A former boss started watching “forged in fire” and got me into it. Yadda yadda yadda, I took a couple classes and made a couple knives. Huge nod to fire horse forge in the Seattle area - the classes were a blast and I wound up with knives that I use all the time.

My first knife was a western style chef’s knife. The blade is pretty beefy but has a 15 degree edge and is really sharp. It’s carbon steel, and both takes and holds an edge really well.

The handle is 3d printed. I designed the handle to fit my hand precisely. It supports my favorite knife grips, and lets me rock the blade really efficiently because the channels in the handle match my fingers. My hands are very large, and while I have a lot of very comfortable knives, none of them were designed for hands like mine. Having a knife handle that fits my hand specifically for the knife grips that I personally use is really meaningful to me.

I was able to design a void in the handle that matched the shape of the tang, but just a little bit smaller. I printed the handle with PLA. PLA with a reasonable infill is very compressible and shrinks a bit from the nominal print dimensions as the plastic cools. Just hammering the handle onto the blade made a connection both adhesive free and very sturdy. The handle is also easy to destructively remove with something like a dremel tool, which will be nice some day for someone who gets the blade but doesn’t have gigantic ham hands like mine and just wants a normal goddamn knife handle.

I tried a Nakiri style for my second knife. I made the blade pretty thin as it tapers toward the cutting edge, although the spine is a bit hefty. The edge continues up the front of the blade just a bit, which makes it really nice for shallow scoring and opening packaged food (and also packages).

I love how the staining reflects both how i made the blade and what i’ve used the blade to cut. I’ve found over time that some foods stain carbon steel much more than others, so it can be a little blotchy for a long while after, say, cutting mushrooms.

My knives are flawed, the both of them. Neither knife is technically impressive, and both blades have imperfections in design and execution that reveal the level of skill that I had when I made them. These knives are precious to me, though, more than my other knives, which are commercial and produced to a very high standard of quality.