SELF-TAUGHT KNIFE maker Thomas McGuane Jr. grew up around guys cut from the Hemingway cloth: men who fished the Florida Keys and hunted the Montana wilderness—when they weren't pounding on their typewriter keys. "From a very early age, I would get cool knives from mildly inebriated artistic-types," said Mr. McGuane, 45, the son of writer Tom McGuane ("The Sporting Club," "Ninety-Two in the Shade," "To Skin a Cat"). "The novelist Jim Harrison gave me a great knife. And my dad and stepdad [Peter Fonda] both had collections of very cool high-grade knives when I was growing up. Eventually, I realized that I could make one myself."
He started making knives in earnest when he was about 19 years old, "if you don't count weapons I made during my childhood," he said. He read books about the craft, and asked for advice from established knife makers. He learned about Samurai sword-making during a trip to Japan and wove some of that into his work. Mr. McGuane now creates anywhere from six to 100 knives per year, sinking about 200 hours into just one of his handcrafted pieces, which are constructed in his Bozeman, Mont., workshop.
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