FORT MYERS, Fla. (AP) - It’s a good thing Gordon Romeis is kindly and soft-spoken, because when he strides from his workshop, strapping form filling the doorway, a burly hand nearly engulfing a visitor’s, he might seem just the tiniest bit intimidating, especially after he ushers that visitor into his domain, where he makes knives, hatchets and swords.
Fact of the matter is, Romeis is as gentle-hearted as they come; his wife, Cindy, will attest to that.
“He’s a godly man first and foremost, a servant,” she says. “I don’t see what he does as making tools of violence. He’s just so interested in his craft and has just kept improving over the years.”
Indeed. Romeis, 57, is a virtuoso bladesmith, a member of the elite knife-makers guild, to which only masters of the craft are admitted. So much in demand are his knives that he rarely has more than a few in stock ready to be sold
“Even I don’t have as many Romeis knives in the kitchen as I’d like to,” says Cindy with a laugh.
Another reason they’re scarce is that the Fort Myers resident has only a few hours a day in the backyard shed that doubles as his workshop. As a full-time environmental consultant with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, he can only indulge his passion after work and on weekends.
Each one takes at least 6 hours to complete, sometimes twice as long. Generally he starts with bars of steel, often Damascus steel, made from multiple layers of the metal pounded together, which gives it strength and a characteristic brindled pattern.
“On a microscopic level, it gives the edge little saw teeth, so it cuts really well. And it won’t break either because of the layering,” he says. “I get it from a friend of mine who makes this in Alabama. I don’t think my neighbors would appreciate a 400-pound power hammer just smashing it over and over.”
After Romeis cuts the knife’s outline on a band saw, it’s sent to a heat-treater in Pennsylvania for further tempering.
“It’s put in a vacuum with electronic coils and taken up to 1,900 degrees, then taken down to minus 300-something,” he says. “Then after they’re back, I finish grinding and I put handles on them.”
Romeis can make handles from stag horn, exotic hardwoods or mastodon ivory, but he likes to use woven fabrics encased in phenolic resin and attached with industrial-strength epoxy. “You can literally pound on this with a hammer, and it’ll just dimple. If it was a piece of wood, it’d bust all up. So it’s waterproof, blood-, schmear-, grease- whatever-proof.”
He hand-makes the sheaths by wet-forming the leather for each individual knife, which are then hand-stitched and waxed.
“I do everything I can to make these things as well as I can, both technically and aesthetically,” he says. At the same time, he tries to keep them affordable. His knives generally range between $165 and $300, though materials and customization raise the price. (By way of comparison, a Ray Mears Bushcraft knife is about $600.)
Romeis, who’s from an old Fort Myers family (“If you’ve been around long enough, you know the M. Flossie Hill company: My mama worked there,” he says), was in Cub Scouts when he got his first knife. By the time he got to Fort Myers High School, he decided he wanted to try his hand at making his own.
“This was back when they had a shop class and you could do such things, and the idea, ’I’m going to make a knife wouldn’t scare people senseless,’” he says. “I decided to make my first knife out of a file.”
He recalls his father’s skepticism.
“I said, ’Hey, Dad, I want to make a knife out of this’, and he was like, ’Yeah, right.’ You know what that did? To a teenager, that’s just gas on the fire. So I did it. And then I made another one.”
Three decades later, his enthusiasm remains as high as his standards.
“Sometimes, they fight you but I’m a perfectionist. It’s a hard virus to have because it doesn’t leave here if it’s not good enough. I’m not selling junk. Once in a while, there’s just one of those problem children. So it gets clamped in this,” Romeis motions to a sturdy vise, “hit with a hammer, busted in two and thrown in yonder gray receptacle, he says, jerking his head toward the garbage can. “That’s where they go. I don’t sell seconds and I don’t sell crap.”
He does enjoy his day job, but with only 49 weeks left to go before he can retire, he’s looking forward to spending more time at his craft.
“I love making tools that people can really use,” he says. “When someone tells me, ’I field-dressed two hogs and a deer with this knife, and it’ll still shave,’ well, that’s all the testimonial I need.”
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Information from: The (Fort Myers, Fla.) News-Press, https://www.news-press.com
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