By Karina Fain

A sheet of steel.

A chunk of antler.

A piece of sandpaper.

A parcel of imagination.

These are tools of the trade for Gary Etherington, a Logan man who is carving his initials into history one knife at a time. In the basement of his home, in a room no bigger than your average tub, tile and toilet lavatory, Gary spends anywhere from 10 to 30 hours sawing, sanding and shaping a single knife.

It all started about 20 years ago. Gary was an employee at Bourns, a
branch of a worldwide company that makes electrical components for computer, medical and other related markets. The machine shop manager showed him a hunting knife he'd made, and Gary mentioned an interest in doing one. With the manager's help, Gary created a fish-cleaning knife that he still uses. After making a few additional knives for family and friends, he lost interest in the craft.

"It was just something to try," Gary says. "I really had no intention to continue doing them." But in the mid-‘90s he got a "wild hair," and decided to make a couple more knives.

"I'd make one, and somebody liked it, and then they would want one," Gary says. He started to get more and more requests.

"I started making several a year, and it just kind of grew from a little
hobby into one that pays for itself and is kind of fun to do," Gary says.

His interest in hunting knives originally began with an interest in hunting.
Gary was 6 years old when he went on his first deer-hunting trip with his
father. Since then this rifle hunter has sought a wide range of animals,
including elk, moose and grizzly bears. He's been to Alaska four times for
hunts, including black bear and Dall sheep, a white sheep found only in Alaska and Western Canada.

According to Alaska's state Web site, www.state.ak.us, the sheep inhabit a
combination of alpine ridges, meadows and steep, rocky slopes. It is difficult to retrieve the meat from this terrain, so information on the site says Dall hunting is limited to "a relatively few, hardy individuals whose interest is more in the challenge and satisfaction of mountain hunting and the alpine experience than in getting food." But Gary said he loved both the meat and the horns.

"That's probably the best game meat I've ever had," Gary says. He is the
father of four children, all in their twenties now. Meals at the Etherington
house often include meat from his hunts.

"Our freezer is full of meat," says Susan, Gary's wife. "We have moose
burgers and elk steaks and all different kinds of meat."

When Gary's not out hunting, or at Bridgerland Applied Technology College, where he keeps the school's computer system running, Gary can be found in his shop. There he meticulously carves, grinds and polishes bits of steel, bone and antler into usable works of art.

He begins with an idea – maybe from a magazine, maybe from a friend or maybe from his imagination – and makes it tangible by sketching it out on paper. He cuts the shape out of a piece of steel using a band saw, which can run at slow speeds for cutting metal.

Gary usually uses D2, a tool steel that has "a really good wear property to
it" and holds an edge "forever." He also uses 440C steel, which most knife
blades are made of, but dislikes it because it doesn't harden as well and
doesn't hold an edge. He occasionally uses Damascus steel, which has a
beautiful swirled pattern created by pounding together two different layers of steel, but there is a large difference in price. A 1 1/2 inch wide piece of D2 costs $1.50 a linear inch, compared with Damascus, which costs around $80 for a 12-inch piece. Gary says a blade that would cost $8 or $10 for steel would cost $40 if he used Damascus.

Next, Gary grinds a taper on the blade freehand, without a guard or guide to duplicate the taper on both sides, using a one-inch belt sander. He then
polishes the blade with a cotton buffing wheel and polishing compound before heat treating the steel because it is easier to get scratches out while the steel is "soft."

Heat treating involves wrapping the blade in stainless steel foil to help
prevent oxidation, placing it in a brick kiln and putting it through three
heat cycles. Each type of steel has different heating properties, which Gary
has discovered through data sheets from steel manufacturers and trial and
error.

A D2 blade is heated to 1850 degrees Fahrenheit, cooled, tempered for two
hours at 800 degrees, cooled, tempered again at 800 degrees and then cooled.

The initial heating makes the blade too hard and brittle to use, so the second and third treatments take the steel to a softness that's usable. In comparison, 440C steel is heated to 1950 degrees, then cooled and tempered twice at 400 degrees.

Gary puts a final hand polish on the blade using a combination of wet and dry sandpaper, from coarse 240 grit to fine 2000 grit, and a rope wheel with a grease compound to create a satin finish. He prefers the satin finish because it doesn't show the fingerprints as much as a mirror finish.

The next step is to build a handle. He begins with the metal parts in the handle, made of brass, nickel silver or stainless steel. A straight knife will
have fewer parts in the handle, and could be as simple as an antler and a
blade with a hidden tang, the part of metal that goes back into the handle.
This type of handle is easier because Gary uses the natural curve of the
antler and doesn't have to shape the handle. Shaping is usually done with a
belt and spindle sander.

Other handles have an exposed tang, which is visible all the way through the handle. This is more common with handles made of two pieces of bone or horn.

Folding knives have six pieces of steel and nine pins in the handle. Gary uses a CNC milling machine to precisely create parts so they fit together. Pieces of bone or antler must then be fitted with the metal pieces. While a straight knife can take as little as 10 hours to build, a folding knife can take up to 30 hours.

Gary does a final fit on the handle and blade to make sure the pieces
interlock correctly, stamps his initials onto the knife, then puts one last
shine on his creation.

"There's lots of hand work," Gary says, "but you get a beautiful finish that
way."

Not all of the knives are for hunting. Gary also makes tools for other
artisans – several Cache Valley saddle makers. One tool, a hook knife, is used to cut sheets of leather. He's also made several fillet knives for an ocean fisherman from California. Others are just small pocketknives.

"I like Gary's knives because he is so meticulous with them," says Jerold
Knight, a friend and coworker of Gary's. "He does such a nice job with them."

Knight owns and uses two folders and a "palm skinner," a knife Gary created that has a half-circle blade with a hole through the center to put a finger through for stability and ease of movement when skinning an animal. But it's more than just a sharp blade that Gary creates – he's making memories.

"I went to Alaska moose hunting, and I got a moose. I wanted to make me a memory, so this is my moose bone from Alaska," Gary says, handling a straight edge with a pearly white handle made of a rear leg bone. Moose bone is white, while elk bone tends to have a lot of reds, purples and other colorations to it.

"This is a big, heavy knife," Gary says. "It's not worth much, but it's in a
pretty display case, and it's my memory of Alaska." He builds wooden,
velvet-lined boxes for some of the knives.

Most of Gary's customers are hunters he meets while working as a cook for a hunting camp for two weeks every September. The camp, located about 50 miles south of Jackpot, Nev., belongs to a friend of his, Blain Jackson.

"When you've got a fairly well-to-do elk hunter with an elk down, it's pretty easy to convince him that if we take that back leg and make a knife handle out of it, then they've got a memory," Gary says. "I make use of things you'd usually throw away."

Gary made a matched set of knives, a more meaningful memento, for a deer hunter who shot a small buck, or male deer, in Nevada. Another customer shot a cougar and wanted a knife made. The bones he saved weren't big enough for a handle, so Gary carved an oval on each side of a piece of wood from the hill where the hunter took the cat, and inlaid some small pieces of bone.

A more personal creation is a pocketknife he crafted from mother of pearl and nickel silver for his daughter, a med student at the University of Utah. It's inlaid with a small, silver medical symbol, a gift from the doctor who is her mentor at school.

Gary has a small binder in which he keeps 4" by 6" photos of each of his
creations, with a ruler next to each knife so he can see measurements. The
knives start at one and go up to the most recent addition, number 114, a knife

Gary made and donated to the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation for its
fund-raising banquet. Also in the binder is a list of the names and contact
information for the owner of each knife, and details about what each is made of. Gary says he would love to make one for anybody, and he's more than willing to try something new, but only if he doesn't have to hurry. Typical lead-time is three to six months depending on the time of year. Knives average $200 to $300 depending on the materials involved.

"I don't want it to be a job," Gary says. "I do it kind of on my time frame,
but I love to make ‘em."

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