Nothing but KnivesIn this class the student will start by learning the basic moves of knife-making on a piece of mild steel, ending up with a letter-opener if all goes well, and then move on to a piece of high-carbon spring steel and make a small, simple, one piece knife, suitable for cooking, eating, or general use.
Focus will be entirely on making a knife; only those tools, techniques and concepts needed for knife making will be addressed. The fires will be managed by the instructor.
Techniques include: straightening, drawing out, forging high-carbon steel, flattening, shouldering, pre-allocation of bend and mass, beveling, annealing, filing, hardening, tempering, and sharpening.
Gift Certificates for Nothing but Knives are available.
9 hours in three 3 hour meetings dates×
Instructor: Carl West
$375 per student
Class size is limited to 4 students (one per forge).
Some smithing experience is required for this class.
If you have not struck hot iron before, you should take "A Taste of Blacksmithing" or "Forged Bottle Opener" first (watching a whole lot of Forged in Fire is not enough). Doing so will help keep the knife class on schedule and really, the more hammer-time you have, the more likely you'll make something like a knife.
Please wear proper clothing for visiting or working in the forge:
- closed top shoes
(Preferably leather, preferably high-topped. Sneakers are sufficient...
but sandals, crocs, pumps, mules... are not. If you can see the skin of your foot, or the foot of your socks, it's not good enough.)
- natural fiber clothing
(Synthetics are a risk because: IF a HOT thing touches them it's likely that the material will melt and stick to your flesh, making the burn even worse than it would be through a natural fiber.)
- long pants that cover the tops of the shoes.
(To keep hot coals and bits of steel from getting down into your shoes. Which I hear is a bunch of No Fun.)
Click here for more safety information.
Ongoing:
Weekly on Mondays, June 30 to July 14 This class is either: If you're interested in taking Nothing but Knives and it's not on the calendar, please tell us using our Notification-List Page.
Dates and Times:
If none of the dates below work for you (or are already full), we suggest you
Add yourself to the Notification List for this class.
(The notification list gets emailed soon after classes are put on the schedule.)
Noon to 3:00pm
(2025)
---------------
Upcoming:
- not upcoming on our schedule,
- or we've fallen behind in our clerical duties and not entered it in the database.
If you found it on our calendar page, we are planning to offer it on that date.