Knife production

By Per Thoresen

Most knife makers use a minimum of tools, even when they work from home: knife, file, scissors, hammer, awl, gimlet, a couple of engraving needles, and preferably the typical anvil with long, thin horns. The knives are often made in the most basic environment imaginable.

The Tater knife makers rarely forged the blades themselves. They used mostly standard, factory-produced Swedish or Norwegian blades. The explanation for so few hand-forged blades being used is that the knife maker did not want another craftsman to have made any part of his knife.

Side guards and waistbands are almost always nicely shaped from a neatly bent metal plate. The reason the quality of these details is high, even when the knife is otherwise very simple, is that the metal was bent on the "flanging machine", a device the tinsmiths used.

Traditional Norwegian knives often have a spherical bead at the end of the handle and at the tip of the sheath. The vast majority of Tater knives also have such beads, and they are made in a characteristic way. "Tater beads" are made as follows: instead of forming a bead from a thick piece of metal, a strip of metal is wrapped around the end of the tongs, soldered and filed to its final shape. This gives the bead a spiral pattern. This method was also used by some non-Romani but is still considered typical of Tater work. It is rare to see a Tater/Romani knife without such spherical beads.

1. All-metal knife
This is the knife we primarily think of as a Tater knife, and it is the one we see most frequently. The all-metal knives vary in quality from the very plain to the elaborately engraved. The best ones are exquisite, with beautiful decorations and high-quality craftsmanship. The simplest construction is a one-piece handle and a one-piece sheath. The more advanced ones have handles consisting of several parts and a reinforcement ring at the top of the sheath. The metal is brass or nickel silver, sometimes zinc or copper, and sometimes a combination of two or more metals. Silver is also used, especially when the buyer brings it.

2. Bolsters and sheath guards
Both handles and sheaths on these knives have metal bolsters and sheath guards at each end. The sheath also has side guards and a waistband. The handle material is mostly something other than metal. Inlays on the front and back are also not made of metal.
A tange (tongue) is usually attached to the ball at the end. When the knife has a wooden handle and inlays (leiner) of black knots on the sheath, it is often called a "root knife", although such black knots are just as likely to grow on the tree trunk as on the roots.

The two main styles may overlap. There are, for example, many knives with handles made of wood or bone and with bolsters, but with all-metal sheaths.

The handle and the disc inlays on the sheath of knives that are not all-metal may be made of materials such as wood, leather, bone, horn and tooth/tusk, in addition to the metal bolsters. Some of the finest knives are carved from tusks, often walrus tusks. They represent the ultimate in Norwegian knife art.

The joints on the all-metal knives are usually made so that the metal plates overlap. This is considered typical Tater-style soldering. However, on finer knives, good craftsmen often soldered the metal edge-to-edge. The solder joint would be almost invisible on the best knife makers’ knives.

Almost all Tater/Romani knives are engraved. The all-metal knives often have wiggle cuts. A common design is a quite simple acanthus. In addition, there may be engraved, decorative notches. The engraving often covers the entire front. The back is mostly without ornamentation, as sharp engraving ruins clothes. The solder joint is often decorated with wiggle cuts as well.

The ornamentation on the carved knives often requires very time-consuming work. Although wiggle cuts are used most frequently, standard acanthus engraving is also used, especially on high-quality knives. The decoration on the more common knives must look good with the least amount of effort. Decorative notches were engraved quickly and looked good, while time-consuming precision work was only performed when the knife maker had a customer who appreciated it, and preferably when the customer paid a little more.