A custom meat-carving knife Quintin Hardtner made for a friend.
by Ariel Roberson, ShrevePossible
Quintin Hardtner is a seasoned financial advisor, but he has discovered a passion for crafting knives. Shrevepossible sat down with Hardtner to discuss his hobby.
What got you started with knife making?
I’ve always liked making things. All my life. I’ve always liked making stuff, and especially really detailed type stuff. I was actually meeting with a client, and he told me he started making knives. And I’m like, “How the hell do you do that?” He said, “There’s a guy in town by the name Dan Graves who has been making knives forever. And you can go to his place, and he’ll teach you how to make knives.” That was about two years ago. I called him (Graves) and went and started working with him some, and that’s how I learned. I loved it. I ended up building a shop underneath my house. Now I have a shop at my house. I still do some work at Dan’s, but most of it I do at home. I work in the evening and on the weekends, just as a hobby. Obviously, I’m not trying to make a living from it, although I do sell my knives.
Where do you sell your knives?
Typically, just to friends or people that see them. I just recently set up an Instagram page, @Q_hardtner_blades. I’ve just had people see knives on that, and say, “Hey, I’d like to get one.” That’s how I sell them. I haven’t really aggressively turned it into a business, per se. I don’t have a website. I just started making them for the love of making them, and they ended up being pretty nice. Then people said, “You’ve gotta sell these,” and then some people were buying them. They’re like, “Can I buy one?” I’ve started more actively posting them, so we’ll see what happens.
A custom meat-carving knife Quintin Hardtner made for a friend.
What’s the process? Where does the wood and steel come from?
Some of the blades have really cool patterns on them. That’s Damascus (steel). We bought steel from different places that provide steel and forge them.
You stack it together and put it in the forge and then press it under high heat. You can create patterns in Damascus, but basically it’s just 100 or 200 layers of two different kinds of steel. Then, once you forge it out, you make what they call a billet, which is basically just a blank piece of steel that’s maybe an inch and a half or two inches wide by a quarter inch thick and 12 inches long. Then you draw out the shape of the knife you want to make and start grinding and cutting and etching.
Then there’s the handle materials. Some of the handles we used fossilized walrus tusk, Some we used sandbar stag, it’s European stag, antler, essentially, but more rare. Then all kinds of exotic woods and some synthetic stuff, for instance micarta. Primarily different kinds of really pretty woods, ivory and stack from all over the world. I also use nickel and silver. For one of my knives, I melted down some sterling silver spoons and forks and made part of the components on it out of sterling silver.
What did your first knife look like?
My first knife actually turned out pretty well. It is called ball-bearing Damascus. The blade is made out of nickel silver covered ball bearings that are put in a steel canister. I got it really hot and pressed it down and then peeled off the canister, and that’s what was underneath. It is a pretty good first knife. The handle is walrus tusk, so that’s ivory, and the rest is Damascus and a little piece of nickel silver. That was my first knife.
How did you come up with the concepts?
Like Dan always says, it’s art. You just come up with something, and then the Damascus comes out the way it comes out. You can create patterns. (Damascus) was developed by the Japanese a long, long time ago for their swords so that the swords wouldn’t break. They would maintain a really sharp edge, but the body was more flexible, so they wouldn’t break.
I had a client call that said, “I want a barbecue meat carving knife.” I said, “What the hell is that?” So he sent me a picture of one.It’s got a really curved blade, it’s really thin, and it’s flexible.
A knife made with a micarta handle.
Do you shape the handles?
With these, you shape them a little, but that’s naturally the way it is. You might shape it a little here and here or grind it a little bit. (Some are) a fossilized walrus tusk. Only certain natives in Alaska can harvest it, and they don’t harvest it by killing the animals they find. That’s probably 2,000 years old. They find old tusks on the beach, along the ocean. So when you buy it, it’s nasty looking.
What does something like this cost?
It depends on the knife. (One) took about 50 hours to make. The reason is that the blade is called feathered Damascus, and that’s a really complicated Damascus to make. (With) a takedown knife, you can disassemble the whole knife. It has pins in it. So you can take it apart and put it back together, and it goes back together perfectly. This is probably the most complex knife I’ve made. A knife like this would probably be $2,500 because it took a long time to make.
A knife Quintin Hardtner made with a mosaic Damascus steel blade.
What’s the typical amount of time you spend making a knife?
Something like a carving knife probably takes 15 hours to make, so a couple of days. Again, I just do this on the side. I’m a retirement planner, financial advisor, so I’ve got a real job. This is just my passion and my hobby. I come home after dinner, and I’ll go down to the shop and work on it, or on a Saturday or Sunday. Just something to kill the time and I love it. It’s art you create. You come up with an idea, and then you go make it.
What’s the future with knife making?
I don’t really have a planned future for it. I’m actually thinking about going to a weeklong school up in Texarkana. I have a perfectionist personality, and an obsessive-compulsive one as well. So typically, when I get into something, I really get into it. I might go for a journeyman’s certificate, where you have to make knives for a certain number of years and take some courses, similar to getting a masters in knife making. You can become a master bladesmith, but that takes years and years and years. I might do that just for fun, just to get better. I have no real planned future for it. Besides, I’ll keep doing it as a hobby. And that’ll be that. But you never know, maybe one day when I retire, I can make a bit, spend more time doing it. I don’t really have any kind of particular plan for it besides to do it as a passion and make knives for other people and then sell them. I’m ready to move on to the next one.
