When Jon Warshawsky and James Ross-Harris founded Blenheim Forge in 2014, they had next to no idea how to make a knife. The pair originally met whilst sharing a house in south London, and used to fill their free weekends by knocking up DIY projects in their back garden. First, there was a meat smoker. Then, a hot tub to while away the winter evenings. Then, they thought they’d turn their hands to knife-making. James built a forge out of fire bricks and a leaf blower, and the pair forged their first blade – a beautiful, pattern-welded number, with etchings all across the surface.
‘We got lucky, basically,’ says Jon. ‘We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. We thought we could get away with a hammer, an anvil and a forge and just make some knives. We were really wrong!’
That first knife turned out to be somewhat of an immaculate conception. The pair tried over and over to recreate the process in the following months, and met failure after failure. ‘I had done some metalwork before, so I thought that would help,’ explains James, who worked as a furniture maker before starting Blenheim Forge. ‘It turns out that making a knife is pretty different to making a table! It’s a totally different skill set, different level of precision, different everything.’
Buoyed by their original success and bolstered by the machine-engineering expertise of Richard Warner, who joined James and Jon at Blenheim, the trio slowly but surely managed to iron out the kinks in their processes. ‘We didn’t make life easy for ourselves,’ James admits. ‘We kept trying to complicate things and take it up another level – if we’d just stuck to what worked a couple of years ago, there wouldn’t be so many fucked up knives lying around!’