What is a Handcrafted Knife?

Our knives are very labour intensive and involve many steps in the creation of each unique piece.

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Blades: Steel is sourced from several places but whenever possible we like to upcycle old found materials such as vintage farm equipment, leaf springs on cars, chainsaw bars, and saw blades.  Fillet knives have even been made out of old Scandinavian skate blades!  

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Several type of Blade patterns are possible:

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• Unique one-of-a-kind etching/patterns on vintage and high carbon steel for a variety of designs by David MacLean.

• A natural vintage pitted look from old recycled high carbon steel parts

• Clean and shiny Stainless Steel for easy care

 

Shaping the steel is the next step which involves heating it up in the forge and then cooling it down (annealing) to make the steel more malleable. After this, the steel is formed and shaped, before being tempered. After tempering, the newly formed blade is very hard, but brittle, so it then needs to be heat treated in an oven at 460 degrees for 5 hours.

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Handles: This is where a lot of the artist’s creativity gets to play out with his ever growing collection of USED materials including many types of woods, brass, ebony, mother of pearl, horn, antler, leather, stone, artifacts, even incorporating personal items such as coins, rings and stone. Each piece is laid out, shaped, and bonded together before many hours of filing, sanding, oiling and polishing.