Knife-making is almost meditative for me.
There's a lot of passion behind it.
There's a lot of hard work behind it.
And it's not just something that you kind of just brush off,
like, oh, this is just a knife.
People hands touched this knife.
People pour their passion and their soul
inside of these products.
The art of blacksmithing has a very long history.
Our notion of what it means to be civilized
is to have metallurgy,
to have the ability to transform the natural world.
When somebody use my knife,
I want them to say, damn.
Golly, this is a badass knife.
Come here, let me show you all something.
Well, let me tell you what Quintin Middleton does.
I make knives for a living.
Who knew?
I am from St. Stephen, South Carolina.
That's maybe about an hour away from Charleston,
South Carolina.
We are basically in my backyard.
This is my studio.
This is where it all goes down.
Where every last one of my knives is made.
Why does Quintin Middleton make knives?
Because I love it.
It's just a boy-ish love from watching fantasy movies
like "Star Wars, He-Man, Conan."
It just piqued my imagination.
I have the power.
I've watched him go from making Kung Fu weapons
out of lawnmower blades to chef's knives,
to being a serious businessman,
like a force to be reckoned with.
I love color.
I love pops of color.
I love the reds, the blues, the greens.
That's my personality.
And I like my knives to look sexy.
The knife that we'll be making today
will be an eight inch chef knife.
It will be damascus.
Damascus steel is a set of techniques
that involve the layering of iron upon iron, upon iron,
creating this more complex and more durable structure.
I will be using two types of steel.
It basically is going to give you contrast
between shiny and dark.
You will see a bunch of swirls in it.
That's what make it pretty.
First, I am measuring each one of these pieces of steel.
Each one of them is cut at five inches.
And then I'm chopping it up in the chop saw.
I take it next to my grinder
and I'm cleaning the surface of the billets.
So when I put it in the forge,
it has a clean surface to adhere to.
I'm going to stack about 10 layers,
and I'm going to weld it together.
Now we're going to put it into a forge.
And the forge is about 2,300 degrees.
And basically that's not molting, but very close.
So I need it to stick to each other.
I'm looking for a particular color.
The color I'm looking for is like a bright yellowish orange.
So once it reach the color I'm looking for,
it's time to pull it out 'cause I don't want it to burn
or melt.
Next we're going to use the hydraulic press
and we're going to compress it.
So this is now kneading the steel like dough.
And I'm not going to initially just chomp down on it.
I'm doing light touches.
And once we do that and we get a long enough piece,
we're going to cut it in half.
The piece that I cut off, I'm going to stack it
to the other piece, building up those layers.
And we're going to do the same thing again.
Put it in the forge, heat it up.
Draw it out on the hydraulic press.
And I'm going to cut it again.
So basically now we have a great starting point
to what the knife is going to look like.
Historically, blacksmithing played an important role
in the formation of African-American identity.
During the transatlantic slave trade,
which carried more than 12 million Africans,
many hundreds and even thousands of blacksmiths
were among them.
They came with their knowledge of iron working and smelting
and forging and their ritual power.
They were remarkable individuals and they became leaders
in the community.
So on plantations,
they might have been responsible for shoeing horses,
for keeping the operations of the industrial complex going.
They not only forged iron shackles,
but they forged the weapons that account
for the resistance to slavery.
For example, we know that African blacksmiths
played a tremendous role in the Haitian Revolution.
Sometime around the late 19th century,
science began to transform and professionalize iron working
in that process.
Many African-Americans were left out of the picture.
They were being excluded and discriminated against
in the workplace.
They still played a critical role, and their labor,
and their expertise was really important
to the rise of many different industries.
Today, blacksmithing has become an important art form,
and African-Americans have a very important role
in the contemporary community of artisans.
They have persisted in part because they stayed longer
in rural communities.
So African-American blacksmiths have really
remained critical to the persistence of these techniques
of forging, by hand, exquisitely beautiful objects
out of iron.
So next I'll be grinding the knife to shape.
I take a template and I lay it on to the billet.
And then now I'm cutting the excess away.
So basically the whole perimeter of the knife.
After I cut the excess away,
now it's time to normalize it and heat treat it.
We did all this hard work in the beginning
to get the width and the thickness we want.
So it has a lot of stress inside of it.
So I need to basically massage.
Basically it needs to go into the sauna.
So that's what normalizing is.
Heating it to it's critical temperature.
And for this instance, it's about 1,500 degrees.
And then I have to quickly dip it in oil.
This process is called quenching.
This process is allowing the grain structures
inside the steel to realign and mesh together,
and I need it to stay that way.
So that's what the quenching process does.
Now since I quenched it in oil,
this knife is so brittle that I can take a hammer
or throw it on the ground
and it will shatter in a thousand pieces.
So now I need to put it in an oven at 400 degrees
for a two hour span, allowing it to soften just slightly,
but still be hard enough to hold an edge.
And that is the key point of a knife.
It needs to be able to hold an edge and stay sharp
for a very long time.
As a child, I was very adventurous.
I was a loner.
I would play in the woods,
make my own bow and arrows, slingshots.
I would take tubing off my swing set
and flatten it with a hammer and make my own sword.
There are not many,
probably five or six black knife makers
that I can think of right now.
And it was very hard because it's a white dominated area.
And a lot of people didn't want to teach me starting out.
I worked at a local mall and I sold knives and cigars
and swords.
And a man came in one day, his name is Jason Knight.
Quintin was behind the counter.
And he knew what he was talking about.
He knew all the knives.
He knew what they were made out of.
He knew where they were from.
He's very interested in the whole idea of making knives.
And he started telling me that he make knives for living.
And as a 17 year old boy, like my eyes like brighten up,
like can you teach me?
He's making me nervous.
Why?
He's my teacher.
Got to make sure I do it right.
He would come to my shop and he would show me what he made
and I would give him some pointers,
and then he would go back and work on that again.
And one day, he came over and he said,
God told me to make chefs knives.
I was following suit behind Jason,
making hunting knives, swords
and the fantasy movie swords.
And then I had a dream.
I'm very big in my faith.
And the holy spirit told me plainly, make chef knives.
And I woke up.
I was like, that makes sense.
Probably within eight months,
every chef in Charleston had a chef's knife in their hands
that Quintin had the guts to go out there and say,
I want to let you try this knife out and see what you think.
And he built a whole business around that.
That's the exciting thing.
That's the fun thing is to watch something grow
from a little seed
and watch it become awesome.
I just, I love the guy.
He's my friend.
He's my brother.
I want him to be the rockstar knife maker that he is.
So now next what we'll be doing,
we've finished doing the bevel grinding,
basically getting it to a sharp point.
So I'm grinding it from the thickness that it is now
to basically down to zero on the edge.
I don't measure anything, so it's all about feel.
I've been doing this 18 years, and it's muscle memory.
I'm constantly checking it and making sure
that my grinds are straight and consistent,
make sure that everything flows well.
And then I will be putting it inside a developer.
Right now it looks silver,
so you really don't see the patterns yet
until I put it in this ferric chloride.
Now you about see what we all wanted to see, the pattern,
the twist and the turns and the curls and the swooshes.
Doesn't it look sexy?
Now here comes the heavy part for me, adding the handle.
The handle material is going to be oak,
but what's so special about this oak,
this old came from a plantation.
This plantation is called Middleton's Place.
We are currently at Middleton's Place Plantation,
maybe 20 minutes away from Downtown Charleston.
And my last name is Middleton.
So, you know the deal.
My ancestors were here.
They worked this land.
They bled here.
They died here.
They may were beaten here.
They may were hung here.
This oak tree is basically a live oak
or in Charleston, an angel Oak.
This tree has been here since slavery time.
The director's over Middleton Place Plantation,
we had this little project.
I made some oyster knives for them
and they were kind enough to give me some of the wood
that fell off this tree.
And that's the handle I used for this knife.
What I want to do is build off broken pieces.
I'm taking something that's barbaric,
that's a stain on American history
and building off of that in my own way.
This wood is basically a block
and I'm going to cut it to shape.
I want to create a chemical and a mechanical bond.
The chemical bond is the epoxy,
the mechanical bond is a screw.
And I can screw the handle to the blade.
After we let the glue dry,
we have to grind the perimeter of the handle.
Basically, I'm just trying to get that coke bottle shape.
I just want it to be smooth.
I want it to be almost like a car.
The lines need to fit.
They need to flow just right.
And I want to add a sealer.
Now you about to see the rings of the oak.
You can almost count and see how old this tree really was.
Now it's time to sharpen the knife.
And I'm paying very close attention on the angle,
making sure that it's not too steep or not too shallow.
Now you're seeing how sexy this knife look.
I am proud to put my name on it.
So now I'll be putting my maker's mark on it, my logo.
I use a laser engraver.
And will be allowing to laser to engrave my logo
inside this knife.
Growing up, my granddad told me your name is everything.
To put your name on something that means you stand by it,
just like your handshake.
Your stand by your handshake.
Now it's time to box it up, wrap it up and ship it out.
Since this one is so special,
and it's so much emotion inside this one,
it will probably be around $2,000.
People ask me a lot, how long does it take to make a knife?
I answer that two ways.
If I have everything on hand,
I can make that knife in eight hours.
And the second way I answer that is kind of snobbish.
18 years.
You have to look off at it.
The time and the mistakes that I've made
and all the blood, sweat, and tears I put in to my craft,
it feels like second nature to me.
Growing up as a boy,
you never really hear like you're doing a good job.
As a southern man, you more like go to school, go to work,
work hard, provide for your family.
But to build this knife in honor of my ancestors,
they're saying job well done.
I've built my brand.
I've built this company.
And what I'm hearing in my spirit,
and what I'm hearing in my inner man is saying,
I'm proud of you.
That's what I feel.