Rusty Preston gets an unforgettable slipjoint from good friends.

As a founding member of the South Texas Slipjoint Cartel, Rusty Preston made lots of traditional pocketknives over the years, but never did he have one made for him like the trapper recently built by fellow Cartel member Phil Jacob and Ben Champagne.

It all started when a friend sent Ben some green Micarta® bearing some unusual part and serial numbers. They traced it back to a Vietnam-era F4 Phantom fighter jet. The Micarta was part of a chafing block used on F4s as a support to keep hydraulic-activated metal rods used throughout the plane from rubbing or chafing against each other. Ben and Phil knew Rusty was an Air Force pilot during the Vietnam War and when they learned he flew an F4, they decided to use the Micarta in making a surprise knife for him.

The knife had to be a slipjoint, of course, and the two decided on a one-blade trapper pattern. Phil made the blade and springs and Ben made the handle. For a shield they figured a silhouette of an F4 would be appropriate. They got a photograph of an F4 to use as a guide and made the shield of 416 stainless steel to inlay into the Micarta. However, the shield was an inch-and-a-half long.

“It was so long it wouldn’t fit from the center pin to the pivot pin,” Phil said.

The solution? The knife would have to be a shadow pattern, which has no bolsters and provides a bigger canvas for a shield. Phil added some Roman knot filework—which Rusty taught him how to do—to the backspring, and the result is a really cool pocketknife.

Once the trapper was done, they had to settle on a place where they could all meet, including many members of the Cartel, and Rusty would be there, too. BLADE Show Texas would be the place and Rusty was about to get a surprise for the ages.

Parting Gift

Rusty and his wife Sally had visited with BLADE Magazine Cutlery Hall-of-Fame® member Bill Ruple and the rest of the Cartel members during the show at the Fort Worth Convention Center and were preparing to leave on show Saturday.

“We were just saying our goodbyes and somebody hollered at me—Bill, I think—‘Hey Rusty, come over here,’ and I realized he was at the end of the aisle and he had a group of guys there,” Rusty recalled “Everybody there was a friend of mine, and I thought, ‘Oh, what’s gonna happen here?,’ and sure enough Sally and I walked up—Sally knew about it but I had not a clue—and they started in on me.”

It was all Rusty could do to keep from breaking down—which is about what he did.

“I’ve had this birth defect I’ve had all my life,” he said. “I can squall like a baby at an ice-skating contest at something like that, so it was pretty hard on me but in a good way—you know how that is. So they told me they wanted to present me with something and I saw what it was and I couldn’t believe it. It came as a total, absolute surprise to me. I was dumfounded at what they had done, and why they saw fit to honor me in that fashion is a marvel to me.

“It was just an honor to look around and see the approval on every one of those guys’ faces for what was happening.”

Rusty called the work on the knife “stunning.”

“It’s got both Ben and Phil’s names on the blade and it’s just absolutely outstanding detail work on the inlay and the silhouette of the F4,” he observed. “That took a lot of effort. I don’t know how they managed to get ahold of all that but they did. It’s beautiful, it’s perfect.”

But what about that Micarta? How in the heck was Ben able to obtain material meant for an F4 Phantom jet fighter? Some things are just better left unsaid.

“The fact that the handle material is what it is and where it came from, how in the world Ben ever got ahold of F4 parts I don’t know. And I’m scared to ask him,” Rusty grinned, “because he’d probably tell me.”

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