Everything in This Shop Was Found, Built, or Inherited: Clayton at Burning Stables Forge

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The forge Clayton runs at Burning Stables Forge started life as a brake drum on an 18-wheeler. He found it on the side of the road.

He built the rest of it himself. The door, the counterweights, the housing, all of it out of a scrapyard. The only two things he bought were the switch and the blower. It is 18 inches long with a 13-inch ribbon burner in it, and it will run hot enough to do serious Damascus work.

That is the fastest way I know to explain this shop. Almost nothing in it was bought new, and a surprising amount of it he made.

A crowbar and a framing hammer

Clayton's first knife happened because business was slow.

He and his brother-in-law ran a gold and silver buying operation during the big gold boom, and when the counter went quiet they needed something to do. There was a crowbar in the back of the truck. There was a framing hammer. There was an oxy acetylene torch.

"We took turns in between watching the counter and forging a knife," he said. "He would do what he wanted, then I'd go do what I wanted."

The anvil was a Harbor Freight special. His brother-in-law still has it. What came out the other end was a little teeny knife, and Clayton still has that.

This was before Forged in Fire aired, which he is careful to point out, though he gives the show its due for making him want to fire the forge back up years later.

His first real anvil after that was a section of railroad track.

The reason he is in South Carolina at all

Clayton did not grow up planning any of this. Out of high school he went straight into construction and took every job in the trade he could get.

"I did tile, I did electrical, I did insulation, I carried plywood for years," he said. Framing, all of it. He built a business out of that work, climbed into management, eventually sold his company, then went to work managing for somebody else. That last part did not work out.

What moved him home was his father getting sick.

His sister Kathy lives close to their parents and had been doing everything she could, but she needed help. She talked him into coming back.

"He had to leave where he was living and his job to come here and help us," Kathy said. "And I said, let's make this thing happen."

So the business is not a career plan that went well. It is what two siblings built after one of them came home for their dad.

Kathy does all the leather. Every sheath that leaves the shop is hers. She also handles the editing and the computer work, which she describes with a straight face as everything her brother does not want to do.

"He gets to have the fun, and I do the hard stuff."

I asked her what it is like working with her brother, since that arrangement goes badly for a lot of families.

"We grew up together, we knew each other as kids, but then I had kids and we were both doing life," she said. "I feel like I'm meeting him all over again and getting to know my best friend again."

The shop

It is a small space in a neighborhood, and Clayton's phrase for it is that they make the best with what they have got.

The horizontal saw for cutting billets was a Marketplace find. The leg vise was a Marketplace find, and he built the stand for it. The hydraulic pump came off Marketplace in Savannah for 200 dollars, and it feeds a 30-ton press that Clayton built around free steel and a cylinder he bought.

The drill press was his grandfather's, an old Craftsman built by King-Seeley. His grandfather's machinist toolbox is in there too, now full of leather supplies. He built a stand for the Milwaukee portable band saw. There is a Delta 14-inch wood band saw whose logo my brain insists is a Triforce and which Clayton insists is just Delta's logo.

The mill is old and, in his words, a little clapped out, but it handles small work.

There is a 1x30 grinder he keeps around because it is the one he learned on, and then there is the workhorse, a 2x72 running a two horse three phase motor.

There is also a 1976 shovelhead in the garage, which he presented as a requirement rather than a choice.

Old ways, new tools

Clayton originally wanted a coal forge with a hand crank. The romantic version.

Southern heat killed that idea, along with the reality of running a shop in a neighborhood.

"I can't have billowing smoke coming outside of the yard next to the neighbor's house," he said.

So he went propane and ribbon burner, and the control turned out to matter more than the romance once he started doing more Damascus.

I asked him whether he sees CNC shops as competition or as a different lane on the same road. His answer was more interesting than either option.

"To make it as a small knife maker, either you have to be really high end and elite and into customs, or maybe you need to embrace it."

Embrace it means, for him, a shop that eventually runs power hammers and CNC side by side, with production runs that are still made in America but priced where normal people can reach them. He wants to get into folders. He does not see a contradiction.

He is also clear eyed about the market he is in.

"You have a flooded market with hand forged knives. So where it sets you apart is your Damascus work, your quality, and people wanting your stuff."

Why he lives on YouTube

Clayton is on social media constantly, and it is deliberate.

Instagram came first, built off his personal page with friends and family following along. Then, he says, shadowbanning pushed him toward YouTube, which has worked out better.

I raised something I think about a lot, which is that people spend enormous money on a Picasso, and the canvas is only part of what they are buying.

He went straight at it.

"Why is someone buying a knife from me? What makes my drop point more special than all the other makers out there making drop point knives?" he said. "In my opinion, it's because I'm selling myself on social media. People get to see who I really am. I'm not saying my knives are better or different or worse than anyone else's. They like the personality, and they like to buy things from people like that."

The long-form video is part of the same argument. A Damascus build can run four, five, even eight hours of real work, and he compresses it into something around 45 minutes to an hour.

"It still doesn't give you the full representation," he said. Which is why he also does live streams that run eight hours, sometimes with other makers coming on as guests.

Ask him whether people understand how much work goes into a hand forged knife and the answer is honest. Some do. Not all.

Five hours on a railroad spike

The plan for the day was to turn a railroad spike into a knife with Ariah, which is a nice piece of symmetry given that a spike knife is exactly what Johnathan Sibley told us he uses to teach beginners two stops earlier on this tour.

It took five hours. We started at ten and finished at three.

The process goes like this. Heat it, then upset the end by hitting it down into itself to pack more material into the spike. Mark the handle section with two or four lines, then twist it, which leaves it looking like four separate pieces wound together. Then forge out the blade and, as Clayton put it, let the knife make itself.

Somewhere in the middle of that I noticed he taps the anvil lightly between real hammer blows.

"It's a timing thing," he said. "It comes into you kind of naturally. It's not something I really set out to do."

Things went wrong at one point, which is the part worth keeping. A cold shut formed near the tip, a crease in the steel from over squishing it, and it showed up as a yellow line. He pointed it out rather than quietly working around it, then ground it out and checked it again.

He also stamped the blade before we came back from lunch. GAKT 26 for the Great American Knife Tour, plus the horse head from his old logo, which he put on because Ariah had asked about his tattoos.

When she saw it, neither of us could actually read it, and Clayton laughed at us trying to be polite about it before opening the stamp up and cleaning it.

His philosophy on the finish is worth repeating.

"This is the style of knife where you don't want it to look like it's not handmade," he said. Little scratches, little marks, small evidence of the day. "Leaving little details, little moments on it, in my opinion makes them more fun."

The sharpening lesson at the end was a good one. He had her run a finger along the edge to feel the burr, which is how you know you have gone past the apex, then worked up through the grits to take it off.

Kathy made the sheath in red, white, and blue, and then spent a solid minute talking trash about her own work.

"That's the jankiest sheath I've ever made. I wanted to make it again and I didn't have time."

She put a clip on it. Her stated reason was to hide her mistake. It looked good.

What the knife is actually for

At one point during the forging Clayton said the thing that explains why we are doing this tour at all.

"We're not going for a top of the line knife here. This is something that you and your dad on the tour get to have and experience and remember."

Then Ariah and I said "memories" at each other like a couple of dorks, and we went back to work.

He is also generous about her, and she earned it.

"You were on plane every time. It was killer. I never had to be like, hey, get over here. You were already there."

That is a 13-year-old on her third forge in three states, holding a hammer steady for five hours in a South Carolina summer.

Where to find them

Burning Stables Forge is at burningstablesforge.com, and the honest sales pitch Clayton gave is that the site is sold out. He works in drops, so the move is to follow along and watch for one.

They are on Instagram and YouTube under the same name. The lives are YouTube only and they run long, with giveaways and guest makers.

If you want to see how many hours are actually behind one of these knives, that is where to look.

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