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Permalink Reply by Steve Hanner on August 20, 2013 at 15:25

Happy Birthday Cliff! It appears Tennessee Knife Works went out of Business years ago...found this on a Colonel Coon site: 

Did Tennessee Knife Works do anything beside make knives? Yes they were pioneers in the business in a lot of ways.
Background - Please note, from about 1984 on, the bulk of the business was not making Colonel Coon Knives but making custom etched - packaged knives out of every brand you could think of. Adrian Harris developed an electrolitic and chemical milling process for etching the blades, a packaging program which included a Q-Vac vacuum forming machine and a table top die cutter, a process to make molds for vacuum forming, and a box business.

The set up boxes that they used were made in a small box plant over in Shelbyville (close to Lewisburg). One day, Adrian went over to visit the owner/manager who really loved the juice of the corn. They had been discussing how to make a paper box with a hinge. He had a jug on his table that he used for a desk and said, "It is almost time for my people to go to lunch. When they do, and I have a little more of this thought medicine, I'm sure we can solve the problem." At the end of the lunch hour, they had come up with a way to make a hinged paper box.

All they did was change one side of the "wrap" or covering that goes around the box and made it longer (top part only). That side of the plunger was taken of the press and only three sides were folded. When the girl picked this up off the conveyer, all she did was place it onto the bottom half and fold the remaining side under the bottom half. Hence , a hinged paper box. What is weird, the same type of box is still being used today.

Very few people know that Adrian is the one who came up with this. Then he could produce a paper box (at a cost of about 25 cents), and having the equipment to produce the plastic flocked insert, they were covered up with business making all kinds of commemorative knives for various knife dealers and clubs. Adrian recalls the month following the death of Paul Bear Bryant, the famous football coach at Alabama, we etched over 30,000 knives with Paul "Bear" Bryant on them. Knives were being delivered by tractor trailer trucks.

Adrian also set up a silk-screen process to print boxes. He had two girls working full time doing nothing but printing boxes. Two others were operating the Q-Vac and then cutting out the insert forms in the die cutter (they made 89 forms or inserts per cycle). Adrian had a complete art department set up with a print shop camera, dark room, type setter, plate burner, drawing room, and an artist. He also had a small machine shop with lathe, milling machine, band saws, and a surface grinder. All of this went to support the making of knives and then molds for vacuum forming. They were going through about 25-30k of boxes per 2-4 weeks. Along with this, he installed a shrink wrap machine. After the knives were packed in the boxes, they were shrink wrapped. Ben Wells was spending more and more time with Adrian making molds and setting up other jigs and tooling for the amount of etching and packing they did.

People don't know Tennessee Knife Works was that big and doing all of the contract work for knife dealers, clubs, and even the big knife companies.

At one point Tennessee Knife Works had 28 people work there at one time. Along with these other "special" things they did, Adrian also set up a process to gold plate. They did a lot of Case Trapper commemorative that were gold plated. Carbon steel was easy to gold plate, but with stainless, you have to first plate it with nickel and then plate it with gold.

Tennessee Knife Works plate but only a very few Colonel Coons. A few knives that Ben made, were plated for him. Also, Adrian had a hot bluing process (same as guns) that they blued carbon steel blades (i.e. Case Trappers). Speaking of guns, they also did commemorative guns for some dealers. For that reason, they had to get a Federal Firearms License in order to ship the guns back and forth. They etched the receivers, re-blued them, and filled the etch with a gold fill. If you should run across an Alvin C. York commemorative Colt .45, Tennessee Knife Works did that. Total - 1,000. They had 1,000 Army Colt .45 s torn down, with parts scattered all over Tennessee Knife Works. They even did the handles using a sublimation machine they had just bought for printing precoated metal (brass colored, I think anodized aluminum), and it worked great on some plastics, even using multi-colors.

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Permalink Reply by Jan Carter on August 20, 2013 at 17:19

Several companies made a blue tick hound knife

The top is the Coons, the lower is a Bulldog.  I also understand that colt made one.  Each of these is hard to find, I have not seen them available lately

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Permalink Reply by Steve Hanner on August 20, 2013 at 20:31

Great find Jan Thank you. More than anything I am so glad this story got shared with us. 

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Permalink Reply by Cliff Sweat Jr. on August 20, 2013 at 22:48

Thanks for the Birthday Wishes Steve. When I first posted this in 2010, I looked hard and found Col.Coon Blue Tick Knife. It is one of my favorite knives. I was lucky to find one. Wish I was more regular on here. Thanks again.

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