My Story

I am Erik Greiner; I was born in Windhoek, Namibia, in 1985 and have since lived all over the USA and other countries. I have loved traveling and learning new languages and new cultures. I currently live in Lubbock, Texas, with my wife and 4 busy daughters, and I have grown to really appreciate the warmth and hospitality of the Texas south. I am a Journeyman bladesmith and knifemaker, and forging hand-made knives is my passion.

My fascination with knives started at a very young age. One of my mother’s favorite stories is when I was 4 years old, saying the dinner prayer at the table. According to her, I thanked God for knives for fighting. This pretty much sums up my childhood, as from the time I got my first pocketknife at the age of 8, I have never been found “naked” without one! Camping, hunting, and scouting brought me joy and satisfaction in my youth and played a significant role in my journey to bladesmithing.

When my older brother was 15, he and my dad went to the scrap yard and bought an anvil for $0.50 per lb. It sat in the backyard untouched for over a year. When I was 14, I decided to take matters into my own hands, and I dug a hole in my backyard and built a fire. Using a shop vac to feed air to the flames, I built my first “forge,” albeit very inefficient. That summer, knowing nothing about different steels, I unsuccessfully forged low-carbon steel into some rough resemblances of knives. At the end of that summer, my Dad filled in the hole; I put the anvil away, finished high school, and moved to Brazil for a couple of years as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. University followed and took up all my time for the next few years.

 I still had a niggling desire to try my hand at bladesmithing, so I picked up actual forging and knifemaking in 2015 and have been successfully making mistakes and learning from each of them ever since. Books, YouTube, social media, Engineering courses, and my time managing the welding lab at university have all greatly supported my growth and knowledge.

I am grateful for all the available resources and the openness and willingness of all the greats to teach and share their vast knowledge with me. I genuinely love the knife-making community and consider myself beyond blessed to be a part of it. Knifemaking is my passion; creating something useful and beautiful from a hunk of ugly steel instills a satisfaction I cannot describe. I give all to God and thank him daily for the opportunity to do what I love and to love doing it.