Bonds Creek Knives owner Dave Pratt handcrafts products with precision and care.
written by TARA WINE-QUEEN
photos courtesy of DAVE PRATT
Dave Pratt, like many Appalachians at any given time of day, has a knife in his pocket.
“We’re West Virginians, so all of us grew up being taught how to hunt,” says Pratt. “I’ve had hundreds of knives through the years, and my grandpa made knives for a little bit, tinkering around in the shop.”
Watching his grandfather create knives—an essential tool anywhere, but especially in the Mountain State—put the idea in Pratt’s mind that he could do it, too. He experimented, drawing designs of his own. Eventually, those drawings grew into the business he runs today: Bonds Creek Knives.
Pratt’s family is full of entrepreneurs; he and his brother grew up helping with his mom’s primitives store, making lids for Longaberger baskets. “The shop I’m using for the knives now started as my dad’s welding shop, transitioned into the craft shop, and now it’s mine.” His father helped build the press the business uses, and Pratt’s wife—”a born saleswoman”—pitches in, too. Their 8-year-old son even gets in on the action. “Every knife that I sell comes with a little 3D printed keychain, and he can make them as fast as I can!”
Making the knives, though, is all Pratt. “I think our family anvil was cast right after the Civil War. I still use it for stuff that I forge. I forge the Damascus myself here in the shop by hand with the 25-ton press that we built. From there, it’s just a lot of grinding and hand-sanding. Our wood shop helps with processing the knife handles and everything else.”
The hardest part of the process is the most appealing to Pratt. “My favorite part would be forging. They call it ‘forging the billet.’ It’s where you’re stacking up two different types of alternating layers and drawing it out on the press, and you get to manipulate it by turning it a certain way and smashing it in a certain direction to change the pattern in the steel that you see in the end.” Forging is hard, but he wouldn’t have it any other way. “There’s something about being exhausted and actually holding a physical product that you’ve made from start to finish—that’s pretty satisfying.”
bondscreekforge.com, @bondscreekknives on FB
READ MORE ARTICLES FROM WV LIVING’S SUMMER 2024 ISSUE
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