Several years ago, call it around…2011ish, I was sitting on my ass doing a whole lot of nothing.. (playing Skyrim) and found myself losing hours just messing around in the blacksmith’s shop in the game. I ended up spending so much time doing it that I thought to myself, well what the hell… lets try this for real. I didn’t yet know I wanted to make knives.
So I let the wife know “Honey – I’m going outside to build a forge.”
She, being the saint she is , replied “Ok hon”
And off I went.
Truth be told, I never really came back.
Eventually, I was given a piece of railroad track to use as an anvil. But before that? I was basically flattening barn nails (barn spikes) into makeshift knives. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. Note: The junk box I started. I found useful metal in alot of stuff and began harvesting as much as I could for my metallurgical sorcery (Making junk out of other junk).
Eventually, I found my way to railroad spikes. What a game changer. Although mostly crap steel, at the time it was just what I needed to begin teaching myself to forge and move the steel how I wanted it to move.
So I did thousands of them. Sweet jesus If i ever look at another railroad spike it’ll be too soo- nevermind. I made other things too, hooks hangers …. so many hooks and hangers.
And then it happened. A couple years into the craft, without anyone but myself as a teacher (what could go wrong right?) I did it… the first real knife. Sort of.
Ugh. A real looker huh? Wouldn’t you just love to be seen walking around with that bad boy? haha. No? Oh c’mon. It’s got character lol
At the time I thought it was Excalibur. I had made a full tang knife and pinned it together with bolts and nuts. Sheesh. I kept going.
Over the years I improved my skills, making knives for many people all over the world. I was shocked over and over those folks began to love my knives, and the story behind them. It made me feel like what I was doing meant something to others, not just me. I’m forever grateful for that.
The point of all this? Never give up. Never stop doing what you know you should be doing. I went through years of failures before I felt like I had accomplished something big. It took a thousand setbacks to get a big step forward. I’m still learning every day. I’m almost always spending time in my workshop, trying to become the knifemaker I dreamt of being all those years ago. I’ll keep trying.
Dennis “Denny” Mayes
