BLADE Staff

Instagram Photos Land Knife Retailer in International Hot Water

Instagram is a haven for the knife community (follow BLADE‘s account here), but some accounts are under fire for promoting products legal in one country but illegal in another. 

Take Alien Outfitter’s Instagram account. Based out of the United States, Alien Outfitters sells knives disguised as mundane objects, such as combs or lipstick. When Instagram users in the United Kingdom followed links to order the knives, they could successfully make a purchase. Such knives, however, are banned from import.

Rather than keeping this a customer service issue, some are attacking Instagram itself for hosting the images in the first place.

From The Telegraph:

The Ben Kinsella Trust, a campaigning charity set up in memory of Ben Kinsella, a 16-year-old stabbed to death in Islington a decade ago, said it was appalling that Instagram was helping promote the US company Alien Outfitters.

“Instagram’s action in hosting this site is reprehensible,” said Patrick Green, the charity’s chief executive. “They are glamorising these knives as fashion accessories. This is a forum where young people openly encourage each other to break the law by buying flick knives and concealed knives which are illegal for any age group.”

BLADE does not condone purchasing knives that are illegal in your area. However, it finds that attacking images of knives posted online that are otherwise illegal is as fruitless as it gets. There are thousands upon thousands of knife-related accounts on Instagram. The Internet at large contains millions of blogs, websites and social media accounts depicting knives.

To that end, Instagram is not in the wrong here. Whether the retailer or customer is more at fault isn’t a question I can answer. Oftentimes, stories like these are how the knife community learns about the hard stops in the patchwork of knife laws around the world.

UK Police Find It “Disappointing” Anyone Would Carry a Knife

Policies discouraging knife ownership in the United Kingdom are often cited in the global knife community, but it can be difficult back up their impact with numbers.

Enter the “Bin a Blade” campaign. It solicits unwanted knives from the public using drop boxes, similar to how people in the United States can dispose of prescription meds at police stations. In Suffolk, England, the campaign took in 20,000 knives.

From The Lowestoft Journal:

Likewise, Suffolk’s police and crime commissioner Tim Passmore pledged his support to the initiative.

He said: “To see that over 20,000 blades have been collected since the initiative was launched is excellent.

“We need to do all we can through education, peer pressure, policing and sentencing to make it absolutely clear that it’s never acceptable for a person to carry a knife or weapon.

“I find it really disappointing that anyone carries a blade of any kind.”

Reducing crime is a worthy cause, but one questions the efficacy of such amnesty drives. In 2006, when 90,000 knives were turned in as part of a UK-wide amnesty drive, crime rates changed little. 

Further amnesty drives did little to change the upward swing of violence in years since. In England and Wales, last year marked the highest number of crimes involving a knife or sharp instrument since 2011, according to the BBC. Most of these crimes involved robbery or assault.

Although knives remain the instrument of choice for criminals, 77 percent of violent attacks are committed with no weapons at all. 

As for knives, they account for seven percent of attacks.

Cape Town Water Crisis Impacts Knifemakers

but no rain! Are you kidding me! pic.twitter.com/dI4Smz4XXl

— Tim Flack (@tim_meh87) February 13, 2018

Four million people will be without water in a few months unless conditions change in Cape Town, South Africa. That includes knifemakers living in the area.

BLADE is hearing from the hot knife shops in Cape Town under stress due to water restrictions and related pressures. The impacts include the obvious, such as using leftover shower water to flush toilets, to the lesser known, such as the steep opportunity costs of waiting in line for water. The criminal element is also on the rise as people become more desperate.

BLADE will continue to monitor the feedback from knifemakers in the area, and present opportunities for those outside South Africa to help should they arise.

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Medieval Knives Doubled as Erasers?

Nothing brings back grade school memories like those big, pink erasers. However, medieval students used knives instead of rubber.

From Atlas Obscura:

The job of a scribe was to copy the text from an existing manuscript using a quill pen and an inkhorn. When they made mistakes, they had to scrape the ink off the page with a sharp knife, a painstaking job that could easily ruin a piece of parchment.

Read the full article and see an example of such a knife here.

Video: How Well Can a Wooden Knife Perform?

How well can a knife made out of wood perform? Pretty dang well.

This video details how a man in Japan, identified only by his YouTube channel Kiwami Japan, shaped a knife from a wooden blank using sandpaper and whetstones. 

Here’s the video, featuring a few cutting tests:

The key is the lignum vitae wood the man used. It’s “the densest and hardest wood known,” according to the Forest Legality Initiative. 

Lignum vitae is regulated under Article II of the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species. That means you’re not doing to pick this type of wood up from Home Depot. Still, it’s another admirable example of creativity meeting craftsmanship.

New Hollywood Steak Restaurant Will Feature Knives Made In-House

Adam Perry Lang gained renown for running a barbecue smoker outside the studio of Jimmy Kimmel Live in Los Angeles. Now, Lang is set to open a steak restaurant with something sharp on the menu: knives made by the chef himself.

From Variety:

Walking into Lang’s man-cave/test kitchen, the first thing you spot is the double-barreled smoker rig that Lang tows to various barbecue events. The next thing is the forge. Glowing at something like 2000 degrees, the renowned pitmaster heats a piece of vaguely knife-shaped raw steel until it glows bright orange, puts it on the anvil and gives it a dozen or so good thwonks with a mallet on the way to making a sharp edge. Making Damascus steel knives by hand is just one of his clutch of obsessions — and APL diners will be able to slice into their aged steaks with Lang’s own carefully-forged blades.

Read the full article here.

Knifemaker Turns Out Blades with 14-Year-Old Grandson

The Tribune-Review out of western Pennsylvania recently profiled a grandfather/grandson combo keeping the tradition of bladesmith alive. The article was originally about a heart attack the grandfather experienced, but to BLADE that’s second to the fact a multi-generational pair was pounding steel in the first place.

From the article:

After his heart attack, Eyth had three stents placed in his major coronary artery. But, he said, “It didn’t stop or slow me down much. They wanted me to take it easy for a month or two.”

The pace of production at Eyth’s forge has slowed some, mainly because his son doesn’t participate as much, he said. But his 14-year-old grandson, Joe, has stepped in to help fill the gap.

“We’re still turning out 120 to 130 knives in a year,” said Eyth, who puts some of his knives to use when he hunts deer.

Read the full article here.

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