Wayne Walker on Going From Old Saws to Full Customs

The path into full-time knifemaking usually runs through an apprenticeship, a school, or a shop job. Wayne Walker's ran through a neighbour in his nineties who still made knives, and a twelve-year-old who went over to watch him work. KnifeNews published the interview this week, and the details are more useful than most origin stories because they include the unglamorous middle.

Walker's hobbyist phase lasted decades. He made crude knives on and off, started selling them about fifteen years ago, and by the early 2010s was moving pieces cheap enough that the idea of buying one of his knives for less than the price of a fast-food meal now sounds absurd. That is the part of a maker's development that rarely gets recorded: years of work at prices that would embarrass anyone trying to pay rent. 2021 was the inflection — new equipment, a dedicated workshop, and the shift to full time. He has since relocated to Alabama.

The design philosophy he describes is unfashionable and worth repeating. "I try to focus on making the lines flow on a design, but also be practical at the same time. I like them to be ergonomic and something you can use for long periods of time with unneeded fatigue." That is a working-knife brief, not a collector's brief, and it explains why Walker's work has been picked up by dealers as his production has scaled. He also says his style is still changing, and that he intends to keep trying new things through 2026 and into 2027.

Why it matters beyond one maker: the custom market is small, and the transition from part-time to full-time is where most people fail, because the math only works if the work sells at a price that covers a shop. Walker got there by spending fifteen years building a customer base at low prices first. For anyone considering the same leap, that is the takeaway, and it is a harder lesson than any grinding technique.

Verdict: a short interview that documents the least photogenic part of custom knifemaking — the decade and a half of practice — and the moment it turned into a business. Worth reading if you follow the custom side of the hobby, and a useful counterweight to the launch-day hype that dominates the production market.