My passion for blade-making started when I moved into my wife’s grandpa’s house in New Jersey. He had passed and he left his wooden house there, unused, sitting on a 36-acre tree farm that shares grounds with a reservoir. The experience to live there was inspiring in many ways, not just because of the nature that surrounded me, but mostly because of the marks left by a man that lived on his own. He harvested water from his well and most of his food from his hunt. He had a nice workshop, thousands of tools that kept his autonomous living shiny and well. Every single tool showed the texture of a well-worn important piece of his living. You could feel that the retired engineer was in his workshop everyday, and when I got there it felt like he had just stepped out for a minute to go buy a can of SKOAL long-cut chewing tobacco, his favorite. There, I found myself fond of tools on a visceral level and decided to start creating axes and knives, all etched with his name, ‘Russell Butler’.
