Alexander O'Neill, Bladesmith
GORSE KNIVES
kennington, south London
Working solo in his south London workshop, Alexander O’Neill makes chef’s knives of uncommon beauty, forged with famously tough Aogami super blue steel and featuring carefully balanced European slab handles made from sustainably sourced buffalo horn and olive wood. Schooled in perfectionism by his university mentor, Simone Ten Hompel, a renowned German metalworker with ironclad standards and a strong blacksmithing game, Alexander got started in 2016 and now turns out a maximum of eight knives a week. With customers across the UK and diverse parts beyond – from Canada and the US to Norway and Singapore – he’s been helped through lockdown by his partner who’s been doing the runs to the post office and has “done a bit of sanding”. Although, he adds, “It’s taken her thumbprints off, which she’s not so pleased about. Her phone won’t turn on now because it doesn’t recognise her, but you know, she’s okay.”
“I started making knives at university, just small tool knives and things, and then bought a cheap belt grinder and started making them in my garden in Kennington. And in the kitchen when it was raining, which was quite tricky.
So I was grinding knives out in the garden – and making friends with the neighbours, obviously – and then I started to actually sell them which afforded me some workshop space, and I was able to go from there.
I had got interested in blacksmithing during my jewellery degree. I was having to use a lot of steel, and started using found steel because I was a student and didn’t have any money. To make jewellery out of steel you need to make your own tools because otherwise you’re just ruining expensive jewellery tools, and also the things I was making were kind of eccentric – closer to art jewellery – so I had to make a lot of my own equipment to do that. And because I was having to smith a lot of the tools out, that led on to knives.
The idea of owning handmade knives has become much more mainstream, I think, because people are more into cooking than they used to be, but also because of the sustainability aspect. People want a nice thing one time, and not to be junking cheap knives every year after they’ve split.
The difference is that handmade knives have been smithed, they’ve been hammered out of bar stock. There are lots of companies that push the idea that they’re making handmade knives, but they’re not – they’re using a water-cut piece of steel that is then milled to an edge, which isn’t really going to give you as high performance or certainly not as sharp a knife.
It took about three years to refine my design. When I started, it was kind of extreme; there were more cutaways and the finger grooves were more pronounced, and the join between the horn and the wood were really dead-on straight cut. I thought that was a bit too severe. It started off a little too skinny and it needed a bit of weight in there, too, but I also think those first designs were such statement pieces, they needed to be something that a household would like in their kitchen, not just one person. So I slowly pared the design back until I settled on what I liked.
One of the obvious, nice things when you look at my knives is the oscillating black edge which is the hamon of the knife. I use a piece of high-carbon Aogami steel between two pieces of soft steel, so as you hammer that out and grind back the soft steel, it reveals the hard steel underneath and that then etches that black colour, an almost tide-line effect, which is different on every single knife. I also leave on a very light speckling of hammer marks, usually on the spine of the knife, which I think are quite beautiful and have a sort of meteorite-looking effect to them, especially when they’re polished and oiled, and that, again, is something you couldn’t intentionally recreate.
“as you grind the soft steel, it reveals the hard steel and etches that black colour, an almost tide-line effect”
Alexander O’Neill
My process tends to be a week-long thing. Monday I’ll do all the angle-grinding to cut the steel, to cut out the handle shapes, and then it’s smithing out the blades, making the blade wider and shaping it. You’re also compacting the steel to make a much stronger edge and spine for the blade, so it won’t bend or warp and will keep its edge longer. Then Tuesday is usually cutting and drilling the handles, which doesn’t sound like it would take that long but it’s incredibly hard steel, so you’re just killing drill bits and taking forever to get through them. I grind the knives that day and heat-treat them, which is where you’re heating the knife up and then quenching it quickly in oil. Basically, this makes all the steel particles form a crystalline structure which is how you get a very hard and razor-sharp knife edge. If you rub it with a file and that file just glances off, then you know you’ve done it properly.
The quality of the Japanese Aogami steel I use is so incredibly fine; it’s hard to describe because it’s a tactile thing, but when you’re sharpening it, it very quickly gets this almost silky contact between the stone and the steel; it’s just lovely to work with – you’re not just chipping away at it for hours, and it can provide such a fine blade. And because you have that hard piece between two soft pieces, it makes it easier to work but you also get that beautiful colour difference where all the metals meet. But in terms of actually smithing it, it’s much harder to work than a lot of European steel; you have to keep it at very steady low temperatures – you’re having to smith under about 800 degrees – so moving the metal is much slower and takes a lot more bashing around, basically. But it’s worth it.
The rest of the week is cutting handle materials, matching the wood and horn pieces together which has to be done with quite a high degree of accuracy or it doesn’t work at all, and you have to start again. And it’s grinding out the handles and then polishing them up to very, very high grits.
The nice thing about using buffalo horn is that animals aren’t killed for it – it’s a byproduct of the hide and meat industry. The reason I use it is that it’s extremely resistant – if you think about it, it’s designed for 2-tonne animals to run headlong into each other – so it’s quite good on the collar of a knife handle, because that’s the bit you’re going to be bumping against pans and off the edges of chopping boards and dropping, if you’re as clumsy as I am. And occasionally you get these beautiful shadows running through it, little white highlights and marbling. The olive wood I use is another good, sustainable material. There are thousands and thousands of olive groves which have to be trimmed and trained, so lumps come off them, and I source that through an ethical wood supplier.
And then usually Friday is an endless whetstone polishing day and taking the blades up to a proper razor’s edge. [My knives] are glassy smooth; I sand them up to about 3,000 grit, using super-fine jewellery sandpaper to get the right sort of sheen to them.
“people come and warm up in the forge during midwinter which really feels like a medieval village kind of thing to do”
My workshop is dusty and pretty sooty. I do sometimes realise I’ve come home and it looks like I’ve been in an explosion, with just perfect goggle marks around my eyes. It’s all whitewashed brick interior and concrete – it’s a pretty functional space and all focuses around the anvil, really. It’s used so much during the process, everything has to be accessible to that. It’s a very, very cold workshop until you turn the forge on and then it’s extraordinarily hot. It’s connected to two other workshops, so people come and warm up in the forge during midwinter which is, I think, nice for them and really feels like a medieval village kind of thing to do – there are people trying to light rollies on the forge, which they never seem to realise will take your hand off.
Whether you’re blacksmithing or carpentering or cooking, you get very attached to your tools. A good chef’s knife is one of those things that’s quite enriching in life to have. I mean, one of the worst things about cooking is prep work, but having a good knife actually turns that into a pleasurable experience, because it’s so satisfying to use a properly razor-sharp knife while prepping a meal.
You are going to use a kitchen knife maybe three times a day, especially now, when many people are working from home, so it may as well be as comfortable and as perfectly made as possible. There aren’t many things that we use that often that we settle for as easily, so I think it’s an important investment to have. It’s something that you can come back to, over and over again and it just works, and works properly.”
For more, visit gorseknives.com
Photography: Benjamin McMahon (portrait) and Benjamin McMahon
@gorseknives
