This is a pretty fun discussion. One guy who has forgotten more than most of us will ever know about these subjects is Daryl Meier. I remember in the mid '80s watching him draw out the chunk of star he had milled into a bar of what I had previously thought was an impossibly small size, and still retain the the points. Then he assembled them into an american flag billet to make this knife. Presented it to G.H.W. Bush when he finished, which was kind of anticlimactic for me, but he got a big kick out of it.
Another guy who has taken the pattern welded blade to interesting places, and also out of the Carbondale lineage, is Andrew Meers. Check him out if you like this sort of thing. http://www.andrewmeers.com/#!
I have a dream that one day pedants will be able to share their knowledge on the internet without being dicks to each other and the uninitiated.
Fantastic knife! If that’s really meteorite rock, then that knife’s metal alone is probably worth at least a couple grand (“star stones” range in value but are comparable to precious metals such as gold). I absolutely love that they drink Balvenie out of mason jars.
I know Bob, and he’s awesome. His stuff has become ridiculously expensive because they’ve become the knife status symbol for celebrity chefs etc…
Honestly, the guy knows TONS about metallurgy and makes knives that are absolutely gorgeous. Glad success happened to an intelligent and genuinely good guy.
Well, I’ve actually made crucible steel/wootz, and unless you find it exciting to watch someone charge a crucible, then let it sit in a furnace for a while, then slooooow cool, the process of making it is generally boring as shit.
Working it’s a pain in the butt, as it tends to be a bit red short, but you can’t go too high on the temps or you start to re-dissolve all your carbide crystals.
Well, it was in a store in Colorado, IIRC, and it was a high end store. The kind with giant amethysts from Brazil.
They guy said the metal was from back when the iron meteorites in Arizona were a lot easier to find. The Campo del Cielo in Argentina is another one where the chunks are fairly common. You find enough small ones that you can make it into something else. I also could be misremembering the price, but it was something I could have put on a credit card and owned. But this was 15 years ago and it is long gone.
Some celebrity chefs openly criticize his stuff for being heavy, impractical etc. Which. It must be nice to be able to turn your nose up at knives that cost more than most cars I’ve owned. I think his stuff has been a status symbol for the wallstreet set for a couple decades. I mean even the line he does with Henkels are like a grand or more a knife.
He seems like a cool and very nice guy though. And he’s definitely been a driver on the whole hand made and better quality chef knife thing. Before he started most of your rated and trained knife smiths in the US were just making very fancy Bowie and out door knives intended to be hung up on the wall.
I waded into this Damascus vs. not Damascus steel rabbit hole and got kinda lost. Whew. However, along the way, I found this discussion by US bladesmith Walter Sorrells which helped a lot. Sorrells breaks down Damascus steel vs. not Damascus steel vs. well, everything else in a clear and straightforward fashion:
Sorrells also has an informative video about making Damascus steel:
Oh, Andrea, so so brave. And, really, you are quite enthusiastically right! Dmitriy Shevchenko makes wonderful knives and they are really nice looking. Plus, in just two short sentences, you hurled a five gallon can of contact cement onto a burning automobile of an internet rage fest that has been going on since before Damascus was nothing more than a bend in a camel path. I salute you two times!! FWIW, the process for making wootz steel was meticulously recorded by some French guy who was promptly ignored by everyone for centuries because he’s French. Al Pendray wanted the credit for re-discovering it and he deserves it. A scholar and a gentleman, RIP. We really did however lose the formula for concrete which was really embarrassing. Thanks for the video they are so satisfying to watch.
I’m so glad to hear that. The restaurant, chef, food, hospitality, etc… industry is unnecessarily hard and vicious. I’m always glad to hear that there are a few people in the business who are cool.
I agree. There’s so much emphasis on bowies, fighters, etc… (and I’m as guilty as the next guy of making those), and other things that’ll never be used. Or even things that will be used infrequently (hunting knives, camping stuff, etc…), that the whole kitchen knife thing gets largely ignored. But… those are the knives that you’re going to use pretty much every day. (and don’t even get me started on the “tacticool” knife trend…)
I say make fancy kitchen knives a bigger thing! (but I’m a little biased…)
Honestly that’s where the market was for decades in the US. If you wanted to make any money making high end or custom knives that mean knife collectors and knife collectors still very much means guys buying outdoor and fighting knives. So that’s what the pros were making. That’s what all the instructional material was about. And that’s what all the certification tests are geared for.
Its only been since the rise of this whole geeky food thing that Americans really give much of a shit about good kitchen knives.
