About the service
I run a small forge dedicated to hand-forged chef's knives, and I take on custom commissions for cooks, collectors and gift buyers who want a blade built around their own hand rather than pulled off a shelf. Every blade starts as a billet of high-carbon tool steel or, on request, a folded pattern-welded stack — hammered out on an anvil under a power hammer, normalized in stages, then hand-filed and stock-removed to the final profile before grinding. I forge full-tang blades with a distal taper so the balance point sits just ahead of the bolster, which is the detail that separates a knife that feels alive in the hand from one that just looks sharp in a photo.\n\nHeat treatment is where most home-shop blades fail, and it is where I spend the most care: austenitizing at a controlled soak temperature, quenching in the correct medium for the alloy, then double or triple tempering to pull brittleness out of the edge while keeping hardness in the low-to-mid 60s HRC. I test every blade's edge geometry with flat-ground or convex bevels depending on the cutting task you describe — a thin slicer for produce, a heavier santoku-style profile for chopping, or a robust nakiri for a vegetable-forward kitchen.\n\nThe service covers the whole knife, not just the steel: handle fitting in stabilized wood, horn or micarta with hidden or pinned tang construction, hand-sanded and oiled or lacquered to a food-safe finish, plus a fitted leather or kydex sheath if you want one. I discuss steel choice, blade length, handle material and intended use with you before any hammer falls, send progress photos at the forging, grinding and heat-treat stages, and finish with a hand-stropped edge that shaves paper on delivery. Typical turnaround is one to two weeks depending on queue and pattern-welding complexity; rush slots are available on request. I also take on sharpening consultations and edge geometry fixes for existing knives if you just need a tune-up rather than a whole new blade.
