Forty Years at the Forge: Johnathan Sibley of Djinn Designs

Watch The Great American Knife Tour™ video: https://youtu.be/hrtVrqE7_3U
Watch previous visit to Djinn Desgins: https://youtu.be/xGoEUuZPQZQ

Edom, Texas sits about halfway between Canton and Tyler. If you have trouble finding it, Johnathan Sibley has directions. Stop at the stop sign and look around. You can see the whole town from there.

That is where The Blade Bar is, and where we spent Day 1 of the Great American Knife Tour. My daughter Ariah came with me. She is 13 years old. By the end of the afternoon she had forged her first knife by hand, an 80CrV2 santoku with micarta scales, standing at an anvil with a man who started making knives at exactly the same age she is now.

Johnathan noticed that before I did.

A feral East Texas kid with a magazine

He grew up, in his own words, a feral East Texas kid. Knives, bows, sticks, guns, all the country kid stuff. Then one day he picked up a copy of Blade or Knives Illustrated, he cannot remember which anymore, and something clicked.

"There were way cooler knives in there than there were in Howard's Hardware," he said. "And there was a picture of the guy that made it right next to the knife. I said, I want to do that."

Nobody in his family had any blacksmithing experience. His dad's response was to shrug and say all right, let's figure it out. So Johnathan figured it out the hard way, which he describes as learning about screwing stuff up for a very long time.

Part of that was the era. This was 1984, and knife making was not the open community it is today. "It was more of a, forgive the pun, a cutthroat cottage industry," he said. "A lot of the guys thought they had trade secrets and viewed everybody as competition."

Bill Moran and others had started changing that in the late seventies and early eighties, but a kid in East Texas with no mentor was still on his own. Johnathan has never forgotten it. He teaches now because of it.

"I feel I owe it to 13-year-old me to pass that knowledge along, because nobody did it for me. Therefore, I must do it for others."

Which is roughly the moment he looked at Ariah and told her to pick up the hammer.

Why any of this still matters

I asked him a question I thought might be a softball. We have CNC machines now. We have stock removal, powder steels, tolerances measured in ten thousandths. Does it actually matter whether anyone still knows how to do this by hand?

He did not treat it as a softball.

"We are unfortunately in a situation right now, and it has been for decades, where the knowledge of how things are made is being taken away from us," he said. "And being replaced with a very consumerist mindset. Like people not knowing how to fix things, and now we have the auto industry trying to make it where you cannot fix things."

Then he gave me the analogy I keep thinking about. "This is no different than knowing how to make a cake from scratch. It does not take a rocket surgeon to do it from a box. But not everybody knows how to do it from scratch."

His point was less about knives than about permission. "You do not just have to watch it. You can do it."

The shop his wife signed for

Johnathan spent years making knives in the backyard while working a regular paycheck job. He was a graphic designer for a long stretch of that. Then Forged in Fire happened, and then something better happened.

The knife maker in Ben Wheeler had retired. Ben Wheeler is a small East Texas town that had a crazy old millionaire named Brooks Gromel, who built the place a playground, bars, restaurants, and a knife shop. After Gromel passed away, his widow Reese decided the town was going to keep having a knife maker in it, and she spent three or four months scouting everyone within driving distance. Johnathan was the first one she called.

He walked in and did the math in his head. Storefront, workshop, room for the smithy. Everything he wanted, at a number he assumed was out of reach.

"I said, I would absolutely love to have this place, but I do not think we can afford it. My wife said, oh no, you do not understand. You just got to sign right here, because I already signed up here."

Three months in she called him at work on a Wednesday. They had a knife shop with three knives in the cabinet, she said, and this was not a doable thing. He started mentally packing up the shop.

"She is like, no no no no no. I need you to put in your two weeks notice, because you need to be up here making knives. I am like, do not threaten me with a good time, woman."

He has been a full-time knife maker ever since, and he credits his wife freely and often. She has a master's degree in organizational management and runs the business and the social media.

"There are three knife wives," he told me. "There is the teacher knife wife, the nurse knife wife, and the business knife wife. I got the business knife wife."

The 95% knife

Ask Johnathan what he is proudest of in the actual work and he will show you something he calls a 95% knife.

The idea is this. Weigh the blade when it comes off the anvil. Then weigh it again when it is hardened, ground, drilled, and ready for handle scales. It should still be 95 percent of the same mass.

"If you are going to forge a knife, why not forge it as close to finished as possible?" he said. "It is an exercise in smithing skill to get it as close as possible."

You still have to grind through the decarburized skin, a layer a couple of thousandths thick where the carbon burned out of the surface. You still have to drill pin holes. Past that, the goal is to take away as little material as you can and just reorganize the mass in the piece into the shape you want.

Hand one of these to someone who knows what they are looking at and they notice immediately. Eased and rounded under the chin, and forged all the way around otherwise. Almost no profiling by hand.

It sits at the far end of the spectrum from Damascus, which he also loves, and which he explained in a way that finally made the pricing make sense to me. On a Damascus Bowie, making the steel can eat half the labor of making the knife. Material loss runs 20 to 60 percent between scaling and restacking, and pattern development is mostly subtractive on top of that.

"It is not just expensive because it looks cool," he said. "It is expensive because there is a lot of labor and a lot of material loss involved."

On steel, and on the forged versus stock removal argument

Ariah's knife is 80CrV2, Johnathan's pick for the best balanced forgeable steel there is. People push back on that, since O1, W2, and 1095 all carry more carbon and hold an edge longer. His answer is that they give up too much for it.

"You sacrifice a gram of edge retention for a pound of toughness," he said. "If you have extreme edge retention but your edge is going to chip out, you are not going to yield as much benefit from that edge retention as if your edge does not chip out."

I asked about the HRC arms race, since every MagnaCut spec sheet on the internet is currently arguing about whether 63 beats 60. He said it depends entirely on the steel. Forgeable steels only make you balance two things. Stainless makes you balance three, adding corrosion resistance to the pile.

As for the argument that will not die, forged versus stock removal, he refuses to play.

"It is not a matter of better. It is a matter of cooler," he said. "It is really cool to have a high edge retention knife with carbon fiber scales in CPM 20CV with insane edge retention. Also super cool to have one that was hammered out by hand. It is like asking which is cooler, a sports car or a truck. It just depends on who you are."

The thing everybody gets wrong about quenching

Since he teaches beginners constantly, I asked what myth he hears most. He did not hesitate.

The idea that you have to quench a blade on a north-south axis or it will warp. He says that is nonsense, and the real mechanism is simpler and more interesting.

"It warps because we have one insulator on this planet, and that is air. When you put something hot in something liquid, it makes bubbles. Which is air, which is an insulator. If those bubbles congregate unevenly, they will cause a warpage."

That is why he quenches with a fast up and down motion, what he calls stabby stabby. Move it side to side and you gain bubbles on one face while losing them on the other. Swirl it in circles and you get a corkscrew twist. An uneven vapor jacket does that, not the resistance of the oil.

He also pointed out that forgeable steel does not go fully hard until it drops below 400 degrees, roughly the smoke point of the quench oil. The blade comes out smoking and still has hardening left to do, so he clamps it dead straight and lets it finish that way. He called the clamp cheap insurance.

The shirt

Johnathan's shirt that day read "I will denazify but I will not renazify," and there is a reason he has been selling a lot of knives lately.

Somebody came into the shop with a couple of Hitler Youth knives. One had intact engraving, the other had the engraving scrubbed out but still carried the emblem. The customer wanted the emblem moved onto the other knife. He said no.

The whole thing got caught on camera. His wife watched it, had to pull over on the way to a volleyball tournament in Louisiana because she was laughing so hard, and posted it. By the time she reached the hotel a couple of hours later it had thousands of likes.

"She called me and said, um, I think I did a thing."

Within days people were telling them, not asking, that they had to make shirts. Buyers in other countries could not easily buy a knife because knife laws vary, so they bought shirts instead. When I talked to him after it went viral he had four of his own pieces in the cabinet, and that was the most stock he had managed to keep since it hit.

He still does not seem to understand the fuss, which is part of why people like him.

"I have had a lot of people say I am a hero for it, but I just thought we had settled this 80 years ago," he said. "My granddad and all my great uncles went and fought a whole war over this thing. I thought we had figured this out."

What he actually teaches

If you want to learn from him, he runs classes at The Blade Bar. The best starting point is the railroad spike knife or tomahawk class. A spike is just under a three quarter inch square bar, and about four inches of it will stretch into a three to four inch blade an inch wide and three sixteenths thick. Watching that happen is the whole lesson. Mass does not disappear. You move it.

It is also a lot of hammer work, which he considers the point. His advice to anyone who watched Forged in Fire and now wants to make knives is to come take a class and find out which thing you actually love.

"You get an idea if it is the idea of doing it you like, or the doing it you like. Because once you get into it, there ain't no 12-step program to get out."

In November he is co-hosting an event with Forging Forward, a two-day clinic for first responders and veterans where everyone leaves with a knife they made. He talked about it more seriously than anything else that day.

"A lot of those guys were not fully formed adults when they went into the military and are fully formed adults when they come out, and that is all they know, high school and military," he said. Guys who have come through have told him it helped to see that non-military people care.

Is knife making financially rewarding? I asked. His answer was the best line of the day.

"I have been this broke making somebody else rich, and I want to choke a lot less people."

Ariah's knife

The last step before hardening was a size check. Johnathan's anvil face is four inches across, which happens to be a good average handle length for most adult hands. He laid the blade against it and explained that the only real indexing point is the finger well. Get that right and the other three fingers fall into the curve whether the hand is big or small.

Then the quench. Stabby stabby, fast, up and down. She pulled it out and the scale had blown off the surface, which is how you know it hardened. Blue painter's tape and a few specks of super glue to line up the pin holes. A finish grind. Then snow seal, mostly beeswax and mineral oil, worked into the steel and the handle as a rust preventative.

Forty-one years after a 13-year-old in East Texas decided he wanted to do this and could not find anybody to show him how, a 13-year-old girl walked out of his shop with a knife she made herself.

That seems like the right way to settle a debt.

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Djinn Designs knives are sold in person at The Blade Bar in Edom, Texas, and through their Etsy shop. Classes and event information are available at bladebar.com and on their Facebook and Instagram pages.