He had also found at a farm auction in February a three-ring binder of mimographed notes from a vocational metalwork course taught at a school in Kearney sometime in the early 1960s. He paid 65 cents for the binder. The notes covered heat treatment, quench media, and the basics of differential hardening. He copied the relevant sections into his own notebook in his own words because that was how he learned things by translating them.
He was 16 years old and he had decided without telling anyone that he was going to forge knives from salvaged spring steel and that they were going to be good enough that people would pay for them. He had not told anyone because there was nothing to tell yet. That was a discipline Hyram had given him without naming it. You do not announce what you are going to do.
You do what you are going to do. And then the doing is the announcement. Roland Kesler mentioned the spring transaction to a few people. The story that traveled that week went something like this.
The Bruns kid, Hyram's grandson, had come in and asked for the scrap springs, the cracked ones, and Roland had let him have them because they were going to the salvage yard anyway. And wasn't that something? A teenager hauling off cracked springs like they were treasure. The story was told with a kind of affectionate puzzlement.
The way people tell stories about children who do things that are harmless and slightly odd. Nobody thought much about it. The feed store heard it. The co-op counter heard it.
It did not travel further than that because there was nothing alarming in it. Just a boy doing a boy's peculiar thing. That was the spring of 1973. Here is what happened next.
Elias spent the first 3 weeks of May learning again what he thought he already knew. Hyram's forge ran on coal, a hand-cranked blower feeding air through a firepot that Hyram had cast himself from a pattern in 1953. The fire had to be built correctly. A coke heart had to be surrounded by fresh coal, and the fire had to be managed continuously because a forge fire that goes cold in the middle of a heat is a ruined piece of steel.
Elias had built fires in that forge for 7 years, but he had never been responsible for the temperature management of a piece this thin and this critical. Spring steel at the wrong heat is unforgiving. Too cool and you tear it. Too hot and you burn the carbon out of the surface and the edge you are trying to make will not hold.
The window is maybe 200°F wide and you read it by color. A bright orange tending toward yellow being too hot, a dull red being too cool, and the correct heat being a color that Hyram called honest orange, a term that appeared in no textbook, but that Elias understood completely after the third ruined blank. He ruined four blanks before he produced one that was worth finishing. The ruins went back into the scrap bucket.
Nothing was wasted. Hyram watched the first two attempts and said nothing. On the third attempt, he said, "You are rushing the draw." Elias slowed down.
The fourth blank was better, but the profile was off. He set it aside and looked at it for a day, and then he understood what was wrong with the geometry, and he corrected it on the fifth attempt.
The fifth blank was a 10-inch knife blank 3/16 of an inch thick at the spine, tapering to nothing at the edge bevel with a slight distal taper from handle to tip that Elias had read about in the metallurgy text and had decided to try. He normalized it three times, heating to critical temperature and letting it air cool to relieve the stress from forging. Then he ground the profile on a belt grinder that Hyram had built from a salvaged motor and a set of pulleys in 1966. Then he hardened it, heating it to critical in the forge and quenching it in a trough of warm canola oil.
And then he tempered it in Hyram's kitchen oven at 375°F for two 1-hour cycles. He tested the edge on a piece of manila rope. It cut cleanly. He tested the flex by clamping the tang in the bench vice and pressing the tip to 30 degrees of deflection.
It sprang back without complaint. He held it up and looked at it for a while. Then he put it on the workbench and started the next one.
By August of 1973, he had finished seven knives. The costs, as he had them in the notebook, began with the 11 springs: $0. Coal for the summer: $14.30, split with Hyram, who used the forge for his own work anyway, so Elias's share was $7.15. Belt-grinder abrasive: $4.80.
Handle material, mostly stabilized wood blocks, and a few pieces of stag he had gotten from a retired hunter in Burwell for $2.50 total. An oven thermometer to verify the tempering temperature, $1.90 from the hardware store in town. Total investment through August, $16.35.
Seven knives on the bench. He priced the first one at $22, which was less than a comparable factory knife at the hardware store and more than he had been afraid to ask for. He sold it to a man named Jarvis Toliffson, who ran a custom butchering operation out of a building on his place 8 miles south of town. Toliffson used it for a week and came back and bought two more at $22 each.
That was $66 on a $16 investment. Elias wrote the figures in the notebook and looked at them for a moment. Then he went back to the forge. He did not tell anyone about the sales.