The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 575: How to Sharpen a Knife Like a Real Man

Episode Date: July 22, 2024

Steven Rinella talks with Josh Smith of Montana Knife Company, Seth Morris, Randall Williams, Chester Floyd, Brody Henderson, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider.  Topics discussed: Our new collab MKC x MeatEater Stubhorn Knife; Salty Phil; how Boudin changed Steve’s life; vats of hot sauce; it's an insult sandwich; Steve reads books so you ain’t got to--excerpts on Alaskan hunters, anglers, and trappers; becoming a journeyman smith at 15 and master blade smith at 19; the 90-degree bend; throwaway blades vs. passing down heirloom knives; the BLM revokes its permit for the proposed Ambler Road; Heffelfinger’s issues with  bringing back mammoths; Larry challenging Steve on muskies; no more OTC archery tags for non-residents in CO; more on wolves; legislative wins in Michigan; First Lite’s brand new whitetail line coming July 30th!; how metal loses its magnetism when heated to a certain temperature; the Rockwell Score; how to properly sharpen a knife; edge geometry; hair farmers; and more. Outro song “Echos Home” by Dan Kruse Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light.

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Very special guest. And Max. That door's open for a reason you know why that door is open max exactly max is quick max isn't even he's just wandering by and trying to help us out it's all i'll tell you what's happening come back here max so i can explain something to you i had a plan for a year now to cook. So I recently discovered boudin, which changed my life. Yeah, it's really good. I don't know how it didn't spread into the north.

Everything else did. Oh. I don't know. It had been hidden from me. I heard about it, but I hadn't had it. It's changed my life. And a guy heard me talking about it um

who owns a boudin place billy's boudin sounds great well he sent me a box of his boudin out of the kindness of his heart you want me to watch it well chester's watching if you want to watch it go ahead and watch it low and slow it's as low as it can go you know there's a boudin cooking trick the cajuns tell me about you wrap it in wet paper towel and nuke it. Oh, yeah. You can do hot dogs like that. And then finish it in a pan. Hot dog tip-off from Dr. Randall.

Boudin. We're going to have it with hot sauce. I got an idea where I was going to put a vat of hot sauce. If I lived down there, I'd put a vat of hot sauce on top of my car with a tube that came down. So when I'm driving down the road, there's a little squeeze valve that hangs right at my steering wheel. Because I like to give a little dollop of hot sauce on each bite of boudin. You could put that sauce where people normally put their big snorkel, you know, exhaust snorkel. Yeah, exactly. And the Cajuns call it boudin.

Boudin. If you hit a deer, you'd Yeah, yeah, exactly. And the Cajuns call it boudin. Boudin. If you hit a deer, you'd be pre-hot sauce. It'd be all ready to go. Yeah, exactly. If you hit a deer, yeah. He's already marinated. Also joined us,

Seth is here, Dr. Randall. Corinne, who wouldn't pick up the phone. Phil, who made it that we're not cooking the boudin in the studio salty Phil every good podcast begins with an airing of grievances between the furs on the wall and the carpet

we would have been smelling boudin for who knows how long yeah which is not necessarily a bad thing I was frying fish in the house one time and i remember a couple days later my wife's like even the bath towels smell like that fish so yeah the boudin smell would be slow to go away not now that i'm down on it but uh in this 10 by 12 foot room that we're sitting in yeah but uh But, uh, Billy's boudin, um, we're going to cook.

Thank you, Billy. Chester and Brody. Pork liver and rice. You stopped at Phil. We also have Chester and Brody. Oh, sorry.

Chester and Brody. I have an organizational problem. Um, Corinne wants to remind everybody once again that if you like to watch the network shows on youtube it's all moved that's right to meat eater podcast network it's its own channel on youtube i'm not clear on why but that's something that happened i'm not here to litigate it it's all moved the meat eater Eater Podcast Network. So all podcast materials on an independent YouTube channel.

Right. I mean, it's because we have the Meat Eater TV channel with so many things coming out all the time. And this is the one stop shop for all of our podcasts, podcast videos, etc. I'm trying to think of a history of other channels that have split. I can't think of a good example. There's HBO and there's Max. There you go. It's like that.

It's like when that happened. We have an intern, Nate, who came up and introduced himself to me by way of saying this. Oh, really? He did this? You don't know about this? No, I don't't but i'm just looking at your note i've many times i fell in love with the idea of a compliment sandwich and we've joked about it many times where it's a way to offer criticism to someone where you compliment them

then you criticize them then you compliment them and he did that with you no oh okay often though your compliment sandwiches only have one slice of bread because you compliment them and then you criticize them. So the example I would use is like, Crin, you look great today. Sure wish you'd answer your phone on a podcast day. I like your shirt. That's a compliment sandwich. So you leave her feeling good. I understand what it is.

Yours often lacks the second compliment. You come in soft, right? You hit them with what you're there for. Build them up and break them down. And then you leave them with a good feeling about you. But he pointed out, the intern came up to me and said, it's not a compliment sandwich. He goes, what is a ham sandwich?

Ham's in the middle. Yeah. He's like, it's an insult sandwich. Like you got bread, ham, bread. Do you call it a bread sandwich? No. It's a ham sandwich. Yeah.

It doesn't. It's the name is what's in the middle of that son of a bitch. It's an insult sandwich. Yeah. It doesn't. It's the name is what's in the middle of that son of a bitch. It's an insult sandwich. Wow. Never thought of it that way. And then you liked him a lot after that. I did. Yeah.

I did. So I'm not gonna talk about that anymore, but real quick, this, you know, can you play the drop, Phil? Oh yeah, sure. Let's see.

We got it right here. It's time for Steve Reads Books. So you ain't got to. This one is so rich. I'm just doing it in installments. And I know that I go on, but I just got hit with a couple from here.

This is the best book. Have we gotten feedback from this segment yet, Corinne? Has it been happening long enough? No. No. We just dropped it without this sexy intro. Without the sexy intro. Okay.

Alaska Tracks. Life stories from hunters, fishermen, and trappers of Alaska by Randy Zarnke. It's oral histories. The other day we did this one. I did one out of here. I hunted eagles for bounty years ago. If you tell people that now, they think you're a really bad person. We got two bucks a piece for eagles.

The biggest day I had was during a herring run the eagles were eating the herring and i killed 33 eagles the only reason i didn't get more was i run out of bullets dang did you already read that one no i'm just reminding people. Oh, yeah. Listen to this. This is a different guy. Listen carefully. We finished up the air base on a net island in record time. One day, this is during World War II. One day, a patrol came back, and one of the planes was doing victory rolls over the field. When he landed, he said he got a submarine.

He told his commanding officer where it was. They sent a patrol boat out and came back with about 300 pounds of whale blubber. So they immediately had a whale recognition class. That's the Aleutian Theater in World War II.

Oh. Oh, you got it done already? Yeah. It's done. They kind of... That stove doesn't go too low. Good job. One second. Can you cut them up and pass them around?

Listen to this one. I'm not going to do many. I'm only going to do a couple licks. I'm on board. I'm still hung up on the image of'm not going to do many. I'm going to do a couple licks. I'm on board. Josh, knife. I'm still hung up on the image of that torpedo going into that whale. Torpedo and a whale. He saw me almost throw it at you. Slice that real good. Are you ready for this?

Mm-hmm. Dad dug a great big pit with a manure scoop and a team of horses. It was 20 feet wide, 40 feet long, and 10 feet deep. On winter weekends, he'd pile it full of snow, and all us kids put snowshoes on and we'd tamp it down. We kept that up until it was mounded six or seven feet high above the pit. Then he'd cover it with about a foot of moss. That was our refrigeration. Dad dug a stairway down into the ice and carved holes in the sidewalls.

That's where he'd stick his quarters of beef. In late summer, it would be solid ice in there. That's cool. Huh? I like it. I'm going to do one or two more. This book's so rich, you can't get to them all we got a lot of podcasts yo i'm gonna do one more we should do an entire podcast that is just ready for this one stories with steve just before world war ii broke out a trapper had a pilot fly

him over near farewell to trap the pilot was supposed to come back and get him in January but never showed up. The war broke out and the feds had grounded all the airplanes. The trapper didn't have a radio so he didn't know what was going on. It was March before the authorities would let the pilot fly again. When the pilot flew back over there to pick him up, the trapper was standing under a spruce tree smoking a cigarette. The trapper said,

where the hell you been? He must have rationed his cigarettes pretty well. Yeah. No, I'm telling you, it's a great book, man. It's my favorite book. Josh, can you share with us what you have

what you brought there real quick Josh is going to do another thing too Josh is going to show everybody absolutely once and for all how to sharpen a knife which he did for me it had more of an impact on my life than boudin give your credentials Josh

you're so distracted by the boot. Yeah. It looks pretty good. Um, I was just getting ready to eat. As soon as they put food in front of me, you asked me a question. Oh, I can talk about something else. Well, uh, yeah, I mean, I, I guess how you got into it. My background.

Yeah. Uh, my little league baseball coach and, uh, grew up in Lincoln, Montana, um, home of the Unabomber. That's, you know, that's his retirement home. Yeah. Uh, yeah. My little league baseball coach started teaching me to make knives. Uh, he would bring his, he was a guide, um, and a big hunter and he'd bring his hunting knives to practice and show the parents and being a kid, I was super interested in it. So he, my parents bought me one of his knives for Christmas that year and he, he invited me up to make a knife and, um, I made one or two,

uh, probably two or three in his shop. And then I think his way of getting rid of me was to tell me, if you want to be a knife maker, you have to have your own knife shop. And, uh, so I, I had a lawn mowing business. I worked in my parents' excavation business. I was kind of a entrepreneur kid anyway. So I, I had a little bit of money.

I bought a belt grinder and started making knives in my dad's shop and. Out of what metal though at first? Uh, like. Leaf springs and stuff? Yeah. Yeah. Leaf springs or like flat bar stock, like 1095,

just carbon steel. And in the beginning it was grinding blades. It wasn't forging. I mean, I was probably not strong enough to forge a blade at that point. But that's a good way to start because you, when you forge a blade, you basically, when you're not good at it, you create a bunch of problems you have to fix. So, you know, to learn to become a knife maker, it's probably best to start with a grinder and just get good at grinding and heat treating and finish work, handles, all that.

Yeah. Um, but I mean, I, I really took after it. I, I, um, kind of set a goal to become the youngest journeyman and master bladesmith in the world. And I, I, so I did, I, I became a journeyman smith at the age of 15 years old and a master blade Smith at 19. Okay. Um, yeah, so I, I was, um, where'd you have to go to do that? That, that test, you have to become a member of the American blade Smith society first,

and you have to be an apprentice for, then it was two years. Now it's three. Um, and then you have to test, it's a two part test and you have to do it in front of a master Smith and his shop. Uh, at least the first part, uh, the first part is, is a performance test. You know, if you're, it's nice to make a really pretty knife, but it has, it's a tool that has to function. So you have to forge a 10 inch blade, uh, no longer than 10 inch. Um, and it has to chop a one inch rope in half and one chop, which that just shows sharpness. Uh, and then it has to chop two, two by fours in half. And when you're, and without resharpening, and when you're done with that, uh, with those, the

rope and the two, two by fours, it still has to shave. Uh, and then you have to bend. You mean whacking away at it like it's a hatchet. Yep. Many chops as you want. Uh, and then when you're all done chopping those boards, it still has to shave hair.

And then after that, you put the blade in the vice and you have to bend it 90 degrees without breaking it. Dang. So you just show up at some dude's place and you got to whip all this out. Yeah. So I actually did it out in Oregon in front of

an old legend knife maker, Wayne Goddard. I did it in his shop in front of probably 30 people. I was, when I was, I was actually 14 when I did that. And then I turned, had a birthday and I did the second phase in June that, when I was, I was actually 14 when I did that and then I turned, had a birthday and I did the second phase in June that year when I was 15. But you couldn't take one of your knives now and

bend it into 90, could you? Uh, yeah, my, there's a video on our YouTube of us doing it with a bare tooth knife that we make with, for MKC. Bend it how? In a vice and grab it and pry it over and it bends to 90 in the video and it comes back to about, I don't know, 20 degrees. Oh, okay. Uh, now. I mean, I would never do that. in a vice and grab it and pry it over and it bends to 90 in the video and it comes back to about

i don't know 20 degrees okay uh now i mean i would never do that you wouldn't want to do that i wouldn't picture that i would just not picture that you that it would ever put up with that yeah i mean like this little blade here one of our small knives i mean you you need some you need some length right um uh you know so that that bare tooth knife is of ours is about, I think eight and a half inches. Um, and it's thin. So a thicker blade, shorter blade, it's going to be harder to do. But the point is, and the point of that test is to show that you have really

good control over your heat treatment. So, you know, a knife needs to be able to cut for a long time, but it also needs to be tough, right? So if you get it in a bind, if you hit bone, if you're chopping and you're hitting knots, that edge can actually flex a little without chipping out. So an edge will either bend, deflect,

which means the steel's too soft. It can chip out if it's too hard, or if you have it just right, it kind of gives a little. And it depends on the use case. I mean, we heat treat our knives, even our MKC knives a little different depending on, you know, a chef's knife isn't expected to chop two by fours and a half. It

can be a little harder than like a camp knife that you maybe are doing a lot of chopping and prying and stuff like that with. And so, uh, demonstrating control over your heat treatment process is really important. And, and so I did that as a kid. And then, and then when you're done with that, you have to present five knives to a panel of judges, uh, at the Atlanta blade show and they judge your fit and finish. So like how, how well did you put that knife together? Uh, does the handle material fit well? Is it symmetrical? Uh, you know, uh, edge geometry, good bunch of different things they judge you on. And so like a big old line of dudes waiting to do this? Yeah.

I mean, when I passed my Master Smith test back in 2000, I was probably right around number 80, 81 in the world. Now there's probably 110. Oh. Still a small number though, man. I think like six or seven guys went for the Master this year and one passed. Hmm. It's a difficult.

Did you fail multiple times before you passed? No, I passed. Yeah. I passed the first time. And, uh, I actually, this is super, uh, kind of cool really, but I, so when I did the, the master Smith test when I was 19, that's a little different because you have to do the same

performance blade test with the rope and two by fours and whatnot, but with a Damascus steel blade, uh, of at least 300 layers. And then you have to do your, your master Smith test, and you have to actually present as one of your five knives, a Quillian dagger. And the dagger is hard to make, right? It's symmetrical. Um, it, you know, to make all four sides of that blade, right. You have to also wire a flute and wire wrap the handle. And I sold that whole set when I was 19 to a collector and, and he passed away. And he told me when he bought them that he would, they would come back to me someday. Well,

he passed away, honestly, way too young. They went to his son. His son was very supportive of me, bought some knives over the years. And, uh, unfortunately way too young again, he passed away a few weeks ago and his wife, like two days after he passed away, called me and said, those knives are coming back to you. So I actually brought. Seriously? Yeah. Like this, this is, this right here is the

actual, not that it's great for, uh, people that aren't watching the video, but this is the Quillian dagger I made with that test when I was 19. Whoa. Um. Wow. Yeah. It looks like some Game of Thrones. That is badass. And then. I wish I, I wish I was 19. Whoa. Um. Wow. It looks like some Game of Thrones.

Dude, that is badass. And then. I wish I'd, I wish I'd have brought a, I should have brought a dagger my dad brought back from World War II in North Africa to show you. Oh yeah, that'd be cool. Are you real familiar with ivory? Yeah.

I mean. It's got a big old ivory handle. Yep. He brought it back from, uh. This, uh. It's a big long dagger like this with a ivory handle. Yeah. This, this knife right here is fossilized

walrus ivory. You know, you, and there's a lot of guys that have used like elephant ivory and stuff, but, uh, now the rules have changed a lot. Even if it's an ancient piece of ivory, um, if you, if you, you're not really allowed to change the shape of it, like cut it up and use it. Got it.

Cause they can't prove if it's new or old or whatever. So there's a lot of rules and restrictions compared. I started making knives in the 90s, and it was a little bit of the Wild West with that stuff. This thing too, I should show you. This knife you brought back from North Africa? I'm not saying it is. The leather, the sheath, the leather on this thing it looks like like human skin man

it's like like a trans it's like a translucent leather it's so weird you gotta bring it and show it to you dude i could just kill brody with this thing no problem yes you could right so right after he gave me a compliment sandwich yeah it was It was, uh, it was cool because I, I only really got as good as I got that fast because there were, you know, there were masters willing to teach me. Um, you know, it was a very sharing, um, group of people and, and they embraced a kid. I'm sure an annoying kid at times, but, uh, you

know, there was no YouTube then, uh, you had to go to knife shows. You had to go to people's shops. You know, I flew to Columbia, South Carolina and spent a week with a knife maker that I'd never met when I was 15, you know, but I was pretty, I was pretty persistent about becoming good and trying to catch.

They had to think you were something, man, to be like that obsessed about it at that age. I'm sure they were annoyed by me because I was constantly asking questions. But, uh, but I mean, it's cool. It's cool. Cause I mean, I just had two of those knife makers that, uh, from here in Montana, Wade

Coulter and Shane Taylor on my podcast this last week. And they, they think it's really cool what, what I've built right with where we are today. And they were a huge part of that. So it's a, it's a cool community. And, um, you know, so I, I made custom knives for, you know, I graduated high school and

duck hunted my way out of college, uh, here in Bozeman and, and became a full-time knife maker and, and did that for about 10 years. But I always had the dream of starting Montana Knife Company. I actually registered the name Montana Knife Company when I was 19. Really?

Wow. Yeah. Oh, dang. But I didn't launch it until, you know, 2020. But I was seeing in the stores the lack of quality in factory-made knives for hunters. And you could tell a lot of these companies didn't actually have hunters designing their knives. And I felt like the more we saw stuff being outsourced overseas, actually the throwaway blade became a big deal in the last 10 years. And it bothered me because for decades, I mean, my whole career, I've had people come into my shop and say like, hey, this was my dad's knife in Vietnam. What you just said about like the dagger, right? From North Africa. Hey, this was my dad's knife in Vietnam. What you just said about like the dagger, right.

From North Africa. Hey, this was my dad's pocket knife. He was a bush pilot in Alaska. It doesn't matter what they did. Men generally have passed down knives and guns. And, and all of a sudden we just started throwing away something. That's always been an heirloom. Yeah.

You pass it down right into the dirt. Yeah. When you're right into the dirt. Yeah. Yeah. When you're done with the blade. I had a brief love affair with those replacement blade knives. Yeah. No one's ever going to be like, you know, this is my dad's Havalon. Maybe.

But no. You also can't put a Havalon in a vice and bend it 90. No. Well, and the idea of even just throwing those blades out in the bushes when you're out in the forest. That's what I meant by put them down. Yeah. Because you're like, what do I do with this thing now, man?

I always like try to bury it, you know. Yeah. That's part of me getting turned off on them. But yeah, when I launched this finally in 2020, it was, I'd kind of had enough of it. And people kept telling me that it wasn't possible to make a production knife in America, build, build a brand, build a company. Like they kept saying, you, you have to stay competitive on price, you know, that 50 to a hundred dollar price range and you have to have it done overseas. And, um, I, I felt. Based on companies that don't need to be mentioned, but like big companies that.

Yeah. Make $49. Right. Kn knives, right? Yeah. And it, and it, I felt like, you know, we as hunters, we, we buy, you know, your base layers and your mid layers and your rain gear and boots and your put together a long range rifle with all these optics and your, your binos and, you know,

your spotting scope and all this money we spend. And then people go as an afterthought buy like the cheapest knife possible it's like well it's one of the items if you go hunting in a pair of tennis shoes and levi's and you have a bow or a gun and a knife if you take down an animal you can take care of it but if you don't have that knife you're kind of in a bind and it's um it's one of those, like people started expecting less performance out of their knife. Like, Oh, I'll just grab another one next year. And that's part of why we, we, we sharpen knives for free for people for life when they buy our

knives. Cause I, I want people to send their, if they can't sharpen it, I want them to send it back in and we'll sharpen it and send it back to them because I want them to go out in the field and have a good experience, you know, but part of the reason so many people gave up on sharpening, I hear it all the time, like, well, I can't sharpen. And it's like, well, then they show me the knife they're trying to sharpen. It's like that factory made that knife with the cheapest steel, crappy heat treat, thick blade, because they don't want you to break it. I mean, occasionally on a knife that's this thin, I mean, it's a hundred thousandths thick. It's 12,000ths thick at the tip.

If you abuse it, you can break it. It's like, well, we'll just replace it. But for the one in, you know, hundreds and hundreds that that happens to, the other people are really happy because it's easy to resharpen. It passes through material easy. You know, so when I see what people are trying to sharpen, like, like well you never really

had a chance on your sharpening stone like they hand it to me and i just go straight to a belt grinder yeah you know try to get it right yeah uh i love that knife right there this one's a great one the stone goat yeah we're gonna we're gonna hit on a couple things then we're gonna come back josh we're gonna talk about some products coming out we're gonna talk about we're going to hit on a couple of things that we're going to come back. Josh, we're going to talk about some products coming out. We're going to talk about, you're going to show people how to sharpen your knife.

Yeah. How like, cause I like that stuff, man. Yeah. Yeah. I was at Steve's house for dinner and he like walks off into the garage and he sitting

at, sitting at his counter and he, he walks back in and he just plops down a knife and a sharpening stone. And he was like, show me. I, yeah,

I like to see how you like do it. And he had one that was real bad shape and i told him seth did that no that ain't true well i was like it's not my fault you might have actually said something to that effect actually seth had ruined it i sharpened a knife for someone in texas and got a lot of compliments out of it well you got to see this strategy, dude. He's going to do a strategy that people need. I'm not going to. I am going to tease the strategy. No, I'm not.

He'll explain it. It's different. It's a different strategy, but it's like I've been using it. I love it. I want to watch you do it one more time, but it's a phenomenal strategy. We're going to cover some more stuff. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know,

sucking a high-end titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking.

That's right, we're always talking about OnX here on the MeatEater podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out

if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Some news bits, though. We kind of already touched on this. This is a weird one. Not weird. This is really good. The boudin is on this. This is a weird one. Not weird.

This is really good. The boudin's good. The boudin's fantastic. How did Yankees not know about boudin when you're ice fishing? I don't know. Check. Cut me off. I don't know. I don't care. Just give me another piece. It almost reminds me of like Scrapple. I love Scrapple too.

Yeah. My wife eats it. it oh it's fabulous yeah she's just like oh she's like whatever tastes good i like this better than the last are you saying it hasn't changed her life no some buddhans are a little more livery than that you could say to people it's kind of like liver and rice, and people are going to not want to go near it. You know what I'm saying? You wouldn't.

Yeah, it changed my life. I don't know why Yankees haven't gotten into boudin. They are, because when I start my new company, I don't want to tell people the name, because I don't want anyone to steal it. Or does that help me hold on to it? I'm pretty sure you've said it already. Big Sky Boudin.

Yeah, there it is. Yeah. That, like, now I've. onto it i'm pretty i'm pretty sure you said it already it's big sky booty up there it is yeah that like now i've that'll be a food truck or maybe should be a food truck we open up in front of the store and we'd have long line here's a news item we've touched on a bunch it's going to keep changing back and forth i predict um i've said it before i've said it many times i got the shirt i don't i don't want them to build the Ambler Road in the Brooks Range, which is like a 200 mile road in the Brooks Range to access a mining district that crosses, I don't know, some thousand plus rivers and streams.

I think it's a bad idea. I never, one thing I never worried about was running out of roads. Um, so the BLM officially revoked its permit for the proposed Ambler Road. We had reported on the fact that they were going to. They did. Someone's trying to resurrect it. So right now it's dead. Someone's trying to resurrect it with an amendment that they added to a Senate version of the defense bill, so the annual defense bill,

has in there to force the Department of Interior to select a route for the Ambler Road. The reason I say this will come back up again. When Trump's back in office, his administration did a lot of good stuff for hunters, and they did a lot of stuff that wasn't that good. This is not that great for hunters. This is an area where I'm probably going to really disagree with Trump on.

My guess is the Interior Department under Trump is going to be favorable to the Ambler Road. That's my guess. I think that's a good guess. I'm going to write a letter does that uh dear does that supreme recent supreme court decision impact this at all either or could it what decision where are they they kind of take away the power of agencies to make you didn't see that the chevron the repeal of the show oh i have but i haven't come to understand it yet i don't think this one was done

not quite no you'll be all right they're they're pre-cooked it's it's all pre-cooked yeah oh yeah we're good you're just cold just cold hog liver yeah uh no you know i'm not aware of this i've been trying to understand it but i do think that this is going to be one of those ping pong issues there are certain issues that just never go away. Like an administration will do a thing. Like some of the monument status stuff takes forever. Because one administration does it and an administration doesn't. Yeah, this could be Alaska's new pebble mine.

Yeah. And what will probably happen is like Trump will come back in office. His interior department will probably move toward doing this. But it'll play out so slowly that like some other guy will get elected down the road and his it'll just be stuck in this like never-ending limbo meanwhile but the road's not going to get built while that process while that process is going on but i think that you'll be hearing um it seemed like up in the air but now that it's so clear how the election is going to go, you'll hear more about this Ambler Road issue. We recently had on Colossal Biosciences, and we talked about resurrecting mammoths and all the policy and technology to resurrect mammoths.

Heffelfinger wrote in. I said, hey, can I share your letter? And he said, go ahead, right? Heffelfinger, sort of our resident biologist and world's leading deer expert. He would contest that. World's leading mule deer expert. Your conversation with matt james was interesting this is this is heffelfinger i like the technology that all that research is generating

but the talk of bringing mammoth elephant hybrids back and then creating an ecosystem for them is not only utter nonsense, it is frightening. What will happen to all the animals that currently live in those ecosystems? Those animals have earned their place in it by surviving the evolutionary gauntlet while mammoths are proven losers. Harsh. Harsh. Glad there aren't any mammoths around to hear that. Hurt your feelings.

I mean, they make great knife handles. I support it. Yeah. Think about what? You got to grow them. No, because you can use them fresh. You don't have to wait for them to be thawed. Especially if there was a plethora of them.

That's the thing those guys haven't even thought of to add into their list you can pay for itself with the ivory yeah you should uh you should make an investment into that place yeah well the knife i've made worse investments he goes up proven losers i like rooting for the under underdog but those things are under permafrost. See what he did there? That was good. Very good writer.

Are they really losers if potentially an asteroid hit the planet and they just got wiped out in a second? That's not what happened to them. Well, people. I mean, they were on Wrangell Island until 4,000 years ago. Yeah. They vanished in Europe, you know, 40, years ago and then and then in some places they vanished 13 000 years ago in wrangle island 4 000 years ago uh i'm gonna read read this great sentence i like rooting for the underdog but those things are under permafrost and they lost losers

all the energy and money put into bringing back losers and then trying to create an ecosystem for them is lunacy. However, the money people are donating to bring the mammoth back is generating a lot of great genomic research that will have benefits elsewhere. But let's not ruin the ecosystem for winners by trying to bring back and prop up the losers. Then he closes with this full disclosure. It would be cool to see a mammoth. He sends a thing. They're still trying to puzzle out. So,

so Wrangel Island. See, this is so fascinating, dude, because Wrangel, like, even though people argue about the Blitzkrieg hypothesis, they argue about the idea that humans wiped out mammoths. There's this weird thing that happens where mammoths were wiped out in different places at different times,

contemporaneous with the arrival of humans. There's research now on wrangle island where they lasted until four think about this till 4 000 years ago there were mammoths on wrangle island they currently think just based on all these examples they've had of all the all these mammoth remains and then human remains, it's like they've recognized a 400-year gap between... Huh. It's not very long. Yeah. A 400-year gap between the last mammoth and the first person.

That's bizarre. Whenever someone starts throwing around numbers that precise about that long ago you got to be a little suspicious yeah that was my first thought it was like that's not very many human or mammoth lifetimes and then you know and then you got a fact i don't know i don't even know i'm not getting into what they're looking at i don't know what they're looking at but you also got again to did the did the first person that arrived in wrangle island did he like leave evidence of himself meaning the oldest thing you find is not the oldest thing exactly right so when you get in all this stuff about the peopling of the americas like you have really old sites but there aren't many of them and what are the

chances the first person to do anything created a site? Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. I will say ever since that guy was here for the podcast, whenever I have a, after my, like my first beer, I'll just turn to the nearest person and I'll say, did you know that when the last mammoth blinked out, the Egyptians were building

the pyramids? Cause that frame of reference blew my mind stuck with me um in john mcphee's pulitzer prize winning book of geology based in range no it's called annals of the former world uh he's he says if he was gonna i've said this before if he was gonna sum this book up in one sentence, it would be that the top of Mount Everest is marine limestone. He also imagines that if you took all of the Earth's history and you imagined it as a timeline spanning between fingertip and fingertip,

okay, so this is the Earth's history, you can remove human history with one stroke of a nail file. Whoa. Yeah. It's a lot of history. McPhee's good. I think the first sentence in that is that the magnetic poles wander.

Like the North Pole wanders and the South Pole wanders. Where were we? Oh, Wrangell Island? I threw out there that they should get these mammoths going on Wrangell Island. When they get the new mammoths going. The earliest human occurrence on Wrangell Island has been dated to 3,600 years ago. The last mammoths, 4,000 years ago.

Whatever happened to those mammoths, they feel was sudden. Not, because they're looking at, like you can determine, you know, when you look at stuff, there's like some like mitochondrial DNA thing

where you can determine how many breeding age females are in a population. It was whack. It wasn't like there was like, they're saying it wasn't like there was a couple. I still think my little personal theory being not an expert at all is that, that they're going to wind up. The dude showed up there. It seems not unlikely. Dude showed up there and killed him. On an island that's plausible, right? Yeah. That's kind of what.

But across the entirety of the continent, that might not be what got him. Where's the, how far from the coastline is that boneyard guy that Rogan's had on? That's all those mammoths. Oh, he's way in the interior. Yeah. Way in. Yeah, Rogan's had on. All those mammoths. Oh, he's way in the interior. Way in. He's Fairbanks.

Fairbanks. So like the slight, slight, you know, very center, slightly south of center, but yeah. Yeah. South of the Brooks Range. Takes away my theory. Cause it looks like those are all just like piled in one spot. Like you would imagine even like in a tsunami or something where a wave would wash everything into one spot.

Why they're all tangled up. Yeah. It's like the La Brea Tar Pits in LA. There's just so many of them. A great catching spot. The musky guy. What do we call that musky episode? It's not out yet as of the recording of this.

So we'll see. So can I comment on that? Yeah, of course you can. We just don't know what it's going to be called. Larry. Yeah, we recorded a, well, we covered the Muskie War, which none of us knew occurred.

The Muskie Wars with a muskie expert. And you'll hear him. And he, I challenged him on something. He didn't like getting challenged on it i'm not gonna read what he wrote i'm not gonna read the thing he sent me but he uses all caps oh no and the important words it's like a very like a very trumpian use of all caps he says

hi corinne i just ran across a musculunge study that concurs with my opinion that genetics matter in muskellunge populations, uppercase, contrary to Steve's opinion and disagreement with my comment during our podcast filming. I doubt he will care much, but it does in fact counter his deer population growth by just moving them fish are not mammals i was pointing out to him research by uh the monteith lab where things that here i'm talking about nothing i'm not an expert on but but it's it's interesting stuff it's like when we look when hunters look and they'll say that an area has good genetics, like there's an area that produces big bucks. These deer researchers are doing all these studies that show that like there's a lot

more to the picture than good genetics. So like genetics matters, but there's so much stuff with nutrition, and not only that, but the health of female deer, the health of does when they get pregnant. So meaning when a buck is born, his sort of antler development destiny has already been set his potential from in utero like from in utero development and you could do all kinds of things to that animal

and you will not overcome what it experienced in the womb and the health and condition of that mother in the womb but that's just stress she was under that's just the potential for how big right it's not like if he lives in an area with shitty food he might never sure he could have a great he could have great prenatal care but but land in an area of poor food but what they did they went to areas where they they went to

these areas that have like bad genetics people say like those bucks have bad genetics they don't get big you can take males and females from those areas and move them to different areas and keep them isolated so they're not getting new genetics they're just in a new environment. You can take those males and females, move them to a new area that people think has good genetics, but not interbreed them, and they will become representative of the good genetics area. Meaning, it's nutrition and stress and all these other factors. It's not like the genetics of the area. It's, it's all these things. And,

and stress is a big, they feel that, that, that stress is a big part stress from predators, stress from overpopulation, stress for food resources, how much fat the mother has when she gets pregnant. All these things are

leading to like is it going to be a big giant buck not just that it has good genetics and i don't know if they've done the reverse but presumably you could go to an area with like great like quote great genetics sure the kaibab plateau and take some of those mule deer and move them to a bad genetic area and they might sounds like it's reasonable to assume they might come out not great mule deer he sent me this paper Larry where they've done

just that with muskies and it points to points to me being wrong as he says fish ain't mammals. Hard to argue with that. That I can't argue with. A listener wrote in. Brody was trying to bring

this up with me. We're going to let Brody tell them all about it, Brody. Then I'll give you my commentary. Do you want to read it or do you want me to? Hey guys, I love your show and listen to it every time I get the chance. I'm not sure if you're keeping up with what is going on in Colorado over the last several weeks. What he's referring to is Colorado has announced an end to over-the-counter non-resident archery elk tags. Long time coming on that, but back to his letter.

But I'd like to hear your input. It has to do with the number of tags allotted to non-residents versus residents. On the Colorado Elk Hunters Facebook page, an open forum, it has gotten crazy to the point where many of the residents posting would rather not have

non-resident hunters at all. And he goes on to say there will no longer be OTC availability during archery elk season for non-res hunters. And he wants to know where does that lead? Steve always mentions slippery slopes. What is the slippery slope here? He brings up a couple points that warrant discussion. The animal numbers are down, but most of us are hunting on federal land that our taxes help pay for.

Okay, so that's an old argument, which we'll touch on real quick. I don't agree with residents having to draw a tag every year to hunt a state they live and pay taxes in. But I don't think I should have to move to a state with elk to be able to hunt elk. And I don't know. Yeah, people are acting like the sky is falling on this one. Not me. Like this has been in works for years and years. I don't necessarily see it as this huge anti non-resident thing.

I just see it as a way for them to manage their elk herds better. Like people are going to have to, instead of buying a tag, that's good for most of the state, you're going to have to pick a unit and draw a tag. And I don't think there's going to be this massive decrease in the number of tags available. It's just like, you're gonna have to pick a spot and sure it might be harder to get a tag that way. Um, but I see it as a better way to manage Colorado's elk. Number one. And it's not like Colorado is now some outlier in Western states.

No, like you can't go by over the count, non-resident over the counter archery tags in most Western states. In fact, it's hard, very hard. Like you want to bitch about Colorado, try getting a tag in new Mexico or Utah or Arizona,

you know, like, yeah, there you have like every state has a, like take New Mexico. Okay. New Mexico has a set number of elk tags. They're going to give out demand does not change that.

There's a set. There's going to be a set number of hunters doing it. Right. Yep. Colorado now has a set number. You can't at the last minute like it's like everybody would always put in for draws in the west and if they don't draw they'd be like well if i don't draw i'll just buy my over-the-counter thing in colorado right which i'll point out you still can buy over-the-counter bull tags in color Colorado for second and third rifle season. Like the opportunity, like Colorado is a very

easy state to get an elk, non-resident elk. It has the biggest elk by, by like. Yeah. By a hundred grand. Yeah. More than Montana. Like no one's even close to how many elk Colorado has.

In New Mexico, you can buy the over the counter elk tags on private land. Sure. Sure. And I don't know if you can do that in Colorado or not, but, uh, they, they have to do that on the private lands just to control those herds, but.

And there's a lot of units in Colorado where residents have to draw an archery tag already, like quality units, you know, where there's maybe the numbers don't support over the counter hunting, but there's big bulls. So I think there's a lot more being made of this than people need to be worrying about. When they're making it a draw, right?

It's not like they're just saying no non-residents. It's a draw with quotas and you got to pick a unit. Meaning it's like everybody else. Yeah. You have, yeah, in Montana, you have to now draw mule deer tags or elk tags as a non-resident. And holy cow, like where we were hunting last year there's a huge problem like it's no like with non-residents and that's something to

be like talked about like there's a but that's a cap that's a capped number right yeah it's already capped but however like this is just kind of like a whole different subject. Like, I mean, where Seth and I went hunting last year, there were so many non-resident hunters. It was kind of unbelievable. And a lot of these people are not educated on like what you can do or what you cannot do. On land access. On land access. And you were saying that the agency was sending

people because they're trying to lower deer numbers in a certain area. Yeah. And, but it was, it was terrible. Like. There's another side of that too with the non-residents, you know, especially in Montana, some of those Eastern towns and whatnot, it's a

huge part of the economy too that you can't, it's like, it's a challenge for residents, but it's also, I think a lot of those people come in, tend to spend at times more money. But it's like half and half too, like ranchers are now in those areas, like we are fed up with what's going on. People are trespassing.

Yeah. But like to blanket, like to say like it's all the non-residents doing that. I don't, like I think there's plenty of places where residents are part of the problem. I think, I think the big, I mean, it sort of conflates two issues. One is like distribution of hunters across a

big state. I mean, Idaho has gone through that sort of drifting towards a non-resident draw, but they went from over the counter. You could buy a deer tag. At that time you could buy one like in June. Once you could, you know, this is probably five years ago, you could buy an Idaho deer tag in

June and then it was, you need to pick a unit in an attempt to make, prevent non-residents from all crowding into one unit. Well, yeah. And then that heightens the demand. And then all of a sudden they're selling out of non-resident deer tags December 1st and there's a huge waiting line.

And so that's going to go to a draw soon as well. Limiting those numbers is like. Yeah. Potentially solve some of the problems. Yeah. And that's the thing about non-residents. They're all going to go to the best areas because they're already traveling.

Where resident tags, a lot of those people, they're just hunting after work, maybe on a Saturday, right around where they live in a poor area. Yeah. You know, poor numbers, like even over where we're at, you know, some of the numbers and some of the challenges with that.

But non-resident hunters are like, okay, where's the best spot in Montana to go hunt? So they are congregating in the absolute best hunting areas. Well, I think that they'll eventually, I want to return to Colorado, but they're going to eventually address that by needing, by you're going to need to pick your areas.

Yeah. Because right now, if you have, it's true that if you have huge general areas, like you have these large general areas, and then you have a big number, and it's set by the state. There's a cap, right? There's a cap on how many tags they're going to give out. But if all those people that draw, non-residents draw that big thing, there's nothing preventing them from all going to the exact same spot because your tag isn't broken out by unit, by unit wide. And you have a lot of latitude and you also have like long archery season.

Like in the end, it'll be that you probably, it'll probably wind up being something like you pick your weapon and you pick an area. Which, which it, I mean, which would, Which would conform to how most states run the program. And call, like residents have to draw Colorado rifle tags for first and fourth rifle and they have to draw muzzleloader. Like.

Here's the thing about Colorado. There is no over to count, like think about mule deer. No deer tag. There is no over the counter mule deer tag in Colorado. Yep. It's all draw.

For residents, too. But no one's saying the sky is falling on that. And I got news for the residents in Colorado. They're happy about this non-resident draw thing. Pretty soon, residents are going to have to draw archery tags, too. It's just the way it's going to go. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking.

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Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. In terms of his comment about people on a Facebook page being riled up, let me tell you a little something about human psychology. Human psychology. Most people are out for their own best interests especially on like something hunting right you're out for your i'm not saying that in terms of how you relate to your family but like you're out for your own best interests you know you're kind of like looking out for your own thing i don't care what state you go to on the planet if you went around and polled

welcome non-residents if you went around and polled hunters in any state on the planet if you went around and polled welcome non-residents if you went around and polled hunters in any state on the planet the the the resident hunters are gonna you'd be like hey do you think non-res do you think we should make it that non-residents can't come they're gonna be like yeah huh who but who is that problematic for it winds up being hugely problematic for the fishing game agency that's doing management because there's all kinds of issues around funding it's problematic for the economy but like of course on a facebook page colorado elk hunters facebook page you're gonna have people who are like i don't think they should be able to come here if you came to me and said to me if you came to me and said hey montana just banned non-resident hunters and anglers i would secretly be going like sweet yeah but if you came

to me and said hey alaska just banned non-resident hunters and anglers i'd be saying damn it yep getting the pitchfork oh i'd be yeah i'd be like you know like most people like most people i know most people hang out with do some hunting and fishing in other states. Yeah. My buddy from Pennsylvania like texted me after he got wind of this and he's like, I can't believe Colorado would do this to non-resident hunters. And I was like, dude, Pennsylvania doesn't have over the counter statewide doe tags for

whitetails. It's like, you got to pick your spot. You got to pick a unit. Yeah. It's like, and there's what, a million whitetails or something in Pennsylvania. It's like, it's, it's like you gotta pick your spot yeah it's like and there's what a million white tails or some something in pennsylvania it's like it's it's like not yeah go to southeast alaska and go find people that aren't guides and don't work in the tackle businesses and stuff and go to southeast alaska and say do you think we should get rid of non-resident fishermen right they'd probably like

that sounds like a great idea it's just like human nature dude yep you know so I'd be bummed if they did in Alaska I'd be like if they did in Montana and Colorado move into this thing feels to me not like they're doing something insane it feels to me they're doing something they're doing a management strategy that's already being used all over the place and I don't want to get like i don't want to get alarmist here but colorado's bringing they're purposefully bringing in and trying to they're purposefully bringing in and trying to establish wolf populations there is no mystery this is not debatable there's no mystery to what happens when you do that some of those elk get eaten yeah this is not like like i'm this is just me stating like the

objective reality the objective reality whether you love wolves hate them whatever i heard that like people keep going into our store on main street to complain about uh wolves i don't know if this is true or not to complain about our stance on wolves which are like which is very nuanced there should be like a complaint drop box or something no there should be like a sign that says like here's here's like the stance on wolves it's like really complicated stand here and read it a minute. Okay. The objective reality. Wolves eat elk and wolves don't make elk.

Yes. The objective reality is that each of those things eats seven pounds of meat a day. Okay. It will come to be that Colorado, in areas where wolf packs get established, have dramatically fewer elk go look at the idaho panhandle go look at the the greater yellowstone herd in the years in the the decades coming out of 95 and 96 you you see greater than 50 percent reductions in elk herds it's just like this is not that's not a pro-wolf statement. It's not an anti-wolf statement. It's just like, that's what will happen in areas where wolves get established.

People, some people will say like, that's great. That's great news, right? Hunters will say that sounds like shitty news, but it's just the reality. So the Colorado, and I'm not saying, I'm not trying to draw a parallel here, but the Colorado is taking some measure right now in anticipation. Like they would be smart to take some measure right now in anticipation of having a lot fewer elk as wolves get established. In some places, yeah. We'll see what happens.

You have the perfect case point. You have three states. One of which touches Colorado. It's like, look what happened in Wyoming. Look what happened in areas of Idaho. Look what happened in areas of Montana.

It's just the reality. Some people will sing songs about it. Remember that? It was all debunked, but the whole, like, traffic cascade and, you know, beavers are singing happy songs and stuff, you know. Hugging a wolf. And then later people were like, well,

it turns out that might not have been actually what happened but um either way so yeah colorado sure you got to put in now you can't just wait and buy your license in a gas station it's like okay you can't anywhere right and him saying i think that's hunter the other thing this guy says it's, is he says, I don't want it to be that a hunter can't get an elk tag every year in his own state. Welcome to Arizona, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico. Do you see a theme? Hot, dry places. Without tons of agriculture.

That's already the reality. Anything else to add no just your comment yeah about numbers like those numbers are capped like during the great antelope heyday of montana okay which like you go back to 2000 early 2000. The great antelope heyday of Montana. And it was great. They were giving out 13,000. Tags. Either sex antelope tags. And handing out with each of those two doe tags.

Wow. That sounds awesome. Dude, every year you would go into the field with a buck tag and two doe tags. 13,000. What was that number a couple years ago? 6,000, but you get, what, one doe tag? But when they were giving out those 13,000 tags, those 13,000 tags were getting used. Yeah, because Axis was easier, too. Then they went to 6,000 tags, those 13,000 tags were getting used. Yeah. Cause access was easier to now that then they,

then they went to 6,000 tags. They're getting used. I don't know where it's going to sit now, but I don't know if it's ever going to climb that high again, but it's like the agency, like in the end with, with most of these systems, the agency is saying how many people are going to be in the field,

how they distribute themselves is a different question yeah i mean one thing to my point like i non-residents like that's great seeing him hunt in different state but when i say the problem was in how people are actually respecting the land like it was terrible terrible you said you kept finding people hunting places were driving driving everywhere off roads trespassing people were cutting people off on their way to deer and this wasn't just like one time it was this was like everywhere you went and i guess what i'm trying to say is people need to respect the resource that we have, especially as a non-resident because it was,

it was just a shit show. Well, that's a, that's a general hunter, resident, non-resident problem that we have to as hunters self-police and fix. Cause like my, my uncle manages a gigantic ranch here in Montana. The one he managed for about 20 years over by Show-Dough, you know, hunters ruined him on it

and, and, uh, ruined him on wanting to allow them on their, you know, he would give permission and say, Hey, park here, walk in, no driving in. Two in the morning, they're knocking on his door and we got our truck stuck two miles back, you know, up here, whatever, no driving in, two in the morning, they're knocking on his door and we got our truck stuck two miles back, you know, up here, whatever, driving out in the fields.

Like that's just, we as hunters, if we want to keep that access, have to do better. Yeah. I couldn't, I kind of couldn't believe that that many people were being so disrespectful, you know. But I also have to say. Washington plates.

I mean, resident hunters, resident hunters. Yeah. Do the same stuff. Yeah. What was that, Phil? Sorry. I thought you didn't like what I was saying. That's why I say more, that's a general hunter.

That's people. Yeah, that's people. In any state. We heard from multiple landowners being like, we freaking hate this time of year because of hunters just acting like assholes. Yeah. Yeah.

Which is not good. Even like out in Eastern Montana, some of the roads you choose to drive, even if you can, little two tracks, like. Legally driving. If it's, if it's wetter than hell today and you know it's going to be dry by tomorrow, you know, driving that road today, just tearing the shit

out of those roads. And then those ranchers have to drive them. They have to fix them. Until they can get fixed. Yeah. Right. Until they can fix them. Man, it's too bad.

I don't want to go on and on about this, but I'll say that. No, it's a good point. me or my kids or me and my kids hunt on private land dude i get like i get paranoid about following the rules and do and really try really hard to express my gratitude after the fact and weren't you know we take we take like i'll take a handful of knives out give them to landowners like i mean we're you know most of us can't afford to go buy our own ranch. So when you get like the block management program, when you get permission to hunt a

gigantic piece of property, it's a pretty cool opportunity that those people give us. Yeah. So we have to treat that with like it's gold. Yeah. Bring a gift basket and get real clear on where you're supposed to go and not go and if he says park at that next fence park way this side of the next fence yeah um oh so we got three new so start starting in august we have three new um

whitetail systems launching so you have to stay tuned for this and go to firstlight.com and check them out. Hey, it's Phil jumping in with a quick update. This new Whitetail system actually launches on July 30th. July 30th. Back to the show. System set up by early season, mid-season, late system. So season.

System. God, I sound like Biden here tonight. Early season. But your wife just keeps pushing you to this podcast every day. She's like, oh, honey, i like you doing that let's unbutton let's unbutton more buttons on your shirt we'll unbutton a lot more buttons on your shirt because somehow that'll make you seem really young um early season mid season

late season being phase core thermic similar designs to first light traditional

white tail get up but new tech and integration across all the systems so make sure you check that out get your your kit

dialed it's pretty it's super sweet stuff um from like you know hot weather early season to cold weather late season it's like we've been messing with it and i did some hunting with it and i think you guys will dig so stay tuned for that as that comes forward anything else we want to talk about this supreme court thing We can bump that. It's interesting. Phil, did you get some boot in? Uh,

no, Corinne offered some to me. So thank you, Corinne, but I'm, I'm doing good. Thank you. I want to do one last news item.

Oh, and then also our kids, then we're done on news. Oh, two, two news items. Oh, so people have been hearing the kids show.

Yep. We got a few more episodes. The last one is August 5th. Yeah. So please do us the favor. If you, if your kids are enjoying the kids show, you got to let us know.

What's the email address? The meat eater podcast. Okay. So just go to that. The meat eater.com. Yeah. We've been, we launched a kids podcast.

You've been, it's been dropping on the feed. We need to hear, do your kids dig it? What do they wish was different? And, and keep us updated on the kids podcast. We want to keep doing them but we just want to kind of check and see if people if people's kids are digging them and so let us know how your family is listening what you're finding out on the

kids podcast has been a blast to do it two last news items legislative wins in michigan here's one that's interesting um i wouldn't have thought of this but it's it's uh it's a good one so michigan united conservation clubs um petitioned for this for these legs for some of this legislation they expanded the youth mentor license to allow people with developmental disabilities and special needs to use the mentor license in perpetuity under direct supervision if they cannot pass a typical hunter safety course so think about this normally like normally you can do two years of mentored hunting but let's say you have a child someone in your family that would be incapable of, for whatever reason, of taking the class and passing hunter safety. They're not capped at two years now, as long as they're, you know, when they say a company, it's like you're within arm's reach of your mentor.

So you'd be able to continue hunting, even if for some developmental reason you were not able to go and get certified. That's cool. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah, that's cool. And they also got more funding for Michigan's venison donation program. Those are ones like I get it, but I always, I don't know, man. I understand it. So tons of high quality protein donated to homeless shelters, food banks, needy families through hunter efforts.

It hadn't been part of the state budget, but they got state funding to help with the Sportsman Against Hunger campaign. So, comments anyone? Didn't we just recently talk about those programs getting harder because of CWD somewhere? Yeah. Yeah. recently talk about those programs getting harder because of cwd somewhere yeah yeah yeah and it's like certain there's someone who's mentioning that certain butcher shops in their area weren't participating in them so maybe if there's more funding it there's more of an incentive for yeah well for the program to work more efficiently that's the thing about like that's why

it's a little bit tricky on the donation programs because i what was it what state was it wisconsin i can't remember one of the states said you can't distribute the stuff till it comes back negative so when you kill a deer till it comes back negative on cwd even though we'll continue to point out until the day i die no person has ever gotten cwd from a deer right from consuming it no cow has ever gotten it from a deer. Known, okay? There's no known risk. There's a hypothetical risk

to the consumption of CWD-infected deer meat. You shoot a deer and bring it down to a butcher. And you're like, I'd like to donate this. The butcher has to submit the test. He can't distribute the meat until he gets the negative test. So picture opening day in wisconsin where deer dies every two seconds opening day or something like that yeah i mean it really is something like that about right it could be less every so

so you know your joe blow uh deer processor and you get this big influx of deer deer donations come in and somehow you're under the obligation of sort of like cold storaging right cold storaging all these deer to wait on all these test results and meanwhile you're just getting flooded in with deer so guys had to be like i can't do it i can't accept the i can't accept the donation venison and then wait for a test result to come in and then be responsible for sorting out what deer is what, discarding the ones, getting the other ones down the line, so it created a whole

created a whole mess. I don't picture that mess going away. Not going away. Alright. Corinne has actually on this. It says Boudin. Mission accomplished. I think we hit that.

Crenn, you can scratch that off. Check that one. Billy's Boudin. I like T-Pops and Billy's Boudin, man. Where's Billy's at? I don't know. Can someone look it up? Where is Billy's atoudin, man. Where's Billy's at? I don't know. Can someone look it up? Where is Billy's at?

He sent some. That's good. That is good. I love it. Ice fishing? I'm surprised that those southerners even like it. They don't ice fish. You cannot think of a better ice fishing food than a hot boudin with some hot sauce.

Oh, they've got a couple of locations. It's kind of not something that you crave when you're getting on the boat in the morning in Louisiana and it's 90 degrees and a hundred percent. And you got to go free diving and you're going to be seasick. That's what I'm saying.

It's a good for ice fishing is the ice holds still. Yep. Chase that down. Chase that down with a bush light. No one gets ice sick. No, you don't get seasick on ice.

So it's a great place for boudin, but you don't want to be puking up boudin on the high seas. No. All right, Josh, you ready to dig in? Sure. That's not the stone you described to me that you had, and then you sent me a really nice stone. Yeah, I sent you one. This one's a little finer.

I sent you one that's a little more coarse, that has a coarser side, So you can actually sharpen stuff that's in worse shape. Got it. Like if somebody handed me a knife that was in really bad shape, really thick, um, I, that same stone I sent you, I have at home that I would use to like remove a serious amount of material. But can you fine tune on it too? Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's a 600 grit. Uh, it's a, it's a, I think it was a 320 or 220 on one side and 600 on the other. This one finishes at a thousand on the top instead of 600, just a little difference. And you use, so when you're like, when you go to sharpen your own knives, you use a oilstone.

Yes. Either that oilstone or, or this one. I mean, either way. Okay. So you like that one. He's got in front of him a work sharp with the, it's a work sharp bench stone. So this is a water stone. It's a six inch stone, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And this is, there's water and there's oil stones and that just provides some lubrication for the stone. It actually, if you run these dry, you'll break off the little, you know, the little grit points on the stone. That water actually provides support for the grit next to it. That's what it's doing? Yeah.

Yeah. The owners of, or the guys that work at DMT were explaining kind of why the lubrication. Uh-huh. Um, and so like this one, uh, when I just put it in here, I had to put quite a bit of water in here cause it'll soak it up like a sponge. I mean, the first two times I poured water and it took it all up.

Yeah. I've noticed that. It's amazing. Yeah. You can actually dunk it in there and you'll see bubbles come up. Yep. And then the bubbles will stop coming and

you know it's saturated. Yeah. Like at home, I've got a bucket next to my grinder. I'll just throw this full stone in the grinder and just soak it instead of doing the water bottle thing. But yeah, so, you know, there's these stones.

This is, when people ask me about stones for their home, to me, you have two setups. You have your bench stone in your garage. I think that stone I sent you is a Norton stone, Norton oil stone. Yeah, because I didn't have garage. I think that stone I sent you was a Norton stone, Norton's oil stone. Yeah, because I didn't have a, I have that exact wet stone, but I didn't have an oil stone.

My old man, I have my old man's oil stone, but I keep it more like a piece of what do you call it? Memorabilia. Dude, it's got like, it looks like a valley. Yeah. It's like dished out like you wouldn't believe. People didn't sit around and look at Instagram

back then. They sat around and sharpened their knife, you know, by the fire. Yeah. And, and. That's why none of my knives can cut shit. You know. That, that stone of yours, it's nice.

Cause if you've got, you've got a coarser stone like that one, you've got a finer stone. Like if I, if you were sharpening your chef's knives on a stone, I would tell you to use this one, not the one I sent you because this one flips over and I think it's 6,000 grit on the other side, which is really fine. Got it.

But, uh, so there's that setup, there's on your bench and then there's what you take in your hunting pack, you know, and if you leave the house with a smoking sharp knife, there shouldn't be much need to, you need to do in the field, you know, even a little blade like this, three and a half inch blade, you can do a whole elk or a moose.

Tell people what you're holding up there. This is our stone goat knife. We have, we have our speed goat, which is a paracord knife. Yep. Named after antelope here in Montana, light and fast. Uh, I then made a heavier, uh, fixed blade,

thicker, uh, skinny knife called our Stonewall after Stonewall Mountain in Lincoln. And then people liked that profile so much that I made a kind of a Speed Goat style, but we kind of combined those two knives that this blade looks a lot like our Stonewall. So those two had a baby called the stone goat. You mentioned doing a whole elk, like what's, like what's a realistic expectation, like in

the field for someone like an animal, like how much you can get through with one, one sharp knife, like cutting through heavy hide, like an elk bumping up against bone, like. Yeah, you should be able to do a whole elk. A whole elk. Without. Now, you know, I guess it depends on how

critical you are on a knife. I like a really sharp knife. Yep. So I might in the middle, just taking a break, stretch your back. I might hit it on the stone, like a quick pass back and forth. Just to touch it out.

Just to touch it and then go back to work. But I. That's what I like to do is I like to do the periodic touch up rather than wait until you like tip off the cliff. Yeah, because you get to a point where you're like struggling to cut through high. Yeah. And that's when you're going to jab yourself. Yeah. You know, and it's, the other part of that is, is, you know, I, I have people that come up to me at events and they're, they're,

you know, I did three elk with that knife and two deer and I, before I had to sharpen, it's like, I had to sharpen that some bitch long time ago. Yeah. Like, that's cool. That's great. But, uh, you know, every knife you buy is going to get dull. Yeah. And, and so it's just a matter of when and how long.

The question really a lot of times to me is how easy can you resharpen it? So people will get knives made out of some crazy ass steel and they're like, well, it lasts forever. Well, one that some of those really long lasting steels are quite brittle. It's an inverse scale when you heat treat. So the harder the steel, the, the lower the toughness, right? So as you start to lower hardness, toughness comes up and they, you do that by tempering. I can't pretend to understand. I'm trying to stop doing that in my life.

Yeah. Can you say that again? Yeah. So the heat treating process, you'll heat this blade right here up to 1500 degrees. It's called the critical temperature. Okay. This blade will become non-magnetic at 1500 degrees.

What? So when I was a kid, I didn't have a fancy heat treat oven. I had my dad's. Hold on. When you hit 1500 degrees, a magnet won't grab it? Yep. What chemical happens to change the composition? Yeah, it's wild, but they called it like the steel goes into solution and it changes and it changes, uh, like the structure of the steel kind of changes.

And so even when it cools down, a magnet still, it'll go back as soon as it drops below 1475, 1500 degrees. Could you still cut something with it? Um, well, I don't know.

It'd be kind of hot to hold. Yeah. But you follow me, right? I mean, what would it, what would it be like? It would be soft. It would be soft. Yeah it feels soft yeah you could press it on it you could press it on a uh like

you could take a nail and mark it yeah like if you well i mean not really i mean at that point you're you're you're reaching forging temperatures i mean you would dent that steel because like if you took this blade that's hard right now and you heat it up to 1500 degrees and let it cool you've ruined the temperature temper like it's soft at that point you could probably bend it with your hands hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join our Whew! Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know,

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onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. I remember one time I had a digital you know those like uh laser thermometers yeah we had a big fire going yep and just aiming that laser around 2000 2200 that's what yeah that surprised me that if but i wouldn't picture that if you threw a knife

in there that you would you could harden it okay yep so so the way that works is you you heat this so like i said when i was a kid, I didn't have fancy stuff, right? I had my dad's acetylene torch. So I would stand out in front of my dad's shop and I would heat that blade and I'd have a magnet there and I just keep touching the blade to the magnet and you'll feel it getting light.

Really? Like at first it's like snaps right to it, right? Dude, I had never heard this before. And it'll, it'll start to get light to the touch and pretty soon it's not touching, but it, it's not sticking. It might not stick here and you get back here and it's sticking here.

This part of the blade back here is thicker. Right. So when you're heating, you have to be careful to not overheat the tip. I mean, this tip's 12, 15 thousandths. This is a hundred. You have to put more heat back here, right? Especially a bigger, heavier knife, you know,

like this Bowie knife. And so I would heat with a torch and then when, when that whole thing's not sticking, then you quench it in oil. And depending on the kind of steel, uh, it could be like an automatic transmission fluid, mineral oil, um, you know, hydraulic oil, you know, you don't want to use motor oil. Some oils have a different, a lower flash temperature, but, uh, when you put it in, it'll catch on fire. There's a few times I damn near burned my dad's shop down. Uh, but when you quench that blade, it drops the temperature. You have to drop below 900 degrees in a certain rate of time.

It's like one and a half seconds or something. So by doing it fast, when you drop from 1500 down below that temperature, the steel hardens. Okay. Now that's why when, if you ever watch like that show Forged in Fire, if they, if you take this blade and you heat up and you, you quench it in water, that water's too fast.

It'll, it'll, it'll, it'll drop that temperature so fast that you, you stand a chance to crack it or break it. Huh. So. I didn't know that either. Now there's water hardening. Now Dr. Randall,

did you know what he's saying about the magnet? Be honest. No. First time. Okay. And, you know, there's water hardening steels,

like the Japanese samurai swords and stuff back in the day, W1, W2, stuff like that. You actually quench in water. So steels have their different oils that, that it's the speed at the rate at which that comes down. So people use the wrong terminology all the time to say, well, how do you temper your blades? And it's like, well, the tempering is a part of the heat treatment process.

So by heating that blade up and then quenching it, you've now hardened it. But now this thing is brittle. If I drop it on a concrete floor, it's going to shatter. It's like a piece of glass. Can't do the 90 degree bend. Nope, it snapped right off. At that point, how would it sharpen? It would sharpen up super, super sharp, fine edge.

But it wouldn't hold it. But yeah, if you bumped it against this microphone stand, it would chip it if it was thin. Gotcha. And so now becomes what we got into this on you know, bumped it against this microphone stand. It would chip it, you know, if it was thin. Gotcha. Um, and so now becomes what we got into this on is that, that scale, right?

That blade is like 67, 68 Rockwell. That's the, that's the hardness of the blade. So the, what the hell does that scale mean? The way we test that is we have a Rockwell tester.

He set that blade here and it's got a little diamond point that comes down. It touches the steel and then you, you get it zeroed out and then you pull this handle and it applies pressure down on the blade and then lets up. And however deep that point penetrated the steel or not deep determines how hard your blade is. That's the Rockwell score? Yeah. Yep. And it kicks up.

Did you know that, Dr. Handel? I didn't know how it was measured. I's the Rockwell score? Yeah. Yep. And it, and it kicks up. Did you know that Dr. Handel? I didn't know how it was measured. I knew the Rockwell scores. I knew about it too, but I didn't know what it meant. Yeah. So like if that point buries way down into that blade, it's soft, right? And, and it'll kick back up. Do you have one of those?

Yeah. The tester? Yeah. Is it a thing you, um, you don't make it obviously, you buy it. Yeah. You buy it. It's a, yeah, it's a big heavy thing that sits there with a dial on it and a handle.

So, and we, we randomly test these blades every so often, just making sure that like, hey, nothing's going on with our heat treat. So weird gremlin. So let's say that blade as hardened is like 68 Rockwell. Yeah. So you pull it out of your oil.

Very hard. You pull it out of your oil and it's hard. It's brittle. So now you put that blade in an oven. So when I it out of your oil. Very hard. You pull it out of your oil and it's hard. It's brittle. So now you put that blade in an oven. So when I was a kid, I would always put them in my mom's kitchen oven and they still had oil on them and it would stink up my mom's dad's whole house. Meanwhile, the barn's on fire. Yeah.

It's a shit show. Try that in the podcast studio, Phil. Yeah. But you heat that blade up to say 400 degrees for an hour and you take it back out and you test that rock. Well, it might be down to 64. You heat that blade up for another hour at 400 degrees, let it cool. Now you're down around 62.

And now depending on the type of knife, where do you want to stop? Right. But as you, as your, as your hardness level comes down, now your toughness is coming up. So let's take it all the way the other way. Let's take that hardness all the way down to like 55.

Okay. Now it's not very hard, but it'll, you can flex it, you can bend it, right? Yeah. And you take it all the way to just dead soft. You can bend that thing right around, wrap it around steel, you know, something three times because it's totally soft.

Got it. So again, you're trying to choose that, that balance, achieve that balance, depending on the type of blade you want to make. And that's the thing with like a lot of these factory knives, they're going for mass scale, hit the middle of the road where it's like you want as a custom knife maker, you're trying to

curtail that heat treating towards what the customer is going to do with that knife. That's what we're doing with like our MKC stuff. Can you real quick explain just in layman's term, um, when someone says it's a carbon steel knife? Yep. Yeah. So it's, it's a, there's stainless steel and there's carbon steel. So, um. So that's the two options. Yeah. Yeah. And state, but then there's hundreds of options within those options. Right.

And you know, this gets into. That's a high level division. It. You go the carbon path. Yeah. The stainless path. Yeah. And it's really, it's, it's a variance of

what kind of a, what's the chemical makeup of that steel? How much chromium is in it? How much vanadium is in it? How much manganese is in it? How much carbon is in it? And, and there's a certain scale at which you like there's stainless steels, which stainless

doesn't mean stain free. It means stains less. So at a certain point, you know, you, you step down that stainless scale to where all of a sudden you start getting more rust than you want. There's a certain scale right there where it becomes now officially a carbon steel. Got it.

And there's, there's steels out there that are, you know, more stain resistant, but maybe some of their properties don't, properties don't lend to being a great knife steel, but they're great for like, uh, something used in industry, you know, uh, surgical tools or whatever. Right. Um, like this steel right here, this is a carbon steel blade. This in industry is actually, it's called 5200, which means it has 0.1% carbon. This is ball bearing steel.

So in industry for however many, 100 years now or more, they've been making ball bearings to go in your car and in tools and whatever. They make it out of this steel because this steel is very wear resistant. Now, this brand new steel that we've been using the last couple of years called MagnaCut is stainless steel. And Laren Thomas, I actually shared at my first ever knife show when I was, I turned 14 at Eugene, Oregon show, I shared a table with a really cool knife maker. His name was Devin Thomas. His not yet born son is now a PhD meddler just and he invented magnet cut steel. Seriously?

Yeah. That's cool. And we were literally probably the first company to use it. Now that steel is a super steel because it's most stainless steels over the years have had some really good edge holding ability, but had really low toughness.

You couldn't make knives thin or they would snap break. Yeah. He, he, that's why he developed MagnaCut was to not only have the cutting ability, which frankly will outcut this blade in duration, uh, but still holds a high level of toughness. Still not the toughness of this blade,

but tough enough for anything I wanted to do. That's one of the things that you're not, what makes your knives special is that, like you said, they're like more of a user's knife because they're thin. Yep. You know, some years ago, and a lot of guys got into making their own knives. It felt to me like a lot more people got into that for a while.

Yeah, especially with forged and fire. but like big old thick bastards yep you know yeah thick and heavy that's the thing it doesn't necessarily mean quality i mean uh if you want a splitting mall to chop fur chunks of fur firewood in half yeah you want thick and heavy but when you're cutting through elk hide, moose hide, meat, you know, whatever, you want that material to pass by this edge with as little resistance as possible. The more meat you have behind the edge, and this is what people don't talk enough about is edge geometry. How thick is it behind this edge? And the more weight you have back there, the more resistance you have, the more pressure is getting put on the edge then when you do go to a sharpening stone when you when you're sharpening

a knife you're removing steel the more weight and steel you have behind that edge the more difficult that's going to be to sharpen and so i want a blade to be as as thin as possible and still get the job done without me being worried about breaking it and if you break this knife you're kind of trying even though it's thin this is skeletonized it's still super super tough so let's say someone breaks it yeah and they send it to you and you can and you'd be like I know because I made it yep that if you broke it you're abusing it like you weren't cutting up uh you weren't yeah cutting uh loins up we still send him a new knife yeah yeah yeah it's do you send a little note saying uh yeah sometimes like come on don't use this as a screwdriver anymore

when his letter when his letter is like i was just skinning my deer and the blade is broken in half. You can settle a dispute for me. I had one of your fillet knives in Alaska and I flayed a bunch of salmon with it. No problems. My buddy Ben, I let him use it for two seconds, the blades in half. Yeah. And he said he was doing nothing with it, just playing fish. Playing along. Yeah, I would find that very shocking

because we've got several thousand of those out there and I've seen one maybe or two, maybe. Well, I'll show you a third one. Yeah. Well, we'll send him a new one. Well, it's my knife. Yeah.

It's still in Alaska. I'll bring it back. Yeah. No, it's. I just. I'll bring it back. Yeah. But no, it's. I just did, I just did, I just did a sting rain along those gar with your fillet knife. I love that fillet knife. That's a rough, that's a rough fillet job.

Yeah. For, for the fish spectrum. Well, I, and you know what, every now and then shit's going to happen. People are going to break something. I, I would rather stand behind our stuff, kind of no questions asked. Because when you do replace that knife, people are like, they know what they were doing or not doing.

But they really appreciate that you stand behind it. And who knows? Shit could happen. I mean, you know, something could happen. You want them to know that you're no fool, though. Yeah. So you could say like, while I know you're lying, I have replaced you. Put a little business card in there with a picture of you winking at them.

Yeah. Well, our little secret. What's even better is when I get, you know, a DM on Instagram occasionally and somebody would be like, dude, I was, I was doing what I shouldn't have been doing. Like a hundred percent. I screwed it up. I know you're out of stock. Can I buy another one? Like, they're all heartbroken, but they're just, like, telling you, like, I completely did something I shouldn't have been.

And I still just send them a new knife for your charge. And, again, that makes them customers for life. Yeah, if they sent you a note and it started out with, you know that little ball joint on the back of a deer? Well, you know where that's going. Or like, you know, so I was trying to pry out my elk ivories, you know, and the tip on your speed goat, you know, the last eighth of an inch is gone. And it's like, yeah, yeah, it's not a screwdriver. But now you have a flathead screwdriver. Actually, the funny story, you know, the Ruana knives out of Bonner?

No. Oh, they're famous in this area because old Rudy Ruana was a legend up in this area. He was an old man when I got into making knives, but he was, his knives are worth a lot of money if you can find them. Well, my banker, when I was about 15, uh, was telling me when he was in high school, he tried prying elk ivories out of an elk and he broke the tip off and he took it back to Rudy's shop. Oh, I think you meant, you mentioned, you did mention this guy to me. Yeah.

He walked in. He had a banker at 15 years old. That's what I. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, continue. But he, he, uh, he walked in, he was like, hey, the tip broke off your knife, you know? And Rudy's like, well, what were you doing with it?

And, you know, Mark tells him and, uh, Rudy goes, well, I didn't make you a goddamn screwdriver. You know? So he fixed the tip on it. And he said that, he said, Rudy just chewed his ass up one side and down the other. And he's like, I never, ever the rest of my life did that again. Yeah. But like, if you cut down along the side of the teeth and use the, the back of your knife and

pop them out or a stick or rock or something like that, you know, your knife's not a screwdriver. No. You can turn it into a nice little flat blade screwdriver. But you can't make it into a Phillips. Yeah.

That's hard. Yeah. Okay. Walk through, uh, walk through your moves there. All right. This will be riveting for people that aren't watching, but they'll have to go watch. No, they can go watch. But I'll provide commentary because I'm going to tee it up.

Yeah. I'm just, so this has been sitting in water. I just flipped this over to get a little water on top of the stone. So I'm on the 600 grit or this is a thousand grit side. So this knife, you guys can attest to it being dull. I'm shaping. Whoa, easy.

We watched him run the blade. We watched him dull it. He ran it vertically down the stone before the show. It's good and dull. Yeah, it's dull. It's dull. Tip's dull.

It's dull. It's a dull knife. Dull knife. People at home. So can I provide a quick little bit of color? Yeah. No, you go ahead. You go ahead.

So. No, I am going to. Most people go. Meaning left side, right side. Like cutting into the stone. Yeah. Most people cut. Like you're slicing and you do like left, right, left, right, left, right side, left side, right side. Like cutting into the stone. Yeah. Most people cut.

You're slicing and you do like left, right, left, right, left, right. That's what I do. Yeah. So actually let's talk about. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about what the edge of your knife actually is. It's really a micro saw. There are teeth on your edge.

When you look under a microscope, there are little saw teeth all along your edge. So when your edge is really nice and sharp, especially, and again, I'm going to, I'm talking about a hunting knife here. A chef's knife or like a razor blade is going to be a little bit different. Good. There's little micro serrations. So when you're cutting a, let's say into a moose, a really thick bristly hair or a hog or something like that. But even with like the hide, the leather, you know, or meat, you want those teeth ripping and tearing and biting at what it's, what it's trying to cut. So when you're cutting and don't, I don't generally say you should be cutting across

hair, but if you ever do, and you're cutting across hair, you will actually see those hair pop. I mean, almost jump off of the hide because those teeth are catching that, that hair. And when they pass through it, that hair is popping apart. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, I hadn't thought of that. And so as a knife dulls those teeth, if you

imagine a nice new, uh, hacksaw from the store or a wood saw, you get it from the store and those teeth are just super, super sharp. Well, as that saw starts to get dull, those teeth are just becoming rounded, right? You can still saw through your piece of wood or that piece of steel, but it's going to take longer. It's going to take more effort. Well, it's the same way the knife blade, your little micro serration teeth are starting to wear down. They're starting to round out. And at the certain point where like they are here, they're, this is flat. I mean, if you looked under a microscope, there would be a microscopic flat across this edge. Cause you guys saw me go right, right across the stone. So what I need to do is

I need to reestablish my teeth, my burr on this blade, because that's, what's actually going to do the cutting for me down the road. And that's, what's going to give me this long duration. Um, you know, I did two elk and it was still cutting. It's because I actually delivered that blade to you with those micro teeth on it. So it didn't just go flat doll right away. If I was to strop this edge down or buff this edge down to like a razor blade, as soon as you start cutting hide or some wood or something like that, it's going to immediately create a

flat spot as soon as it wears off and there's no teeth there. So it's going to go from feeling smoking sharp when you get it to like flat dull fast. Man, nothing feels better than that first couple seconds. Do you know what I mean? Yep.

Oh, you just love it. But you got to last longer than just a few seconds. So, so anyway, I'm going to create that burr. So what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to start and a lot of people worry about the angle so much and they think the angle is wrong. But generally a knife blade is between 15 and 20 degrees of an, of, of angle.

So 15 is a, you know, that lower degree, like a, like a chef's knife or a thin blade like this. Um, and then as you get thicker blade, you got to steepen that angle up, right. All the way up to like a splitting mall that's more like a wedge. Yeah. Right? And so if it's a chopping knife or chopping through wood, you want that weight behind the edge. That weight is striking or that edge is striking, whatever it's striking. And that steel right behind the edge is providing support for that edge and also driving that wood apart.

Right? So this is thin. I've got 15 degree angle. With these work sharps, you can actually check your angle right on the end that wood apart. Right. So this is thin. I've got 15 degree angle. With these work sharps, you can actually check your angle right on the end of the stone. Yeah. He's got a work sharp sharpener that has the angle guide and you can put different angle

guides on those. Yep. So I actually am just going to start on one side and I'm going to just kind of create a burr. So I'm actually starting at the tip. Yeah. And what I see a lot of people do where's the camera this one the people will round off when they when they go this way yep you'll hear if you listen you'll hear this um like this little at the end like a flick

yeah that little flick well this tip is like 10, 15 thousandths thick. This back here is maybe thicker. And you're removing more steel off that tip and people round their tip off. You'll see. Oh, yeah. You do it and then you feel it and you start at the back. You're like loving it, loving it, loving it. You get up there and you're like, damn it.

Yeah. And they'll like bullnose, damn it. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, and, and, and they'll like bullnose their little tip. Yeah, dude. So if you start here, you can start right up on the tip if you need to, or you can actually start right behind that tip and remove material, maybe down a 16th from the tip or less, uh, and just to

keep that tip nice and sharp. And you can actually rehab your tip and, and put a tip back on your knife. Cause this tip is for like caping duties, you know, in around the tight hair on the horns and, you know, the tear ducts and those areas. Dude, that little move you got there, man. I mean, I know you've been doing it your whole life, but that little move right there is the move. So what I'm doing is I'm putting a lot of pressure right here. And he's giving Brody the bird.

Pushing hard. Yeah. Yeah, I'm just using like one finger here to just put more pressure on that blade. And I am just going in one direction, starting at the tip and pushing back to the ricasso or the plunge grind of this blade. And then I'm going to feel on the opposite side.

So the side facing me, I'm going to feel with these fingers and I'm going to feel for a burr. I'm looking for a burr because as I go across this edge, it's going to curl with these fingers and I'm going to feel for a burr. I'm looking for a burr because as I go across this edge, it's going to curl a burr up on the other side. So instead of looking at this or trying to figure out, I'm just going to wait till my fingers tell me like, oh, there's a burr all the way down it. I'm starting to develop a little burr here, but I don't have anything up here by the tip and nothing back here. Or you might have worked at one side.

So I might even work this tip, like I might just work this spot for a second, or I could work back here, like right in this spot, or then I can go back and even this thing out and I'm just going fast and putting a lot of pressure. And you're not keeping track of how many strokes you do the same on the other side. No, it's not, it's not algebra.

You don't, what you do to one side of the equation. I've been doing it so wrong my whole life. But what about the angle? How are you using the angle guide? He's got it all memorized in his head. Yeah, I can feel it. But if you want to go slow, you can be on this angle, and then you can just take and transfer that right to your stone.

Yeah, I asked him a bunch about that, but he just got it in his head, and he does it the same way every damn time. But the angle guide slows you down, but it's good for starter. It is. It's good to kind of come across and then check. Yep.

Yeah, I'm pretty good at it. Okay, so right. You're not doing it the other. Okay, yep. And so now. Okay, he still has only worked. He still has only worked. He still has only worked the starboard side of that. No, he's only worked the port side of that knife.

Port side. Left. Yeah. Four letters. Do you get sick of people telling you you're doing it all wrong? Yeah. If I just came by and saw you doing it, I'd be like, look at that moron. Doesn't he know he's supposed to do one side

than the other? I'm going to pass this around. I just kind of went fast on this, but you're going to feel there's no burr on the USA Made side, and there's a burr on the MKC logo side. And we're just feeling straight across that, and you'll feel it.

Oh, this is great. I love it already. No, listen, man, you got to bring gotta bring back yeah i can't wait to try it feel that oh yeah for sure and so if if that blade was a lot thicker and say in a lot worse condition i would have a stone with more grit like the like the the stone that i gave you is like 220 grit or something on that other side if you don't have a belt grinder or something aggressive to go to you can just move material there and reestablish your flat and

your angle that you need and then flip to the other side. And you're just, at that point, you're just hogging away material and you're trying to establish, you know, cause people will use like ceramics and a lot of these really fine stones. And over time, they're not removing any steel and that edge is just coming down in further.

It's getting more round and pretty soon you've got like nothing left. What's your opinion on the electric, electric sharpeners? They're fine. Like, like WorkSharp has, I think that Kenyan edition, like belt sander kind of edition. That's essentially the poor version of like

the grinder. I'm using like a heavy duty grinder. The problem I have with them on like a new knife of our knives is our knives are so thin like this blade, you're going to, you're going to take off 10 sharpenings or more worth of steel. Got it.

Then I'm going to take off in one. Yeah. I accidentally ground the tip off of, like rounded the tip on one of those. Did you? I was going to say. Well, you can make a mistake in a hurry. I was describing all of my knives.

Hmm? I said, we're describing all of my knives. Roundtips, round. They've come flat. Do you feel it? Mm-hmm. Hey, what's your general take on diamond honers versus stone?

I don't really have any, I mean, to me, they're all, I can make whatever work. So you don't hate diamond? I don't hate diamond. I tend to like the feel of the stone better, but maybe that's because that's what I've used since I was 12. Got it.

So. Feeling it, Brody? Oh yeah. What have you got? Diamond also is, it's kind of nice where you don't have oil and water and all the mess, but. You don't use water on diamond? No, most of those are dry, but you do take water

and like scrub them up and clean them up yeah yeah you know and like with this you can see on here there's like grit so these these stones will load up it's it's it's carving away steel and you're leaving that steel on your stone so in the middle i'll pour a little water on here and just kind of clean it off because now i've got i mean it's like putting a new piece of fresh sandpaper on the sanding stick. And that. You want to come over here and cop a feel, Phil?

That material is just filling in the gaps. All that like steel is just in there filling the gaps. It is. Yeah. It loads up. It's like if people sand on a, on a project at home with sandpaper and your sandpaper starts

getting full of stuff. Dust, yeah. Yeah, if your sandpaper is not necessarily totally dull yet, it's just loaded up. So if you clean it, you'll bring some life back. So now I've done that side. I'm going to go to the opposite side and just do the same thing. It's kind of weird sitting. I always do the standing

now here's where i'm pushing here's where i'm pushing hard even though i've been mimicking the style you taught me here's where i got a little bit um here's where i needed a refresher is how do you know when you haven't just rolled it over the other way? Well, that's, I mean, you haven't, you're not going to roll it over. I mean, cause like right here, I can feel a really heavy burr out here, but I don't have anything back here. Okay. So you're not, you're not just going to roll it over. I mean, let me, let's say you did that for a day. Aren't you going to have it be, well, you would end up, you would, if you did it for a full day, you would just end up with

like a wedge. Isn't that the purpose of like a leather is to line that. Yeah. We'll get, we'll get to that at the end. Cause like right now I have a really good burr out here. There's no sense in me taking more life out of

my knife here. So I'm just going to work this inch and a half right here. And you don't run the risk of going one or two strokes too many and just rolling it the other direction. No. Okay.

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Now, why are you ignoring the tip now? Because I already have a burr. Okay. Oh, you're monitoring where you're at. Yeah. So, like, I already established a really nice burr in my first, like, 10 passes here. But back here, I didn't have it. So, there's no sense in just taking steel away here for the sake of taking it away. I have what I'm looking for. I'm going to here and now I've got it after,

after I just did those passes there. So now to your guys' point, I'll kind of balance it out, right? So I'm going to do a full pass kind of hard. Like I just did it and I'm going to flip it over. No, he's doing the lefty right. left and a full pass and now i'm left and right every time i'm still pushing hard okay pushing hard and then what i'll start to do is i'm going to start to lighten my pressure i'm still pushing but it's it's getting lighter and with each pass i'll do a pass on each side and then i'm now i'm lightening even more and you you can hear it in the stone right yeah you were putting some ass into it early i was and now it's basically as hard as you can push early yeah is this something that you developed over time or is this like a known technique i learned this from Tim Hancock, a legendary knife maker that passed away from, uh, from MS, but, uh, or, um, Parkinson's, I'm sorry.

But he, he taught this 20 years ago to knife show. And it was like, it resonated with a bunch of us. So I'm, I'm like the weight of the blade right now. Uh, so like basically no, no weight. So now that last pass was right here. I can guarantee you, even with that last super light pass, I've got a burr on this edge, but not over here. So what's going on on that last pass, I am, even though it's the weight of the blade,

I'm chasing that burr left and right. And right now I just did a pass here. So I have a burr to this MKC side of the edge. So that's where this leather strop, if you'll hold that in. Let me see that thing. Just hold it up for everybody. Yeah, we have these. Francesca Teton Leather down in Idaho makes these for us.

Got it. And they're on our website. But I have an ancient one hanging on my nail in my shop that I think was my grandfather's. But no reason your belt, a leather belt wouldn't work. No, I take my leather belt. I think I did it in your house. Yeah.

I use my leather belt. So I have this burr here and I'm going to actually demonstrate, you can be the evidence of this. If I go this way, I leave like no tracks yep see that i come this way oh yeah look at the scratches hmm yep can you guys see the scratch line kind of yeah so that's telling you that that little light microscopic burr is just laid over to the left and that's where a lot of times retouching your knife up in the middle, you might just be unloading that burr.

Like think of loaded up sandpaper, a quick pass on your stone, one side and back the other. And you pull some of that fat and crap out of your, of your burr and you realign that burr right down the middle. Yeah. I never thought of that, that you're kind of cleaning those, you're cleaning those teeth out.

And you can see those, they're still there, right? right yeah i'm pushing kind of hard on this side and then i'll just go to this side and now i've got i can feel it dragging us a little i have it on both sides yeah and i'll just kind of balance it i don't want to take too much of this off because that burr is what i want for uh for hunting you guys want to come up a couple inches the mic arm is in the way there um yeah i mean we've we've just come back and forth across this strop and i'm done with it now so i'm gonna feel it yeah i mean that's smoking sharp so an evidence of that if you guys want um impressive damn oh wow i'm surprised you have any hair i was gonna say i know you think he'd like have denuded all the real estate man so he'd have to be like he probably doesn't use me i have to undo my belt he doesn't do this he doesn't do this for every podcast

uh yeah we're kind of considered hair farmers yeah but you can you can test like back here that is amazing back here versus like like right at the belly versus like out at the tip and it's still you can see the hairs popping um and again listen that okay that was dull. It was dull. I checked it. Everybody checked it. It was dull. And this is a work sharp bench stone. Yeah, it's called a wet stone. It's a wet stone. But it's know-how, man.

It's not like it doesn't, it's know-how. You can try to buy your way into it with contraptions and stuff, but you cannot beat that. Yeah, and if you had done that without us bugging you, it would have taken you a couple minutes. Yeah, I could just real quick. So think about it. You said, I think it was your grandfather or something with his stone that's all dished out. No, it was my dad's stone.

Yeah, no YouTube, no Instagram, no whatever. And you sit around at night. Every night you come home, sit on your chair. Well, let me share something with you. My dad's knives weren't half as sharp as that. Now what I, what I want. They were serviceable, but they weren't like that. What I want you guys to feel, when I feel an edge, I don't feel straight across.

I mean, that, that doesn't tell me anything. I'm actually, when I'm feeling this edge, I'm, I'm across, but I'm also almost, I'm sliding my finger just a tiny bit and you will feel that little burr wanting to bite. So that's the burr as a hunter. You want something when you pass it across that hide or hair or meat, it is biting in, it is digging in. That's not a thing people would naturally think of. Like if you picture a really sharp knife, you'd imagine it being just like under microscope that it's smooth slice yeah but it's like a microscopic serrated steak correct it's a saw and that's what's going to give you the longevity and the feel of like god i use i've

been using this thing and it hasn't been going dull or i'm still using it after so long it's because those teeth are wearing down but you still have some life. And, you know, like, uh, there's cutting competitions and stuff out there and you'll see guys like put a silk piece of silk up and they'll chop a piece of silk in half. Well, that's, that's not a hunting knife edge. I'm not picturing what you're talking about. Um, like a, like a piece of fabric.

Yeah. Just like a silk scarf, right? It's hanging there, just dangling in the air. Testing whether the knife will. There's no tension on it. There's no tension. Whether the knife will cut through that. Yeah.

When you like chop through it, I mean, it has to be an absolute razor to get through that. But you put that on moose hair, it's going to suck. You take a razor blade, take a razor blade from Home Depot, new out of the package and run it just straight across moose hair. It's not going to cut it. Mm-hmm. Now it'll cut the crap out of your skin because

your skin's soft, but that you want those microsurations biting that. So if you feel this edge and you feel along it, it's going to feel toothy and bitey like it wants to get you. Oh yeah. I'm so jacked. It's a working edge.

I know. I'm going to go home. I know. Sharpen some knives. I'm going to go home. I know. Sharpen some knives. I'm going to go home and ruin all of our kitchen knives. No, you're not, Randall. Come on. You're going to.

Well, I need practice. I'm going to get out all the. Oh, I see what you're saying. I'm going to get all the knives from the camper and I'm going to sharpen the camper knives first. Yeah, you can certainly feel the bite. No, it's not complicated. And it's what I want people, I want the whole idea of passing your stuff down is like, how cool would it be if, I don't know, do you have kids? How old are they?

Young? Yeah. Almost two. Yeah. So two years old. You use the, you know, a couple knives for the next 20 years and you personally sharpen them and you, you wear that thing down to where it's a half inch shorter than it is now. And it's maybe you send it back to us now and then we reset it, but you pass that thing down. It tells a story. Like

when you pass down a gun, I have a, um, black powder gun sitting on my, uh, shelf that my grandma gave me that we don't know where it came from, but it was clearly used in like civil war era. It's all beat up and the stocks beat up and chunked out. Like it was old when she got it. Yeah. And you just wonder like, God, what's this thing

been through? What's it seen? Yeah. You know, and that's the thing, like when people bring me stuff and they're like, you can tell where their grandpa fixed the handle on it and, you know, sharpened it forever and wore it out. Um. grandpa fixed the handle on it and, you know, sharpened it forever and wore it out. I recently cleaned out my garage and sold a

bunch of stuff at a garage sale. The things I did not sell were my knives. Yeah. Keep those. Yeah. Knives and guns. Yeah. That's great, man.

Would you do, what would you do differently sharpening like good kitchen knives? The same process? Basically the same thing, but what I would do at the end is I would flip over on the stone and I would probably take a few passes on that 6,000 grit side and side, and it would just make it finer, um, sometimes cutting some of the veggies

and stuff like that, that nice fine edge, tomato skin and stuff. But this edge would work just fine in your kitchen, but you'd probably like for like a push cut. You know, this is like a pole and a slice cut where those teeth are, you're putting those teeth to work like a saw. Yeah. Versus a polished edge where you're just pushing through veggies, stuff like that. Least amount of resistance. So Josh and I worked on, we worked on it. We worked on a couple, but two are available.

We worked on one. We worked on a hunting knife, which is the first time I've ever gone through this process on a hunting knife. Yeah. We worked on a hunting knife which uh we came up with the term the stub horn which is an old term for buffalo but walk through like how you approach the collaboration process because i don't know the first thing about metallurgy yeah but we talked a lot about what i'm after on blade thickness well not so much thickness blade shape handle shape blade length.

Yeah, but use case. I mean, that kind of lends to thickness, right? Like, you know, a blade that you can use, you know, a hardworking knife, right? Like if you're going to break down a buffalo, you know, you're probably going to use a blade that's a little larger in size, a little thicker in dimension if you're working through joints and some of that stuff. But yeah, we started talking and I've always been a fan of the show and a fan of yours. And for us to be able to work with you on this was very, very exciting. We talked through, I really wanted your input. I don't want to just make a knife and have you put your signature on something. So it's why it took over a year, frankly.

Probably was here a year and a half ago. Yeah, no, we sent back a bunch of, what do you call them when you make the blanks? Yeah, we did like 3D prints. Yeah, 3D prints. Because I was hung up on, one of the things I'm hung up on about it is I like them to have, I like a pretty fine point. Yep. For making opening cuts. Yep.

Like I don't like a really exaggerated version would be like the beaver skinning knives, which have that, that it's almost like a half, like a, like a quarter circle. Almost bull nosed. It's almost just like a, like a. Well, and the other thing you were, you were talking about was like the ergonomics of the handle.

Yes. Like your handle's much different looking than most of our knives uh the other unintended i'm not holding it like you picture like a boat like you picture a bowie knife pick it up you're gonna like try to kill somebody with it right i'm not most of the time i'm not holding my skinning knife i'm not like gripping it like how you imagine if you were gonna stab somebody with a knife you're more pinch gripping it like how you imagine if you were going to stab somebody with a knife. You're more pinch gripping it. Yeah. But in all different, it's upside down, it's right side up, it's sideways. I'm holding it this way.

I'm holding it that way. Do you know what I mean? It's more like you're not, I'm never grabbing it and doing a whole job like that. I'm using it in a bunch of different positions. You know, it's like, it's rolling around in your hand. You're this, you're this, you're that, whatever. The cool thing. I like it to be shaped where it's not, it's rolling around in your hand. You're this, you're this, you're that, whatever. The cool thing. It's not going to be shaped where it's not, the shape isn't that you're totally committed on a certain grip.

Right. Up is up and down is down and you can't change it. It's something that you're rolling around, that you're rolling around in your hand. It's comfortable in a bunch of positions and has some ass to it. Yep. Yeah. The shape. But also has a fine, a fine working point.

The shape of that handle, you, the unintended thing that kind of happened that I noticed as it came together was, uh, very few handles, uh, you know, I guess most of the, most of the knives that I see out there, um, certain size hands fit a knife really well, but then like guys with big hands, it doesn't. Or maybe a guy with a smaller hand is like, well, it well, but then like guys with big hands, it doesn't.

Or maybe a guy with a smaller hand is like, well, it works, but it could be smaller. The shape of that handle kind of works with all people's hand sizes. The way, because there's no like point that comes down on the handle, that handle allows even a guy with a really, I handed it the other day to a guy with a freaking huge hand.

And he was like, oh, this is really nice. It's actually comfortable because usually like the, you know, the point of the bird beak of the handle is like stuck in his palm because of the size of his hand and he gets wear spots, you know, like blisters. Another thing we did was we fluted, I use the term fluted because it looks like a Clovis point,

fluted the part of the handle that comes up to the blade. What do you? Yeah, it's more of like a what do you call it like a thumb like a thumb ramp scallop yeah which again that's in that pinch grip i don't know why we don't have one sitting here but no it'd been a good that would have been a really good marketing idea i was waiting for the big reveal yeah you got one in your office i have some sitting on my desk can you run up grab real quick? That's why I have a business partner

that does the marketing and I'm not in charge of it. But yeah, like if your thumb is right here, if you're in a pinch grip situation and we'll show it when he brings it in, but like a lot of times you want more control over that blade and you have your finger on the top.

Yeah. You know, and you're getting into and doing fine work. Again, that caping work and some of that. But you're pinching that side of that handle with your thumb. The other cool thing is, is like I asked you and you were a little back and forth one way or the other didn't seem to matter either way. But the whole lanyard hole idea, you know, some people it's really, really important to people and others it's not.

And so we did put that as an option in there because we do have a lot of people, they get worried about losing them, which they really don't need to with our sheaths, but some people want to tie it off to their gear or they'll tie a lanyard around it and have it around their wrist when they're using it. Yeah. You guys, all your sheaths come with a, with a, I guess like a belt, like a belt clip. Yeah. It's a Kydex sheath that, that blade really snaps into position. Those are, those are molded to that knife. Yeah. And we do that right in our shop.

We take a lot of care in really getting those right and they have an adjustable screw on them retention wise. So you, if that, over time it starts to loosen a little, you can tighten that screw down and get it tighter again. But it's got a belt loop clip on it that we make that you can actually put that knife on your belt and take it off

without undoing your belt or or like over your pack strap yeah the way their sheaths work i don't recommend you do this the way they're actually i got it right here you could take one the way the knives here i'll show it well i want to tell it too but the way the knives go into the sheath i don't recommend you do this you could throw this off a cliff yeah and go down there and find it it's going to be in the sheath yeah it's not gonna it doesn't pop out so here listen to the satisfying noise yeah and you can tighten it loosen it that's the noise i like i I mean, that snaps. So here, here we are again. Out and in. Yep.

Yeah. And that. Now that. That's nice. Yeah. You know it's in that. And the reason that we, you know, it bothered me over the years. I'd go in a store and, you know, you look at a knife, you might think it's kind of nice. And then you're, and then you're like, well, let me see the sheath.

And they hand you this afterthought piece of shit. Yeah. The people designing the knife did not think about the guy carrying it. Is he going to be in brush in Canada or Alaska or Montana? You know, I want you to carry your knife available for use. I don't want it stuffed in the bottom of their pack. Um, you know, none of us really want to have to fight a mountain lion or a bear with a knife,

but at least if it's, if it's available on you, you have it not to mention just being handy for, for use. Yeah. If it's buried in your pack, you also maybe get out there and you shoot a deer, you unload your pack and realize, oh, I left that knife in my truck.

If it's, if it's clipped on your pack and somewhere out on the exterior, you're going to see that that. You got it. Especially that knife in my truck. If it's, if it's clipped on your pack and somewhere out on the exterior, you're going to see that that. You got it. Especially that knife with this color. This is the first time we've done that blaze orange. I mean, because that was the other thing you were like, I don't, I don't. Dude, I need to have a visual reminder to pick it up. Yeah.

I like the orange. I like to be able to pick it up. And I like the big, the, the, it's got like a fat ball on the end up um and i like the big the the it's got like a fat ball on the end yeah and the and and it's got a guard on it that's the other thing as far as like keeping you from slipping your hand up on that edge another thing i was commenting on when we were designing it is you know that deep notch sometimes that's got a name you told me the name i forgot yeah that that plunge grind yeah i don't like that to be too exaggerated because it hangs up on stuff yeah and you're actually talking about

like the sharpening choil right there and what that gives you is a little spot uh to start like actually this knife does not have it and as you sharpen a blade down you start the edge starts to get below this little point here and it can be hard to get the corner of your stone in there and start. That gives you a lot of years of sharpening that blade before that notch is completely gone. But like Steve said, it gets too aggressive and it's hanging up on hide and, you know, some of the sinew and some of the stuff and meat can be a challenge in there. Those grips are G10. So it's a synthetic material, it's fiberglass and epoxy resin. And those are titanium screws. So that, that thing is absolutely bulletproof. You know, it,

you know, I love, like we were talking when we started the podcast about like hardwoods, right? For bow building or whatever. There's nothing cooler than a beautiful piece of hardwood on a knife. It's the unfortunate reality is, you know, cold, heat, blood, water over the years. You have to take care of them. Expands, contracts. Yeah.

And this G10 is, I mean, it's going to last to the end of the earth. It's hard on equipment though. What's that? G10 is, I mean, it's going to last to the end of the earth. It's hard on equipment though. What's that? G10. Oh yeah. Yeah. It's tough.

It's tough stuff. I mean, it's hard to shape it. Well, yeah. Just like bandsaw blades, things like that. That fiberglass in it. It heats it up. Yeah. Dude, I love this thing though, man.

Good. That's awesome. Yeah. This is the stub horn. Well, and then we got this one. This is my hunter for the rest of my life. And then we worked on a smaller, you know, people call them bird and trout knives, but like

a, like a caping knife, like a detail work knife. Yeah. Or like, uh, even trapping like small animal. Um. Hence the name, the flat tail. Yeah. That's a cool name. Yeah.

You came up with that one. I was like, that's a cool ass name after a beaver. Uh, and so this flat was like, that's a cool ass name after a beaver. Uh, and so this flat tail, again, that, like you say, that detail work, um, being able to really choke up, even with that, as we talked about, it's got the same feature as the stub horn with this kind of thumb ramp here where it really thins down. So your, your thumb can be really right against the side of that blade pinch in here, and you can really get in tight and do like that really fine detail work. And you'll find, I guarantee a lot of people that break down

whole elk and deer with this thing. You know, some people like more of a tip. That knife has a little more belly, but it still has enough of a tip to be functional. Yeah. And there again, a bit of a guard on it. It's, it's, this is a cool little knife. Yeah. The stub horn's got some ass to it.

The flat does. Like your delicate knife. Yep. Yep. I mean, this pair together. Picking those of that. This pair together, if you had this for doing your detail keeping or what kind of detail work, and then that knife for just hard use. I mean, ripping through the sternum of a deer or whatever.

I mean, that knife's going to do it. That's one thing about your knives that, that people talk about, but it actually works is you just. Yeah. Up through the sternum on a deer. It's like, holy shit, man. Yeah.

It's, it's, it's wild. Yeah. No, it's almost alarming. Yeah. There's no need to carry it. Do you know what I mean? That you can actually, cause you know, you actually do that just like very effortlessly.

Yeah. Yeah. I just rip right up through a white tail, right up to the, to the throat and the. And it doesn't ruin it. No. You know, I cut a whole, my daughter's elk last year, I cut the whole elk in half with my speed

goat, which is basically the same size blade as this, you know, through the spine there again, I'm not chopping through vertebrae. You're finding those soft areas. You're finding that connective tissue in the joints, uh, just like at the, you know, at the legs and whatnot, when you're taking the bottom of the legs off, you know, you, you don't need a

saw. You can break down a whole animal with that stub horn or this flat tail without a saw. Oh yeah. Um, easily. Yeah. So those, the, the flat tails are going to be available on MKC's website.

Yep. Uh, I think depending on when this drops, it may be even the week of this podcast. I think so. Right. Corinne. Yep. Yeah.

So you can go to Montana Knife Company website, find all their stuff, check out the flat tail knife we're talking about. Um, and you guys usually have, you'll have a lot of different handle four different handle colors uh we'll actually have uh seven seven handle colors so this one and then our six and yeah you know they're going to end up for sale as well as on on the meat eater site yep we'll have some of these on the meat eater eventually you're going to have some of these on the meat eater site. I think Flat Tail's on meat eater. Eventually. You're going to have some of these too. We'll have some Stubhorns on ours.

The thing with us, you know, it's been a, it's been cool, but it's been sometimes I think frustrating for customers. I saw a comment on YouTube the other day. It was like, oh great. You did a knife with Rinella. Now we're never going to be able to get one because our stuff has been selling so fast.

Yeah. Up to now. You know, it's, this is the challenge of growing a business. And I started this in 2020, it was in my garage and it was me doing everything. And then my kids, like my 14 year old daughter at the time, she's 18 now was helping me grind handles. And I was doing these high end knives. I knew nothing about production, but I built this company with my business partner, Brandon, the two of us, bootstrapped it entirely. Didn't borrow any money. We didn't take on any outside conglomerate money, but what that meant was we can only afford to do so much at a time, which it kind of took off so much that like by the time we would drop knives, they would sell super fast. So, you know, hopefully as we continue to grow, you know, we expand

our production more. I mean, we've hired, we have, we now have 65 employees. Oh, no kidding. Yeah. So it's not that we're not hiring, not growing. We just bought land to build a new manufacturing facility. Um, we're going to start building that this fall. Uh, we're still making knives in my backyard at my property, which is, I think it's really cool because it shows the American dream is still alive and real. Like you can start as a hobby. I was a full-time lineman for Northwestern energy and I was making MKC knives at night. And here we are today. So the point is, is over this next year, we're

going to have more and more of these knives available through our site and through yours. But in the beginning here for the next little while, uh, you better be Johnny on the spot when they see, like, if they see an announcement that you guys are dropping them or that we are, they're going to probably go quick. Yeah.

It's always struck me as funny that you guys have the aspiration of someday having it be that your knives are always in stock. Yeah. Yeah. It's always struck me as funny that you guys have the aspiration of someday having it be that your knives are always in stock. Yeah. Well, we, we, we kind of learned that it's a challenge when, when you're dropping them once a week and then it's, it's a Monday and it's, you know, your kid's birthday a few days later

and you're like, oh, I need a knife. And they go to our website and there's nothing there to buy. So getting in stock. So you'll take some of your most favorite designs and make them available all the time. Yeah. And we've been working on that.

We, we have knives in stock today of a couple of a couple models, but they, they kind of come and go, but honestly it's been cool just because the support of the outdoor industry, the hunting industry, you know, like we grew up through the total archery challenge, uh, the support of the American worker, because they literally followed me from the day, January 1st of 2021, I shot a video and put up on my Instagram. Like I just quit my job. I'm chasing MKC full-time. And then Brandon and I didn't take a paycheck for six months after that.

That was in 2021. Now we're in the middle of 2024 and here we are and what we got going. So it's, it's really, really cool. And I hope people take what we're doing and, and chase it and do it within their own passions around the country. Like it's, it's hard. It's a lot of work, but it's possible.

American elbow grease, man. Yep. But so the support of you guys is awesome. And we have some more stuff coming out later, I think, that we'll chat about later. Yeah, for sure. But we got to get you over and let you heat up a blade and put a magnet to it.

Yeah. Do I still think it's a lie? I don't think it's true. It's a lie. Yeah. Well, thanks for the knife sharpening lesson, man. Yeah. yeah you guys that are just listening go on youtube and watch and it'll change your sharpening game if you here's the thing you know the feeling you buy a knife and that first cut it's all downhill and like you might think you know in your head you're like

gonna get it back but you're kind of like but i just know that was the sharpest cut that one's ever gonna make yeah it's like buying a boat yeah day one's the nicest it'll ever be yeah downhill from there yeah exactly you're like there was the sharpest cut that knife will ever make and imagine getting where you thought nope that knife's got sharper cuts in its future. I'm still just staring at that shiny bald patch on your arm. I mean, you can go get a tattoo for that hair girl. Is that why your beard's all nice trimmed up? Yeah, we should carry the cosmetic mirror with him so he can do his trim.

It is funny. It's always my left arm because I don't dare try it with my left hand. Alright, man. Once again, Josh Smith from Montana Knife Company. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, guys. I appreciate it. up before the fog, socks, boots, gear Ready for the slog through the midst of stir Outside where winds sing Glass and on through all things

Steady steps, easy brings All awake, soul takes wings Chandelier, 300 under arms Midday sun, bright lights still ease calm This is a quiet cloud Chantilly 300 under arms Undone steps out of the road Trophy head, body behold Still breath measured twice more A beauty of years old Steady steps, peace it brings All awake, the soul it sings

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