Australian Blade Ed 2 Sep 2017

Frontier
According author of “Wilderness: Earth’s last wild places”, Cape York
Northern
Peninsula (Cape York) is the largest unspoiled wilderness in northern Australia
and one of the last remaining wilderness areas on Earth. “To qualify as
"wilderness," an area must have 70 percent or more of its original vegetation,
cover at least 10,000 square kilometres, and have fewer than five people per
square kilometre.” Cape York is 137,000 square kilometres and Thursday Island is
some 39 kilometres north of the Tip, nestled in the Torres Strait archipelago. As
the crow flies, Thursday Island is 2,745 kilometres north of Sydney and 143
kilometres south of Papua New Guinea. Truly the Northern Frontier!
Dylan Jones of Cape York Blades is based on Thursday
Island and as such, can legitimately claim the title of
“Australia’s most northern knife maker”. Given the
remoteness on Australia’s northern border, it was rather apt
that Dylan presented his “Frontier” range of knives at the
2017 Sydney Knife Show. Here's Dylan’s own account.
“When I got back from the American Blade Smith
course in Sydney and started to plan for the Sydney
Knife Show, I thought to myself “I have heaps of time!
I’ll use some of the blades forged over the last couple
of weeks.” I already had a good idea about some
others that I wanted to make. Then “Boom!” all of a
sudden I was six weeks out from the show and only had
four knives ready! This was partly my fault as I kept
selling knives as I made them thinking I had heaps of
time before the show. The next six weeks were chaos."
"Every weekend in the shed away from the
family (thankfully I have an understanding
wife) every night after I sorted out the kids I
would be burning the midnight oil trying to get
everything done in time."
"On top of all that I had two split Damascus
guards, warped blades and split scales just to
keep things interesting. Originally I wanted 20
knives for the show and ended up with 13.
Considering the lead up I was pretty happy
with the outcome and the quality of the builds.
The last week involved sheath making with the
wife hand stitching at night after the kids were
in bed."