A new edgy shop – Vulcan Knife Works – has opened in downtown Ballard. With 30 years of experience, Paul Inman and partner Thomas Gregory forge and sharpen custom knives, swords, axes and tools while Inman’s wife, Dee Button, a longtime leather crafter, designs sheaths and helps run the business.

Gregory, who lives on his sailboat in Ballard, mentored with Inman for 10 years. Inman learned from the late William F. Moran Jr., world-renowned bladesmith known as "the father of the modern Damascus knife.”

One needn’t be a sharp-eyed customer to first notice the more than 70 shiny steel knives, including two-handed great swords, Japanese Katana blades, a "Three Musketeers"-like rapier sword blade, Bowie knives and daggers, suspended from magnetic strips in the shop, located at 2419 N.W. Market St.

Button said her father used to feed her family while they were in Alaska in the late 40s by hunting outside Anchorage and indicated a mounted sheep head on the wall.

“This sheep head is the only thing he ever had mounted,” she said. “He would not shoot anything to brag. He shot to feed the family. I was raised on wild meat, and when I first ate beef it tasted strange.”

This sense of authenticity seems to reverberate in the work Inman and Gregory proudly display.

“When you’re a knife maker, making a pretty thing is great, but if it doesn’t cut it defeats the purpose,” said Inman, who pointed out that some prefer extremely ornate, but dull-edged knives.

“A knife that cuts immediately gives you respect,” he said. “We understand what the knife needs. It doesn’t matter what kind of knife walks through the door, from an extremely expensive one to one that they bought in the thrift store. We put an edge on it that will shave hair when they leave.”

“The more we become more technically advanced, the more we get away from the simplistic things that made us what we are today,” Inman said. “Having that sharp knife 150 years ago sometimes meant life and death and whether or not you were going to freeze to death or have a home.”

“Everybody’s got something to cut with,” he said. “That’s the one tool our bodies don’t have. We can’t cut. For 15,000 years we’ve come up with flakes of obsidian to be able to cut. Everybody has something sharp, so technically everybody is our demographic as far as the sharpening goes.”

“A lot of people walk in and see swords and things like that, and it can be a little intimidating,” said Gregory. “But once they get passed that initial intimidation, they find that they can learn things here, as far as the history of the blades, how they are made, regardless of cultures, time periods and everything else. We’ve tried to dabble in all of them, from Old-World bronze blades to modern technology.”

The blades that line the wall of the shop are not complete. They lack handles.

“If you like the shape of one, we’ll choose the wood you want for the handle, and it will be finished specifically for you,” Button said. “At a certain point before it is completely finished, you can come back in and we make it fit perfectly for your hand.”

Gregory, who enjoys occasionally adorning himself in pirate gear while taking a stroll, said he spent years performing at Renaissance fairs.

“I put on shows of swordplay at the Ren fairs, which is what inspired me to get into making them,” he said. “Everything you could buy was crap. The swords looked pretty, but they weren’t any good. I wanted to make serviceable blades you could use and abuse and cut and do the things the sword was originally made to do.

“The shows were entertainment, but making a believable fight for the audience actually requires months of work with your partner,” he said. “You will lose fingers and maim people if you don’t practice enough. In the 'Pirates of the Caribbean' movies, they spend months working on sword fighting scenes. That’s how you get the real-looking fight, with the anger and intensity that goes with it, while still being safe for the participants. Johnny Depp is a fairly proficient swordsman. I look at the 'Pirate' movies a lot differently than most people.”