right, is uh the show. Right, next week. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And um, you know, one thing one thing that I really like is the the roster of knife makers is top tier. And any any knife show, uh any one of those knife makers would be top tier, isn't it? Um and so the the uh ability for the uh people to go to Solvang and to uh see and feel um a a large breadth of of price points, but a high level of craftsmanship uh to me is uh indicative of the kind of thing that you would experience in in you know the the renaissance of the guild shows, right? And that's something that um I really uh look forward to your success in in the Solvang show and that the uh you know collectors and and uh uh knife users you know start uh going to that a lot more uh because that's something that I I think as we start talking about the resurgence of the custom knife show um uh in in the next few years, we're going to be using Solvang as a model for how we can uh take that same um the same essence of the show and replicate that with uh, you know, maybe this uh you know Midwestern shows or things like that. Maybe if the guild decides to uh start doing a show once a year. Again, um all of those, you know, I I look to Solvang and what you're doing and what everybody else is uh uh propagating out there as a as a blueprint for how we can uh continue to invest in this market.

SPEAKER_01 2:07:42

Yeah, I it's like I said, I think the the guild uh is big enough. You know, the Kansas City shows uh I think we had about a hundred makers originally uh at the show, maybe a hundred and fifteen, something like that, uh, by then. Uh in the mid-70s. Uh now we got I I think you told me there's a couple hundred makers in uh guild now, two hundred and something. I just talked to somebody, yeah. Uh so that's plenty to put on a show. I mean, look at Solvang. I think we got room for 50, 55 or 57 makers or whatever, and it's full. Uh and we got people waiting. Uh but you know, I picked up a new customer there last year. Um and any show that you have where somebody that walks in the door is from the public, okay, and sees your work, they can if if they can afford it, okay. Um but it wasn't a real expensive knife. I think it was a couple thousand dollars or something, which is a lot of don't get me wrong, that's still a lot of money for a knife, okay. Because I, you know, I use some $39 and $59 ones, you know, uh for work. Um but it's still that exposure to the public is where you develop yourself uh as a knife maker. You know, uh a lot of times some of the most successful shows in the world uh uh in the early days, and I wish they still had them again, you know, but at one time we had in Las Vegas, we had the antique arm show, the shot show, the uh Dallas Safari, or the Safari Club, not Dallas Safari. We had the Safari Club, uh and the knife show, the gun uh maker show, and engravers combined. Uh that was all going on within a seven or eight-day period in Las Vegas. Collectors flew in from all over the world to do those shows because they could go to five shows and spend four or five days or three or four days in one location and be able to do all that. You talk about successful, I mean, there was it was not uncommon to sell out everything on your table and most of your neighbors' tables was gone before the show was over. Uh because it had the collector's interest by combining it with uh a number of interests, you know. Uh you know, and everybody started thinking I'm a show promoter and my idea is the best. Okay, well, that limited the number of shows. Now there's one and or two in Las Vegas. Uh there's one or two in, you know, in these cities, and they're dividing up that same market that we had, all those people concentrated. You could do two shows a year in those days, Kansas City and Las Vegas, and that took care of your whole year's revenue and w work time. You had to work to make products for those shows each year.

SPEAKER_00 2:11:33

Yeah, that's uh a a lot of uh food for thought, uh for sure. I mean, um one thing that um I think is you know part of no food for thought.

SPEAKER_01 2:11:44

I'm gonna have to stop pretty quick. I got to finish I have to finish some ingredients for the for the solving show.

SPEAKER_00 2:11:52

Yeah. Well no, and I I I uh uh I think that we're probably uh ready to cut it soon. Um but you know, like uh you know you're you're right. Um one of the plans from uh for you and I, as we've kind of talked through this uh over the last year, is to do multiple segments where we can talk through a larger breadth of things. So, yeah, we covered a little bit about you and your craft and you know availability materials and uh how it relates to jewelry and you know, some history, uh, knife shows and things like that. Um, but there's with with over 50 years of making experience um alone, uh not to mention all of the other things that you do, um, you're probably one of the most uh you know converse in a large range of mediums. And so um my understanding is uh over after Solvang, you're going to Cambodia for a little while. I want to talk about that on our next episode. Um, but uh you know, people should expect that we're gonna have uh quite a few more episodes that some of some of that's knife involved.

SPEAKER_01 2:12:51

Yeah, you know, yeah, yeah. I uh number one, I made uh made knives with uh blacksmith over there and wrote an article for Knife Magazine uh several years in 2020, I think, was that. Since then I've met five other uh six other blacksmiths, uh knife makers in Cambodia, and I've worked with a couple uh and I brought some little miniature hatchets out, uh not miniature, small camp hatchets that I had made out of bomb fragments over there from debris we left. Uh but I brought those to Solvang uh to uh Las Vegas show and sold them out right away. There was 25 of them I saw. But anyway, I sold them for like 30 bucks a piece or whatever. Uh but that money I sent directly to a couple schools I support over there. So ulterior motives, I guess, or whatever. But it it was a it was a way to help pay back a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 2:13:59

Yeah. Well, I definitely um when you when you come back uh this summer, uh I want to talk about that on our next episode and uh try to get uh you know listeners and other makers involved uh as they can with that uh you know that investment that you're making um in in in the areas of Cambodia and and around there. Um but you know, like it's an extreme pleasure to even have this time with you. I mean, no, I know on the back of a show when you have a lot of things to do, um, it's you know uh it's a pleasure, uh, but I also know that your time is very valuable. So I put you off several times.

SPEAKER_02 2:14:34

It's okay.

SPEAKER_01 2:14:38

I just uh you know I'm getting older, so time is more valuable, and I want to I I've had a great run and I don't want to quit yet.

SPEAKER_00 2:14:48

Yeah. Well, I I think I think the uh crux of it was every time we sit and talk on the phone about coming and and doing a recording, we spend about an hour and a half to to three hours talking. So it's like, well, why don't we just get on and start recording?

SPEAKER_01 2:15:01

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 2:15:02

Yeah, well, hey Jim, I I appreciate your time. I really do. Um, next episode, let's plan on sometime after you get back from uh your overseas travels. Um you have a a good show and everything, and uh uh, you know, uh stay in touch for sure. But I mean I I I I really do appreciate the insights that you've given. It is uh a true honor to be able to talk to somebody with as much experience and longevity in knives as you do, and I can't wait for these like further conversations and how we kind of build this uh uh this epic of yours out.

SPEAKER_01 2:15:32

Uh okay, let's do it.

SPEAKER_00 2:15:36

All right, well, thank you. Thanks. Take care. Thank you for spending your time with me on this episode of the Good Old Blades podcast. Remember that you are worthy, loved, and may God strengthen and bless you on your own journey in this crazy thing called life.