On the Edge : Blade Runner of the Great Northwest

Michael Carder realized early in his chosen career as a knife-maker that he need not limit his craft to kitchen cutlery, to long-bladed chef’s knives or thin-bladed fillet knives or paring knives or boning knives, or even the small, cleaver-shaped vegetable knives often found in Japanese kitchens. He could just as easily fabricate hunting knives and skinning knives, the kind of big, dangerous-looking, blood-letting knives that never fail to catch a would-be mountain man’s eye.

“Oh I did that a little,” Carder says. “And I put what I thought were outrageous prices on those knives, and they would sell right out, which says something about the values of society when you consider that those knives might be used once a year, if ever. Kitchen knives are used daily.”

Carder lives a simple life in Port Townsend, something of an artists’ community on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. He earns a living sharpening knives in restaurant kitchens in the town; once a week he opens his sharpening business to the general public at a local hardware store. Through the winter, Carder manufactures kitchen knives of his own design, which he sells at street fairs and craft shows in the summer.

He works in a tiny shop behind a house built on the edge of a field. Work bench space has been given over to buffing and grinding wheels, a planer, a jigsaw, a belt grinder. A wood-burning stove squats near the door. A small table saw crowds the floorspace. The wood Carder shapes for knife handles is neatly stacked on shelves beneath the bench. Windows look out onto a lump of a hill. Carder’s step van, once both shop and home, is parked near the top. It hasn’t moved in three years.

Long gone are Carder’s days at the United Nations, where he worked on international population issues, or his days in a Geneva think tank, or his graduate days at the London School of Economics. Carder put all that behind him in the mid-’70s when he resigned his position at the United Nations. He didn’t much care for the way industrial nations were experimenting with birth-control drugs and devices on Third World populations, and cared even less for the part he played in that. Instead, he turned his attention and more basic talents to market gardening and restaurant kitchen work and living according to the dictates of his conscience.

Carder grew up in a small town in Sussex, south of London. His father wanted him to seek a secure life in the civil service, much like his own. Carder credits his uncle, a bricklayer and “country boy,” with introducing him to the natural world and to non-academic skills, such as how to keep tools sharp.

It was just this skill that Carder returned to when he decided to settle on the life of an itinerant knife and scissors sharpener, working and living out of his multihued step van, first with the better part of New England, and now the Pacific Northwest, as his chosen territory. He claimed a modern tinker’s life for his own and called his one-man business Stone Soup after a European fairy tale about three soldiers on their way home from a war who set about making a pot of “stone soup” to shame a village of greedy hoarders into sharing their abundance. What begins with a stone in a pot of boiling water ends in a feast and a new era of generosity and human affection in the village.

“The lesson for me?” Carder asks. “I guess, ‘The more you share, the less you need.’ Stone Soup to me means working toward a world based on love and sharing, not greed. I live in the world as a cutler, and I make knives for the kitchen because I know there they will be used every day in beneficial ways.”

Carder is built on the slight side, to the scale of his shop. His thinning brown hair has been invaded by gray curls. A big, easy smile hangs from his knobby cheekbones. An ambience of roadwear, the dents, scrapes and touchups that come from logging a lot of miles outside the mainstream, dominates Carder’s general appearance. His basic wardrobe is one of baggy wool trousers, knit cap, darned sweater, patched flannel shirt, mismatched wool socks and handcrafted shoes. His British accent, his quiet voice, his well-considered words, his hazel eyes that catch the light and the color of the nearby forest imbue Carder and his lifestyle with the spirit of long-lived tradition, as though he had stepped out of a book with a cracked leather binding.

Carder ground his first kitchen knives out of industrial hacksaw blades, but promptly gave up. “It was grunt work, like all grinding,” he says, “but particularly wearing and unrewarding given the hard qualities of the steel.” He turned instead to America’s oldest cutlery manufacturer, the Russell Harrington Cutlery Corp. of Southbridge, Mass., established in 1818. For what he calls his “production knives,” the kitchen knives he can sell at a price competitive with commercially manufactured kitchen cutlery, Carder purchases blade blanks in various sizes and reshapes them into kitchen tools that he finds more comfortable to the hand and pleasing to the eye.

“When I was doing kitchen work I noticed that the knives were often clumsy and awkward,” Carder explains. “My wrist and hand would get tired, which is a handle and weight issue. My knives are smaller and lighter. They are balanced, by which I don’t mean some mechanical notion, a certain point, like that. Balance occurs when a knife becomes an extension of your hand and arm, which is important for people who use a knife a lot. Like cooks.”

Selecting a Russell Harrington chef’s knife blank of classic French silhouette, Carder rounds a little here, thins a little there, shapes and polishes a hardwood handle and produces a knife substantial enough for kitchen tasks, yet feather-light. The user’s thumb and forefinger naturally come to the back of the blade and gently pinch the steel, while the remaining fingers curl the rounded handle in against the palm.

Pacific yew, Eastern and Western Curly Maple, and Western Quilted Maple are among Carder’s favorite woods for handles. When he uses tropical hardwoods, usually at the request of a customer, he follows the dictates of his political convictions and contributes to rain forest reforestation programs.

In the early 1980s Carder lived in and around Burlington, Vt. It was his habit to set up shop on the street. He sharpened knives and scissors for free, asking only for a donation for his labor. He also displayed his production knives, for which he had begun to feel a certain pride of accomplishment.

A Burlington High School student appeared one day. He had been making custom knives in a metalworking class, starting at the very beginning with a bar of tool steel. “He was full of himself,” Carder recalls. “He looked me up and down, asked a few questions, gave my knives a once-over and finally said, ‘You’re just a handle maker.’ ”

The comment still stings like spring nettles, but it did give Carder the push he needed to start custom-making kitchen knives from scratch, a task much longer and more demanding than grinding Russell Harrington blade blanks. When making his custom knives, Carder incorporates his own ideas of improved design, introducing a slight angle where handle meets cutting blade, grinding in rounded depressions where thumb and forefinger grip the steel. He makes 50 or so custom knives a year, charging a good deal more than he does for his production knives.

Carder cuts the rough shape of the custom knife he has in mind from a salvaged sawmill blade with an oxyacetylene torch. Cast-off sawmill blades tend to be made from what Carder calls “old-fashioned carbon steel,” the kind that takes a keen edge but tarnishes easily.

After smoothing away the slag left by the torch--burnt, bubbled, useless metal--Carder anneals the blade by first heating it in a forge to a rosy red slightly brighter than bright cherry, around 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit, then slowly cooling it in a pile of sand. Annealing softens steel. “I can grind it quicker,” Carder says. “I don’t have to worry so much about the steel heating up on me.” The annealed blade looks like an artifact spit out of a lava flow. The knife first begins to emerge for the eye when Carder snags the blade on his bench grinder, removing the rough exterior.

At this stage the blade is little more than a suggestion of a knife, a flat, steel template good only for weighing down papers on an executive desk. With a carbide-tipped scribe, Carder finds and etches the center line of the back of the knife and what will become the cutting edge, then works the blade on the belt grinder from the edge to the back of the knife, ever mindful of the center line, creating the knife-like bevels, the V-shape cross section, as he grinds, stopping and starting, stopping and starting, grinding one side then the other, always checking to keep the two sides even, as in a good haircut.

“Grinding has the potential to become drudgery,” Carder admits as he works the blade against the lower wheel of the belt grinder. Sparks shoot at the floor. “Concentration is essential, however. I can feel and hear where the belt is cutting and how much it is cutting. What I am really learning is patience and perseverance.”

Before the final round of grinding and shaping and polishing and sharpening, Carder hardens, then tempers the steel. He accomplishes hardening by first warming the blade to a rosy-colored 1,525 degrees Fahrenheit, then rapidly but gently dipping it point first into a pipe filled with olive oil, the quenching bath. Waving the blade around as though cutting strips of air completes the hardening. “My methods are primitive compared to what they must do on an industrial level when they are quenching with frigid air and finishing with a liquid nitrogen bath,” Carder says. “But my methods are effective.”

Without benefit of tempering, hardened steel would be too brittle to flex. It would shatter if dropped, not rattle around on the floor like a kitchen knife knocked off a counter. Carder tempers his blades one by one by resting them backside down on the top of his hot wood stove, then gradually raising the temperature of the knife to around 400 degrees Fahrenheit, which he determines by color. At that temperature the back and the handle turn blue. The color rises up the blade toward the edge like mercury in a thermometer, changing from blue to brown. “The cutting edge turns yellow,” Carder explains, “the color of straw.”

The handle of a properly tempered knife is soft enough to drill for the wooden grips, the edge tough enough to take and retain a sharp edge, and the whole blade supple enough to bend with pressure. During the final grinding to an ideal shape and edge and polish, Carder often passes the blade across his polishing wheel just once, then immerses the knife in water, all in an effort to spare the temper of the cutting edge, a sharp line of steel one third as thick as a human hair.

This past spring Carder displayed his knives at the Oregon Knife Show, a presentation of the Oregon Knife Collectors Assn. Out of 250 tables given over to knife collections and knife-making demonstrations and the wares of the best custom knife-makers in the West, only Carder displayed custom-made kitchen knives. He looked small and out of place, and his knives looked plain and underfinished next to some of the mirror-bright art pieces made for display on velvet, not to be worn on the hip. He sold five knives, hardly worth the trip and the bother.

“I’m making and selling tools,” Carder says, “not fulfilling some kind of fantasy or need. My place is not among knife collectors, I can see that, but out among the people, at street fairs and craft shows.” Carder’s summer, as it has been for many years, will be one of traveling from fair to fair, like a modern tinker, showing his wares, sharpening knives and scissors, living a simple life.

An illustrated brochure describing Michael Carder’s knives is available for $1 from Stone Soup, P.O. Box 1576, Port Townsend, Wash. 98368; or call (206) 385-7051.