Question about early Broadwell dagger
Hello to everyone. I have an interesting and unique art knife I have had in my collection for a few years. It is a Broadwell dagger dating I think to the early to mid 80's. I have 7 or 8 pretty good photographs of it but can't get them to upload here because they need to be resized and no luck doing that. It was given to Robert Hajofsky by David Broadwell. As you may know Hajofsky was a friend and mentor to Broadwell at the beginning of David's career. He lived about 15 minutes from him in Scotland, Texas. They worked together back then at the same machine shop. I purchased the knife from Bob's sister about 5 or 6 years ago. She is the one who told me that the knife was made for her brother and presented as a gift for being David's mentor.
It's a beautiful knife, the workmanship and design are flawless. The blade is 7.75" and the knife has lots of detailed file work on the pommel and guard. The handle is a 3 segmented affair, with the middle section made of exotic wood covering about 70% of the entire handle. I can't place the wood, its a medium dark brown; not cocobolo, not bocote, not desert ironwood....... maybe some species of rosewood perhaps. Capping the wood on either end and separated by silver inlayed wire is a dark yellow material I am not familiar with at all. Its not any type of micarta but it does look to be manmade, one side is clear and the other side is opaque. Both sections of the material are separated from the guard and the pommel respectively by more inlayed silver wire and two very thin layers of segmented metal appearing to be the same material as that which composes the pommel and guard. Nickel silver would be my guess. The maker's mark is totally different from his present design and there is no sheath with the knife. The blade has a satin finish and I'm sure is one of the stainless offerings popular at the time. It has a double guard, straight with rounded corners made of 3/16 material, nickel silver I believe. It has a tiny chamfer facing towards the pommel end and the remaining material is chamfered the opposite direction (towards the point). The more you look at it, the more interesting little details you find. Overall length is about 12 1/2 inches.
In my opinion, David Broadwell is an artist not merely a knife maker. Just to think this Broadwell knife was conceived, thought out and then carefully crafted to be presented to his mentor (after all who do you want to impress more than your mentor?) is pretty cool. I'm sure Bob treasured it. I would be glad to post the pictures I have if someone can give me a solution to the resizing problem. Thanks.
Last edited by texasrecurve; 12-09-2016 at 07:14 PM.
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