He Chased a Basketball Court for Ten Years: Nicholas Nichols Knives

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Nick spent a decade trying to get his hands on a piece of hardwood.

Not rare hardwood. Specifically the floor Duke won a national championship on. He finally tracked it down in a storage unit in Durham.

That is the shortest way to explain what makes Nicholas Nichols Knives different from every other shop on this tour. The steel is excellent. The folders are excellent. But the thing Nick has built a decade on is the handle, and more precisely the story inside it.

The battleship two miles away

It started with the USS North Carolina, which is docked about two miles from his house. He drove past it constantly.

He got wood from the ship and put it on kitchen knives, and something happened that he did not expect.

"It connected people to it," he said. "Connecting the knife to a story."

He talks about it in commercial terms and emotional terms in the same breath, which I appreciated.

"What do you buy somebody that has everything? If you can connect a story to a piece that they can have for the rest of their lives, it marries this perfect thing."

Some of the people buying those knives had a father or a grandfather who served on that ship. Some visited as kids. Nick has watched people get emotional holding one, and he is clear that the knife is not what did that.

Once he realized the battleship market was not infinite, he went looking for more.

The pen turning world got there first, decades ago. Those makers have been putting wood from historic sites into hand turned pens for years, so Nick found a supplier in Virginia he describes as the authority on it, a man with material from Independence Hall, from the White House during Washington's time, from the tree that came down at Augusta a few years back. Every piece of it comes with documented provenance, which is the part that matters.

After that he started going direct. He has called universities and asked, and a feature in the state magazine a few years back gave him enough credibility that people took the call.

"I have a little bit of credibility to say, hey, I'm not just some idiot trying to get some stuff to make something in my house."

He now has material sourced first hand from North Carolina, NC State, Duke, and Wake Forest, plus UNCW down the road in Wilmington and pieces of the Dean Smith Center floor that he cuts into small scalloped keepsakes and gives away.

There is also bourbon barrel wood from Kentucky, some Virginia Tech, and a piece from a firearm he cannot identify off the top of his head but has paperwork for somewhere.

Eight hours a day holding a knife

Before any of this, Nick was a chef. He graduated from Johnson & Wales, which he notes turned out Emeril among others.

Standing behind a knife for seven or eight hours a day teaches you things about knives that no amount of shop time will.

Two of those lessons are built into his 8-inch chef's knife, which has no clever name because he tried to think of one and could not.

The blade is tall on purpose. "I got tired of hitting my hands on the cutting board," he said. Work through a pile of carrots or potatoes and the extra height keeps your knuckles clear. He also pointed out that grinding a taller blade is more work, so it is not a styling choice.

The handle has a Coke bottle shape, and the reasoning is better than most ergonomic claims I hear.

As a chef he chokes up high on the handle. Someone with big hands will not. Someone with small hands holds it somewhere else again. The curve gives all three of those grips a place to sit, so the same knife works for him, for a line cook twice his size, and for his wife.

The thing that surprised me physically was the weight. I am used to EDC fixed blades, and this was a big knife that felt like nothing. The stock runs around a hundred thousandths, thin and slicy in a way a thicker knife cannot be.

He told himself when he started making folders that he was done with kitchen knives. He now expects to make kitchen knives for the rest of his life.

The junkyard, and the master

Nick grew up in a junkyard surrounded by people who made things. His father was an engineer at General Electric, as was his uncle, and there were always old machines and odd materials to build with.

When he got serious about knives, he made a deliberate decision based on his experience learning golf, which he taught himself badly.

"I don't know that I want to do this knife thing the same way I did the golf thing."

So he found people to learn from. Chris Williams was one, a retired special forces operator in Fayetteville who builds the Wilmont grinders Nick now runs two of, and who manufactures them almost entirely in North Carolina.

The one he calls his master is Scott McGee, who lived about an hour away at the time.

"I would go hang out at Scott's house and learn and learn and learn, and he was so gracious to teach me."

Nick is unusually honest about what that meant early on. In the beginning, he says, his work was straight copies of McGee's. It moved away from that over time, but he does not pretend otherwise.

The Guppy, his flagship folder, exists because McGee made a knife called the Piranha.

"I called it the Guppy because I didn't think the Guppy was worthy of the Piranha."

The name stuck.

The longest 31 seconds of his life

Nick went on Forged in Fire, and he was there, by his own estimate, about fifteen minutes. Possibly seven.

He is refreshingly direct about the experience.

"It definitely is a game show. You have to sign game show papers. It's on a sound stage. They tell you to ham it up."

He also had a problem. Nick does not really forge. He started that way, but his work now is almost entirely stock removal, and he was convinced that grinding on camera would get him sent home.

"I was terrified that if I actually did stock removal, I'd get kicked off."

So he forged a puzzle knife that had to fit inside a puzzle piece, working the steel far more than he normally would, heating and dipping and heating and dipping. With about half a minute left on the clock, it split.

"The longest 31 seconds of my life. They're like, fix it. I'm like, how? There's no way to fix it."

He went home. He also came away with friendships he still keeps, including guys he exchanges Christmas presents with, which is not the outcome the edit usually suggests.

The garage

The shop is a garage, and it exists in its current form because of the kids' bikes.

"My wife would get mad and say, hey, we've got to buy the kids new bikes because you ruined them with all the stuff that was on them."

So he built a proper room. Windows with a fan, two air filters, normally more fans than were running while we were there. Two Wilmont grinders, a disc grinder with a jig behind it for handle angles, a band saw, a drill press, a heat treat oven, and a surface platen made in Texas.

"There's not a step wasted based on what we have in here."

He walked me through a knife from the beginning. A hand drawn sketch, refined across several iterations, becomes a pattern. The pattern gets traced onto steel. He cuts it on the band saw as close to the line as he can without crossing it.

"I wasn't really good at coloring in the lines. That's kind of what happened."

Heat treat happens in there. Then a center line gets scribed, a file guide clamps on, and he grinds to that line. Handles get glued up from stacked wood, drilled, pinned, cut back on the same band saw, then shaped on the disc grinder.

The folders

The Guppy 3.5 is all American, full titanium with a MagnaCut blade, Skiff bearings with washers inside to keep the bearings off the titanium, a milled pocket clip, and titanium hardware throughout. The one he handed me lives in his pocket.

The Dreadnought was the second knife he ever made, and it came from customers who would not leave him alone.

The story goes like this. He made a big cartoonish cleaver. People told him to make a small one. He said he never would. He made a small one, and it became his second most popular knife. Then they told him to make it fold.

He did not want to copy what was already out there, so he worked in a fuller that doubles as a second way to open it. That knife also runs double row Skiff bearings rather than the single row on the 3.5, which he delivered with the appropriate amount of drama.

"I think I just broke the internet."

Some of them come back anodized and lasered by Scott at USA Made Blades. There is also a Blade Runner Outpost exclusive in an 80s camo carbon from Andy at Camo Carbon in California that reacts under UV light.

What he is still chasing

Nick has been at this professionally for about a decade, and the current bottleneck is machines.

The Guppy parts are made in the States but not by him, and he wants that in house.

"I tell people I'm a dumb cook. I don't really know a whole lot about machining."

He has taken classes. He also knows what the equipment costs, and what he would want runs somewhere around 50 or 60 thousand dollars.

"I'm just not ready to jump off that bridge yet."

The reason is sitting in the house. He has three teenagers, one heading to college with twins right behind.

"I don't want to sacrifice their future for what my aspirations are."

On keeping production domestic, his first answer was that he does not entirely know why it started that way. He spent years in sales and liked being able to pick up a phone and talk to a person. What it turned into is a conviction.

"I want to keep as much of it here as I can. I don't like the idea of things going overseas. I don't like the idea of people losing jobs."

He is also clear that it is hard, and that the hardest part is not manufacturing.

"It's hard to source things in the United States, and then try to compete and tell somebody why it's better for you to pay this money."

He thinks the last five to seven years have brought real momentum back toward American made, and he still has to make the case one customer at a time.

The most honest thing he said came near the end, about the business itself.

"This thing has been built and rebuilt three or four times, and I just can't let it go. It's something that burns inside of me."

Some of those rebuilds came from trusting the wrong people with parts of the operation. The website is still standing but currently empty for that reason.

For now, the way to get one is through his dealers. USA Made Blades and DT Trading both stock him, along with Blade Runner Outpost in Tennessee, and he works with several Whatnot sellers including Boss Hog the Blade Man, Sweet 2A Outfitters in Virginia, and Ridge Runner.

He named a maker he is chasing, someone further down the road than he is, and said he tells the man so directly.

The reply he gets back is the right one. Come on then. You can get here too.

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The Great American Knife Tour is a three week run through more than 35 American shops. Watch the full playlist on YouTube, then go buy something made here.