Hi All

I am a handmade knife maker and I live in china.

 

 
i would like to see that if i can find it. i am having some problems navigating the site here. maybe because i am in china. the net here is slow at times

 

 
well there is a story behind the name. my buddy Master Chen makes swords and I take the left over steel and make knives from it. we work from the same work room. we are not a factory.

zu is chinese for bamboo but it also means pig with a different tone. beng is book or volume but its also a word for stupid. the spelling is different in taiwan chinese than in mainland chinese but the words are the same only wrote a bit different. taiwan uses the traditional writing and mainland uses a simple style.

The name come about when the people saw Master Chen working on a sword and they asked him now many can he make per month. He said one per month. They are you can not earn any money that way you have to make a lot. They called him stupid old head in Chinese. So hence the name ZuBeng. Zu could be pig as stubborn and beng or ben being stupid.

we are a family workshop no big machines unless you count the air hammer. all the work is done by hand on japanese water stones. we do use some electric tools for different things but the real work on the blades is only by hand. it works out well since we lose power often here and work does not need to stop.

i work with Master Rich Chen here are Zubeng Forge. I handle the english part for the most of it and he handles the chinese part. i speak chinese but i don't read it or write it.

as for chinese food here in china it is not the same as in the USA. I much prefer the local chinese food to the american version of it.

i bought some tapes to help learn chinese that sorta shows the age of when i learned it. but i would put a tape on beside the bed and let it play all night long. then in time you hear things and if you listen or not you still get the tonal part if not the whole word. i have heard a word i did not remember studying and know what it meant. so i must have learned it in my sleep.

we make the steel and also make the knives. we use tamahagane the stuff samurai swords are made of. Master Chen has to make about 10 swords to get one that will make his cut ( pun intended ) so the other 9 i cut up and make knives from the steel since 90% of the work is already done.

the name of the knives is Zubeng Forge as for making custom knives we make these one at a time. the kitchen knives we make from 1 to maybe we will make 10 or so. but each one is different as we can not make them the same all being hand made, hand heat treated, hand ground, hand polished on Japanese water stones and hand rubbed. all have a convex edge just like a samurai sword has.

the steel has patterns in it but its not a damascus but it is folded and we fold no less than 1.3 million layers. some has even more there is parts of some knives that the steel has been reused and folded 2 or 3 times. in this case the layers in a part of the knife would have 10 million and some even up to 50 million layers. these layers give the steel patterns. We find clouds and dragons and rabbits in the patterns.

There is a lot to making the knives we make and even more to the swords.

Thanks

bobby

 

 
we use iron sand and then we smelt it in a [font=arial, sans-serif]tatra[/font] . then we hand forge the blades.

i planted some seeds and when the trees grow big enough to cut for wood handles we will be more hand made

i think if you make your own steel then make the knife that is about as handmade as handmade gets.

 

tea everyone in china has a kind they like. there is thousands. one kind will grow on the north side of a mountain and the same one on the south and the taste will be different.

me? i drink what is free. if i have to buy some i buy the cheap green tea that comes in the little bags they put in all the hotel rooms in china.

last 200 i bought was about .88 cents USD

i will say that i do like chrysanthemum tea its light and mild. i am not a dark bitter drinker.