We all miss Brian, and several have asked after him. He hasn't been online since March. I decided to look up his phone number and call him. Just finished a pleasant conversation. He sounds good, and reports that he's not making knives at the moment. I told him he has a lot of friends here who miss him, and encouraged him to logon some day soon and say hello. The latest email address I have is bdavisknives@centex.net

You are a life-form consisted in large mass by your genetic material, a small squishy electrical brain and attached wiring, and maybe a few finer things. In your children do your fathers retrieve for history that which will surely be lost to it — yourselves. The exception to my observation:



"Everything lost can be retrieved except lost time."

-- Andy Voelkle (the millennium 2000)





Are there other exceptions?… Continue

Some of the great knife makers here at iKC are making knives with handles of a very rare "Sticky Pine" wood that came to my attention recently. The wood comes from a 300+ year old pine that was cut in the year 1900 then the stump languished in a seasonally wet swamp for 110 years more until it was harvested last year. It has about as much resin as any specimen ever found. If you search the forum for "sticky pine" you can see some of… Continue

Don't you really, really like to learn something new? Some giant revelation? Some little tip or trick that makes something come into focus? Some fact that makes a project do-able? I certainly do.



It pleases me a lot when I can learn something from an old pro who knows a really special insight about the history of knives: Scott King has opened my eyes to the Elephant Toenail (http://www.elephanttoenails.com/) knife which is just too cool… Continue

My grateful thanks to all the veterans of our military and clandestine services for your service to America. The old phrase "All gave some, and some gave all." should be in our hearts every day of the year. I salute you. I do not know who took these photos in the aftermath of war, but they express, for me, our love and gratitude for our veterans' sacrifices.…

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When I joined as one of the first handful of members I though we'd be lucky to have a group that collects little pocket knives. Sure enough, we do. But Scott King, (our founder) to his credit and I'm sure the occasional pain, has allowed us to form groups about Axes, about knife-related fiction in the Story Board, about Fixed Blades and so much more. He's a modest guy, but I'll tell you for sure he knows more about those fat little Elephant Toenail… Continue

This is the version now on the internet. It was made from the 1964 printing, and it has a ton of errors from the early OCR scanner. Nothing better is available.



A good friend has loaned me an 1894 original book, and I am scanning it now. It will take a while to do all the work, read it word for word (my 500'th reading, anyway) and make sure every word is correct. I'm going to add a great index so you can look up any word you want to find, and you can do a text… Continue

Knives take many forms. Drop by our Axes group if you want to expand your horizons. You can read about my "420" saw, the best in the world for one-person harvesting of firewood around the camp. Think about it — a saw is just a bunch of little sharp knives attached to a long handle. Axes are for splitting wood. They were replaced 150 years ago by saws for felling purposes. And what about the Dutch Oven??

Setting your Browser to Display Foreign Languages — My story contains some Russian and Thai characters. If you set your browser this way, you will be able to view almost every web page the way it was intended, with whatever characters it contains. Using Internet Explorer or Firefox, from the top menu, choose View, then (Character) Encoding, then Unicode (UTF-8).

I've posted my story in Nick's Group — The Story Board. It's a PDF document with illustrations of the Randall number 14 and Teegur, the tiger cub. I hope you enjoy my story, and please leave a comment if you have time.