Sherrill Enjoys Avocation to the Hilt
By Roy Ivey
Travis Sherrill is on the cutting edge of an ancient technology.
Sherrill, a May graduate in kinesiology, and his friend Daniel Melton forge knives of Damascus steel after stumbling onto the moneymaking pastime by serendipity.
“My brother came by during Christmas break last year,” Sherrill recalled. “He said he was going to make handles for knives and sell them. Daniel and I looked at the knife he brought with him and thought that was pretty cool.”
Sherrill and Melton researched knife-making on the Internet and then visited a blacksmith.
“We found out right quick that we didn’t know what we were doing,” Sherrill said. “The blacksmith told us what we needed to do, how hot the fire needed to be and what kind of fuel we would need to make the fire.”
Sherrill and Melton outfitted their shop, a converted dairy barn built by Daniel’s great-great grandfather circa-1929 in Castroville, with a homemade forge.
“We took an old brake drum and surrounded it with firebrick, put an air hose up to it and hooked the hose to a dryer and a blower,” Sherrill said.
They fueled the forge with coke, a distillation of bituminous coal used in steelmaking because of how hot it burns, and began pounding out railroad spikes.
“We made a couple of railroad-spike knives and then moved on to more complicated projects, in this case Damascus steel because few craftsmen employ it,” Sherrill said. “Any blacksmith basically knows how to make it, but nobody is really that interested in duplicating it because it is a lot of work.”
The process is derived from techniques that evolved about 1100 to 1700 A.D. by sword makers in the Middle East. The legendary Damascus swords were reputed to cut through almost anything, yet retain their sharp edges.
The precise process that metal smiths used was lost to history, but attempts to replicate the knives have been successful to a point.
“You take a soft metal and a hard metal and, using a forge, heat them white hot,” Sherrill said. “Take some flux, like welders use in arc welding rods, put the metals together and basically weld them together.”
He said the combined metals are heated white hot again, stretched out, folded over, beaten down with hammers and then the process is repeated until the knife has about 200 layers.
“Then, you dip it in strong acid which burns the softer layers, but leaves the harder ones alone,” Sherrill said. “That gives you a striped pattern in the blade.”
The signature stripes give the Damascus blade a striking appearance and its metallurgical properties make it superior to standard single-metal knives.
Sherrill and Melton make the knives and sell them at gun shows for $200-$300 each.
“That might sound expensive for a knife, but it’s a lot of work,” Sherrill said.
Sherrill said they buy readymade handles and customize them, including the addition of their “brand,” a stylized logo combining their first initials.
Though Sherrill enjoys knife-making as a hobby, he loves children and plans to teach elementary school physical education. Later he hopes to attend seminary to become a church youth minister, which he sees as his calling in life.
The ministry will allow him to work with youth, even if he spends his spare time beating plowshares into swords.
