Another of the great men of the golden age of custom knife-making, Daniel John Dennehy, passed away earlier this year in Del Norte, Colorado.
Dan Dennehy began making knives while serving in the Navy in WWII.
Dennehy knives are characterized by original, simple, and practical designs tailored for specific functions. He produced a number of models specially for use by members of the armed forces, including the Pilot/Crewman, a 6” rugged modern bowie designed to be capable of chopping an exit through a downed aircraft’s plexiglass canopy or aluminum skin; the 8” Model 11 Green Beret, a large, double-hilted fighting knife; and the remarkable 6 1/2”, 1/4” thick Model 13 Hoss, designed by a Navy SEAL as an indestructible knife-shaped pry bar and hammer made of surgical stainless steel which actually simultaneously manages to have a usable knife edge.
Dan Dennehy’s most popular productions, though, were simple and elegant hunting and fishing knives of slender and light easy-to-carry design, representative of the philosophy of the late 19th century outdoor writer George Washington Sears, better known as “Nessmuk,” who popularized the concept of ultra-light, minimal-sized sporting and camping equipment.
Dennehy forged all his larger knives, and a Dennehy forged knife exhibits a peculiar and unique glassy surface unlike any other knife.
Dan Dennehy was, along with Bob Loveless and Bill Moran, one of the founders of the Knifemaker’s Guild, and one of the most respected custom knife makers. Dennehy knives were favored by such celebrities as John Wayne, Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood, Carlos Hathcock, Barry Goldwater, as well as by the controversial Watergate burglar and talk show host G. Gordon Liddy. Liddy’s own preferred model, a more ornate, stag-handled version of the 4 1/4” Model 4 Pro Scout became a standard catalogued option, known as the “G. Gordon Liddy Special.”
Dan Dennehy stamped “Dan-D” and a shamrock on every knife as his personal trademark. He mentions in his catalogue that he was only able to produce roughly 100 knives per year. He was in business for a little more than 60 years, so his total production must have amounted to only something on the order of 6000 examples.
An obituary appeared on the Knifemaker’s Guild forum back in January.
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A couple of commemorative videos of Dan Dennehy’s assistants at work during the last few few years in the Dennehy shop in Del Norte, accompanied with Johnny Cash songs, have turned up on YouTube.
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Best viewed in full screen mode
————————————————— DanD 4” Utility Knife, probably a variation of his Model 8, Personal Survival Knife
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Dan’s son, John Dennehy, has a custom leather operation in Loveland, Colorado, and makes some knives of his own design. He is currently offering for sale a small number of his father’s knives, and his web-site has more information on Dan Dennehy.
Late period knives, featuring his optional Naked Lady stamp
America’s greatest custom knife maker and most influential designer, Bob Loveless, passed away recently at the age of 81 of lung cancer.
I’ve never owned a Loveless knife.
I called Bob Loveless once about 20 years ago and asked to purchase his catalogue. He offered to send me one, but assured me it was basically pointless. His waiting list was somewhere beyond 6 years. He charged (at that time) a cool $100 an inch for a knife, and there was an extra charge for a Naked Lady stamp. Both for the frontal and rear versions. I remember asking him if he charged extra not to put that on a knife, and he laughed.
“Most of my customers are rich, vulgar guys, who absolutely love it.” he assured me.
He proceeded to explain that he thought it was a pity that people who actually wanted to use them couldn’t afford to buy them and that the enormous wait made every knife a financial opportunity for the buyer. But he liked making that much money, he conceded.
It was kind of a shame that the excellence of Loveless’s designs propelled within his lifetime his products into a stratospheric world of high-end collecting, but admirers could at least console themselves that Loveless spawned a nearly infinite number of imitators and copies of Loveless patterns could be found by the score, some made by bladesmiths collectible in their own right as well as by mass market cutlery companies.
Like a lot of artists, Bob Loveless was an extremely smart guy and a colorful rascal. He will be missed.
Nature reports that scientists studying the technology of Damascus steel believe the material used in Arabic Medieval weapons may deserve to be regarded as an early form of nanotechnology.
Unfortunately, they seem to be unaware of the similar technology used in the Indonesian keris, or of the far more complex metallurgy of Japanese swords. And they are evidently unfortunately also unaware of the revival of Damascus steel-making by the late American knifemaker William F. Moran.
Think carbon nanotubes are new-fangled? Think again. The Crusaders felt the might of the tube when they fought against the Muslims and their distinctive, patterned Damascus blades.
Sabres from Damascus, now in Syria, date back as far as 900 AD. Strong and sharp, they are made from a type of steel called wootz.
Their blades bear a banded pattern thought to have been created as the sword was annealed and forged. But the secret of the swords’ manufacture was lost in the eighteenth century.
Materials researcher Peter Paufler and his colleagues at Dresden University, Germany, have taken electron-microscope pictures of the swords and found that wootz has a microstructure of nano-metre-sized tubes, just like carbon nanotubes used in modern technologies for their lightweight strength.
William F. Moran, a legendary figure in the world of custom knives, died yesterday morning in the hospital at Frederick, Maryland of cancer at the age of 80.
Born in 1925, on a family farm near Lime Kiln, Maryland, Moran began making knives as a ten year old boy working in a smithy on his father’s farm, using discarded tools as his source of steel. By his teenage years, Moran had learned the skills of tempering and heat-treating blades, and his homemade knives had already developed a local reputation for holding an edge.
By WWII, he was dividing his time equally between knife-making and farming, working out of a small shop he built from material salvaged from a ruined silo. Over time, Moran decided that he enjoyed knife-making more than farming, and in 1958, with knife orders piling up, Moran decided to sell the farm, and devote his full time attention to the production of custom knives. Moran built a permanent shop, a one room concrete block building, near Middletown, Maryland. He built his own forge using stones taken from the stone fences on his family farm.
The first (of three) Moran catalogues appeared 1959-1960. 21 different models were offered, including a couple of historical replicas, two kitchen knives, and a carving set. By the mid 1960s, there was a four year waiting list for a Moran knife. By 1972, the waiting list was nine years long, and Moran had stopped accepting down payments. By the early 1980s, there was a twenty year backlog. With the growth of the collecting hobby, the demand for Moran knives grew and grew to the point where Moran recognized that existing orders exceeded the number of knives he could possibly produce in the remainder of his lifetime, and he stopped issuing catalogues or accepting knife orders not much later. Naturally, prices of Moran knives soared to stratospheric levels in the collecting marketplace.
Bill Moran was one of only a handful of custom knifemakers in business before the rise of the modern knife collecting hobby, and he played a key role in bringing about a vast increase in the number of custom knife makers, and the even greater growth of the audience of collectors and connoisseurs needed to support that industry’s expansion. Public awareness of the existence of custom knives really began with articles published in sporting and Gun magazines in the late 1960s. Moran cooperated with the pioneer journalists, granting interviews and supplying photographs. Moran co-founded the American Bladesmith Society in 1976, and served as its chairman for fifteen years. In later years, he devoted much of his time to teaching forging and knife-making to a younger generation of custom makers.
Moran was one of the most important innovators in knifemaking. He was the first modern knifemaker to revive the craft of making Damascus steel blades, circa 1972, and shared his knowledge widely. He emphasized quality, and moved very early to an emphasis on artistic work over utilitarian production. When most makers were resorting to stock removal and stainless steel, Moran stubbornly continued forging his blades of tool steel. It is generally thought the superior sharpness of Moran blades was attributable to his own style of “convex edge.”
In 1986, William F. Moran was inducted into the Knifemakers Hall of Fame.
