I wrote about Michael’s work last year so today about a year on I visited again and took some more photos of him at work making lovely pocket knives at his workshop at Portland Works. He now has a great website up where you can go and buy his knives. Check them out here This is his cutlers stool. As a…
Here’s a short film of Brian Alcock the last self employed grinder working in Sheffield. It’s a trade that dates back many centuries. The city is literally paved with worn out grindstones in places. Once every stream running through the area was dammed to power thousands of waterwheels. Brian grinds all of our axes along with work for many other…
Well 2016 has been an amazing year for us. We have made so many tools for other woodworkers, particularly axes and hook knives for spooncarvers. 2017 is going to start off well too. Today we finally got the tooling fitted to the old fly press I bought from the workshop of Trevor Ablett and Reg Cooper. A bit of old…
Sheffield has always been famous for high quality knives, now there is a new name to look out for and his work is very exciting. Regular blog readers will have been familiar with the work of Trevor Ablett and his death was a sad loss but I have great news. Michael May is a young knife maker who has served his…
This week I have been making another batch of spooncarving knife blades, or perhaps I should say blade blanks as the bulk of the time in a finished blade is actually in the final sharpening processes. Anyway these are the blades at the first stage of bending, these ones are all right handers. I bend them all at 20 degrees…
I was at Portland Works in Sheffield last week and wanted to share a couple of pics of Andrew at Wigful tools grinding a 3″ bolster chisel. I have learnt a lot from Sheffield folk about grinding, forging, hardening and tempering steel but when I see proper professionals at work I still feel very much an amateur with my metalwork.…
Sheffield is famous across the world for steel, cutlery and metal trades. Steel was first mass produced here using the crucible process and stainless steel first made into cutlery here in 1913. Times move on however, the majority of that kind of manufacturing moved out to China and Sheffield Council have successfully invested in rebranding the city “Creative Sheffield“ English…
Last week I was away on holiday but Radio 4 did a nice piece on the plight of Portland Works and the traditional Sheffield trades housed there. I did a brief interview the week before which is included toward the end and if you are in the UK you can listen to it on iplayer here Portland Works item starts…
The campaign to save Portland works is entering it’s last days now. The planning meeting will be some time between now and 18th February. Portland is the first place in the world where stainless steel was made into cutlery, probably more people in the world today use stainless cutlery than speak the English Language, it could be argued to be…
Last week I posted about visiting a traditional Sheffield pocketknife maker with Jon Henley from the Guardian. Now you can see Jon’s slide show here. Appologies for wrong link posted yesterday. http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/audioslideshow/2010/jan/26/sheffield-pocket-knife-trevor-ablett If you like it why not post a comment here or sign up to the guardian site and post a comment below the slide show. The more interest…
