Crafting the unwanted into family heirlooms Story by Ivan Sanders and Photos Contributed
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spray of hot metal chips flies behind the grinder as Alex Campbell works to create the perfect edge on a new knife he has been creating for a couple of days. Four more blades are in different stages of being ready for the finishing touches of grinding and sanding. To date, Campbell has completed 300 in his five years of knife making. So how did an educator in the Elizabethton School System learn to turn raw steel and deer antler into knives that can be passed down for generations to come? It was a deep love of history and wanting to participate in the frontier day activities at Sycamore Shoals State Park. “I love going down to Sycamore Shoals and watching those re-enactments,” Campbell said. “They have weapons, clothes, and tools like they did a hundred years ago. And I wanted to do that. I thought it would be cool to do that. I could go and help other people learn history. I started talking to them and they told me I had to get the clothes, gun, and bag and other stuff. “I was like, ‘how much do those things cost?’ They were all hand made because in the day they were all hand made. You can’t go to Walmart and get this stuff. You have to make it by hand or buy it from someone who had made it by hand. I asked how much one of those guns would cost and they said $3,500. I asked about the knives and they said $300. The shoes were $200. I thought I couldn’t afford it. That’s when I thought that I would try to make it myself.” Campbell put out a call to his hunting buddies and told them that if they killed a deer to bring the deer hide to him so he could try tanning it to make something out of it. The call was returned by Jay Scurry, another teacher at Elizabethton High School. “Jay told me he had rolled into school with a deer in the back of his truck,” Campbell said. “I stuffed that deer hide into a mini-fridge that I cleaned out in my room. During my planning period, I got online and looked up how to tan a deer hide. When I got home, I tanned it and it didn’t turn out well. It was hard and stiff and it made me mad. “I had to get another one and then another and another and finally I eventually got to where I could decently tan a deer hide. Those first ones were so tough that you could make a suit of armor and not a shirt out of them. So, I started to think what I could do with a tough deer hide. I thought that I could make a knife sheath and I didn’t even have a knife.” Campbell had 10 deer hides in his outbuilding and realized he needed to do something with them. He decided to
Alex Campbell quenches a blade.
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