Some industries have very low barriers to entry, but it is very difficult to do well. Some things are easy to support yourself with a little craftsmanship, but it is difficult to achieve artistic level, be recognized by the market, and sell for a lot of money. The handmade knives I am talking about today is such an industry. This industry has a very long history. From Ou Yezi in China to Vulcan in Greece, those histories and legends have been sung and endless. Today I mentioned these two masters It is a contemporary legend.
Michael Walker – Desperate for Love
Once you meet someone you really like, whether it’s a person or something, there will always be someone who will go in the direction of your heart regardless of everything. Walker is such a person.
Michael Walker was born in Oregon, USA in 1949. Although there was a deep knife-making culture here at the time, Michael Walker eventually became a jewelry designer. Until 1975, by a very coincidental opportunity, Michael Walker’s wife gave him an American Blade folding knife and a knife magazine “American Blade” as a gift. Michael Walker, who has a novel brain circuit, immediately discovered an unusual place from these two seemingly ordinary things.
He decided to leave the jewelry industry, which brought great wealth, to become a knife maker single-handedly. And many years later, his choice made him the title of “the most powerful knife master on the surface of the earth”.
Today we meet the first mysterious knife maker: Michael Walker (Michael Walker). He never gives interviews, nor does he accept public photos. In fact, no one knows what he looks like except the people who come into contact with him…
He has obtained more than 20 patents so far. The average selling price of the knives in his hands is about 100,000 US dollars. Among the many patents, the most common is the liner lock in people’s home folding knives – in the 1970s and 1980s, the liner lock function in the old folding knives was not strong, and the blade was often unstable. Its structure has caused many accidents of cuts and scratches during use.
And Walker’s improvement of folding knives is not deliberate. In fact, it was just an unintentional move caused by his high requirements for the “beauty” of the blade. At that time, a customer ordered ten fixed knives and matching scabbards. But after the scabbard was completed, Walker thought willfully that such a beautiful straight knife was bulky and dull after adding the scabbard and lost the original taste of the blade. He didn’t like it at all.
To this end, he ran to seek customer opinions. After that, I began to try to change the fixed knife into a folding knife. It was also during this transformation that he discovered the disadvantage of the old folding knife being unstable. To overcome this problem, he began to devote himself to rigorous experiments with folding knives. After many attempts to correct the error, he finally had a complete transformation plan. Walker took out the spring, and combined the functions of the lock plate and the spring into one, so as to enhance the stability of the knife.
After this improvement, the folding knife, which used to require both hands to break open, is completely out of date. The new folding knife can be opened and closed with one hand. The stability of the liner lock has been enhanced by 4 times. The locking device is integrated with the serif of the handle. In addition, Walker also designed the self-adjusting mechanism of the liner lock to ensure that the blade will not loosen due to long-term use. So far, the new safer and more effective liner lock in the history of human knife use: Liner lock was born!
Due to his personality, Walker, who is nearly sixty this year, still maintains a low-key living habit. He does not have a personal website, and the knives he makes are usually collected by wealthy people, so private orders are kept very confidential. So much so that the media didn’t know whether he was still maintaining the habit of making knives. But his previous inventions did affect the entire field of knife making. If we talk about the selection of “the strongest on the surface”, this knife maker is hard to be ignored by people.
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