Men of steel
Acolytes of an ancient craft pursue perfection in an everyday kitchen tool Bladesmith forges way into rarefied ranks
REDDING — The craftsman hunched over his bench. With jeweler’s magnifying glasses, he inserted a micro pin into the body of a $2,500 folding knife.
Aaron Wilburn, the master behind the name Wilburn Forge, held up the knife as if looking into a crystal ball. It was as if he were gazing into his future.
He turned to me, eyes lit with zest, his creation nestled in his giant palms like a newborn.
“I used to paint cars in San Francisco,” Wilburn said. “I wish I’d been doing this my whole life. But it took all my previous experiences to prepare for the art that I do now.”
Wilburn, 49, is one of America’s top knife makers, one of 110 master blade smiths in the world. He lives and works out of his house and connected garage-shop on the outskirts of Redding. Wilburn and his wife of 26 years, Anna, have a daughter, Francesca, 19, who is an apprentice blade smith and is forging her own blades. Their son, Rocky, 25, also works in the shop. There are no other employees.
Wilburn’s knives are sold worldwide, including Russia, Hong Kong, Israel and Australia, at prices from $500 to $8,000. They are used for hunting, fishing, collecting — and by the best of chefs for cutting meats, fish and vegetables with razor-blade-like precision.
Wilburn had a leather-repair business in Tampa, Fla., in 2003 when he met Cliff Parker, a knife maker in a neighboring city. “I went to his shop, and I was so blown away that I decided I could master this craft. That’s what started my journey.”
He trained with other knife makers around the country and joined the American Bladesmith Society, based in Arkansas, which allowed him to serve the three-year apprenticeship that qualified him to take the journeyman performance test:
“You have to forge a blade no longer than 10 inches, no wider than 2 inches, and then be able to chop through a 2-by-4 twice, cut the last 6 inches of a free-hanging manila rope, and then, without any deformation on the edge of the blade, still be able to shave the hair on your arm, dry. Then you put the tip of the blade in a vise and bend it 90 degrees without the blade cracking through or breaking.
“That qualifies you to submit five blades of your best work, all in mono steel, to a panel of seven master blade smiths. You get one chance a year to do this, in Atlanta, and three chances your entire life.” He earned the title in 2013. “I’m driven,” Wilburn said. “I have a thing about doing the best I can. It infuriates me to see anybody with an ‘I-don’t-care’ attitude. I can’t do anything about them, so I give it my whole-soul effort on every aspect of every knife I make.
“Isn’t that what integrity is? To do your best even when no one is looking?”
When a customer orders a knife, it takes Wilburn about eight months to create it. It’s like a Hattori Hanzo sword out of the movie “Kill Bill,” a one-of-a-kind that can’t be replicated.
“Only the artist can pour his heart and soul into that creation,” Wilburn said.
His specialty is the forged Damascus blade, which is made out of multilayered steels. He forges it, hammers it, works it with self-made machines to control the layers of steel that shape the blade and the scroll work that penetrates all the way through the steel, unlike any other knife. Wilburn heat-treats it, does tedious hours of hand polishing — and then fabricates a matching handle and puts it all together with a tolerance of .001 of an inch.
Wilburn starts, not with a block of raw steel, but with an idea. From that idea, he creates his vision in the finest high-carbon steel, which he buys from a supplier, the Steel Baron, in New Jersey. He then forges the steel by heating the steel to 2,300 degrees, a point at which it is so hot it turns yellowish white. Wearing safety glass- es, earplugs, Kevlar gloves and leather apron, he then pulls out the white-hot steel and pounds it with his air hammer. “That forge welds the different layers of metal into one piece of steel.”
This is called pattern-welded steel, or Damascus, and is at the heart of the quality of steel, which some call Wilburn Steel, that he produces. This is the beginning of the artistry. His blades come in designs that boggle the mind, from Feather, where the design replicates the quill of a feather, to Persian Ribbon, a complex and intricate mosaic, and many others.
In his adjacent office, Wilburn held up an 11-inch Bowie knife with a ladder pattern, finished with an ironwood handle.
“This one knife is worth $2,500,”
Wilburn said. “It’s going to an attorney in Saudi Arabia. Some might say it took me 40 hours to make. But it actually took me 30 years to learn how to do it.”