Folding Knives and a Trip to Alice Springs

In a couple of weeks we're heading to Alice Springs to spend some more time with François and Anika, this time concentrating on making folding knives.

I've had a go at folding knives before.

Four of them, in fact.

Compared with making a fixed-blade knife, I found the whole process considerably more complicated. My metalworking skills were only just up to the challenge at the time, and the process wasn't without its trials and tribulations.

Everything has to fit.

And I mean really fit.

I remember spending what seemed like half an hour carefully filing the slot that locked the blade into the open position. I'd file a little, try it, file a little more and try it again.

Nothing seemed to be happening.

Then I'd give it one final pass with the file...

...and suddenly the bloody hole was too big.

Back to the beginning.

It was incredibly frustrating, but I suppose that made the finished knives all the more satisfying.

I eventually made four.

One went to my mate Graham, who has helped me enormously during my knife-making journey. Graham is a clockmaker, so he understands precision metalwork in a way that I'm still learning. He's patiently tried to improve my skills over the years, and it was actually using his milling machine that eventually convinced me that I needed one of my own.

More about that adventure another time.

Another of those first four folding knives unexpectedly ended up on the other side of the world.

Out of the blue, I was contacted by a knife collector in Nevada in the USA. He'd visited Tasmania and wanted a knife that would remind him of his time here.

He chose one of my folders.

Suddenly I wasn't just learning how to make folding knives—I was doing a crash course in exporting knives to America, customs declarations, tariffs and everything else that comes with sending a handmade knife halfway around the world.

The third knife never really worked properly.

There's too much movement in the blade when it's open. At the time I couldn't work out how to correct it, so it eventually joined that collection of workshop projects labelled I'll come back to this one day.

It's coming to Alice Springs with me.

I'm interested to see whether, with François and Anika's help and a little more knowledge than I had when I made it, we can work out where I went wrong—and perhaps even save it.

And then there's number four.

That one's mine.

It's the knife in the photograph, with a lovely Damascus blade and Tasmanian Blackwood scales. There are things about it I'd do differently now, but I'm rather pleased that I kept it.

It's a marker in the journey.

Hopefully, when I come home from Alice Springs and put it beside the folding knives I'm about to make, I'll be able to see just how much I've learnt.

That's one of the nice things about making things by hand. The early pieces aren't simply objects. They're a record of what you knew how to do at a particular moment in time.

So this knife is staying exactly as it is.

Besides, it has already found its place in my life.

I use it to eat my apples.