Our Workplace

Explosive temperature, razor-sharp skills and a lot of patience - what it takes to make beautiful knives

Words by Myffy Rigby

Hendrik Max

The Sydney-based knife-maker’s forge is testament to perfect imperfection.

The modest workspace is a shrine to everyday objects used to create knives so beautiful and in demand, the waitlist is upwards of a year.

The composition recipes for his carbon steels are spray-painted on the wall. An old microwave that looks like it’s seen better millenia is tucked under a workbench next to a sturdy-looking safe, which also seems as if it’s been dropped out of more than a few first-floor windows. A couple of vices are attached to the sink. Something that could be a lawnmower engine is tucked under there, too.

Apart from a few tools, Hendrik Max made all the knifemaking equipment himself.

Even the forge is handmade out of an old gas compressor which he cut up, insulated and fitted with the aid ofYoutube instructions in the backyard of his Dulwich Hill home.The forge resembles a bagpipe drone stuck in the side of a metal barrel, hooked up to a domestic gas barbecue cylinder. It’s all resting on a makeshift butcher’s block. “Do you want me to turn it on?” he says. “It’s pretty crazy.”

Max fires it up with a Bic lighter and the flames spit out hot and hard.

Hendrik Max
“I’d say 70 per cent of my days are spent hand sanding. It’s super tedious but I love it.”

It starts with a bar of steel, and ends with a lot of sanding. What happens in the middle of the process changes with each knife. To get those blades so thin, he hardens the steel in his kiln, tempers it, and grinds it into shape, edging it till it’s razor thin.Then comes the sanding, which is what takes up the bulk of his time. “I’d say 70 per cent of my days are spent hand sanding. It’s super tedious but I love it.”

That amount of repetition is a form of madness or meditation, depending on where you’re standing. But a steady diet of audiobooks, podcasts and disco gets him through. He listens to a lot of Hackney-based digital radio station NTS, which plays a broad cross section of electronica, world music and post punk. “I have very, very varied tastes.”

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Writer

Myffy Rigby

Sub-editor

Pru Engel

Photographer

Kristoffer Paulsen

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