- For me, creativity is just trying.

(hammer ringing) Everyone's capable of creating beauty.

(forge roaring) My name is Joshua Prince.

I'm a metal artist, and I'm gonna show you how I make a knife.

One of the main reasons I do this, has to do with the process that I enjoy so much, and not so much the results.

The physical experience of the heat, the fire, the failure.

(metal cracks) Oh!

Every project, at its best, will start with a concept for me.

I have like this idea, I want to do a a winged dragon, and it got me thinking about a dragon devouring the sun.

And I'll begin to sketch.

I'll just sketch something that's impossible, and then I'll try to develop the actual technique to get to what I'm trying to do.

Then I'll go out to my shop and I'll light the forge.

(forge roaring) (funky music) So inside the forge, the temperatures go up to 2,300, 2,400 degrees.

I'm looking at the material as it heats up more as a visual cue to me as to when the material is ready to begin to be worked.

Once the steel is at the desired temperature, I'll take it out and I'll begin to manipulate it under the various tools that I have in the shop.

(machine whining) (machine pounding) (hammer ringing) Once I begin working the steel, the temperature goes out of it, and the risk of destroying the material increases as you work it down to lower temperatures.

But it can always be just put back in the forge, brought back up to the appropriate temperature, and worked again.

During the time of forging, I'll move between machines as appropriate.

You can get a lot done in a very short amount of time.

(machine pounding) Forging is the most romantic visual part of the knife-making process.

There's these beautiful moments of material, and sparks, and fire.

(grinder whining) The glow of the material, very kind of enchanting.

The way I know I'm done forging is usually exhaustion.

(hammer ringing) I don't have an idea about it's gotta be exactly right.

I just have an idea that I'm pursuing and when I feel like I've gotten really close to that idea I just consider it done and I move on to something else.

I think it's good.

The final quenching, or hardening of the steel, is what gives the steel its properties.

Usually we're looking for hardness, toughness, possibly flexibility.

That's the wonder of steel is you can sort of impart those qualities into the steel based on your temperatures.

(mellow music) After a series of hardening and heat treatment steps on the steel, I have to take it to grind.

(grinder whining) It's important because that's where you have go from something very crude to something very refined.

Then I come back inside and I choose the handle material.

(blocks clattering) That's sort of a slow process.

Sometimes it takes me weeks to make a decision.

For this knife, this is the material that I chose.

And this is a piece of curly maple, tiger maple.

It's basically just got sort of like these undulations in them and this just fit really well with the pattern that's in the steel.

For the next step, we're gonna go outside.

All right, so we're gonna demonstrate the etching process on a couple of samples that I have prepared here.

We're using a chemical called ferric chloride.

And I'm just gonna put some in the jar here.

And this reaction happens, usually it happens almost instantaneously.

Might overflow this a little bit.

So it acts on one steel and not the other.

So you get basically two tones, silver and black, and darker color.

So I'm gonna show you a finished knife.

(dinging) So what I like about this knife is it has a whole reggae band on one side, and a whole funk band on the other side.

Yeah, this one's pretty awesome.

And so this is called Soulsonic Force after one of the original funkadelic bands from my childhood.

In order to make this a cutting tool, a useful tool, it has to be sharpened.

And this one has been sharpened by just bringing the knife up a few degrees creating that zero cutting edge.

I would kind of sum up my process as catch and release.

I catch the idea, I go through the process to create it, and then I release it.

My name is Joshua Prince and that's how I make a knife.

(suspenseful music)