Original subtitles

There's a town at the base of the Alleghenies where talk might center

blade patterns just as easily as weather patterns.

Where the introduction of a new shield design can cause almost as big a stir as

Walt Sanderson's new truck.

It's a place where they've been making knives by hand for 107 years.

So yes, you could say the good folks in Bradford know a thing or two about

knives. But then again, you don't have to.

A case knife says that all by itself.

I think my first tool was a knife. The first one was a rock, and it broke, and

it had a sharp edge, and then it was a knife.

I take pieces of steel and handle material and make dust out of everything

that's not a knife by hand.

My name is Bill Ruppel. I'm a custom knife maker from down in South Texas.

The first knife I ever owned, my dad gave me a case trapper.

The first knife I made was a case trapper.

As you progress as a custom maker, people see what you make, and a lot of

will call you an artist that knife.

You know, my father told me when I was a kid, if you'll do what you love, people

will love what you do. And I've taken that to heart. That moment when I finish

knife and I look at it and I think, wow, I can't believe that I just did this.

Pretty knives won't cut better than an ugly one, but it'll sell better.

And so over time, I feel like that my knives have gone from being a functional

piece of work to functional art.

I may start with a quarter pound of stuff and end up with a few ounces.

I make around probably 50, 60 knives a year and go to knife shows and sell

It's just been quite a ride.

This is a knife I designed for Case.

My relationship with Case as a custom maker is I present them knives for them

build, a knife that matches my taste, something that I would want to carry.

I never in my wildest dreams thought I would be working with Case.

Wow, what an honor that is. I'm 73 years old. How many companies were here

before I was born and are still here and still top of their game?

Case is one of those companies. There's not a lot of them left.

The Case brand gets its start in 1889 with four Case brothers who were making

and selling knives, and one of those four brothers was W .R. Case, William

Russell.

Russ Case, W .R.'s son, starts working for his dad and uncles, learns a bit

about the industry, decides to start his own company in 1902.

As every brand or every company gets its start, they have to figure out how

they're going to position themselves.

And our founder, He decided that WR Case and Sons Cutlery Company was going to

be a legacy brand from the beginning.

He did a few strategic things. The first was using his Grandpa Job's image.

So Grandpa Job was this older gentleman, big, long, white beard, because he

looked like this guy who's been around for a while, and you're going to trust

what he says. The other thing that he did was name the company for his father,

WR.

So that automatically sets up the brand as having three generations.

Well, if you've got three generations, you have to have been around for a

And then in 1905, WR Case & Sons Cutlery Company comes to Bradford,

Pennsylvania, and they've been here ever since.

If you want to claim your history as being significant, you have to know it.

can't have that legacy. You can't claim that historical significance if you

don't have and know your history.

Every day we're essentially creating tomorrow's history.

We've got a 15 ,000 square foot building because we want to store anything

that's representative of the company. We want to have room for everything we've

done in the past and then everything new we're doing today.

Part of my job is going through all the old paper assets and pulling any

information that I can from them to be able to answer questions or share

information, tell stories.

And there's a few reasons why this one is my favorite.

For a while, we used the tagline, the world's finest cutlery, but this one was

right around when we were introducing the astronaut's knife.

So I love that little addendum, the world and space's finest cutlery.

NASA actually approached CASE and sort of gave us some specifications and

requirements, and we were able to come up with this knife that went on every

manned Apollo and Gemini mission into space.

That's when collecting case knives really started to take off.

So prior to that, most people were purchasing knives exclusively to use

In about the 70s and the 80s, there started to be knife collector guides

published.

People decided that this is something that could maybe hold value.

They'd already been given as gifts, especially in the South. It's like a

rite of passage, almost like a coming of age gift.

Some collectors collect just the pattern. Some collectors collect just

handle material.

You know, maybe they like abalone. They might collect abalone or sack.

Some have a handful. Some have rooms that are devoted to collecting.

Some have vaults. And they know every knife they have.

We describe a knife as, you know, a working functional tool. They describe

eye candy.

They don't just carry that knife.

They love that knife. They sit it on their shelf. They admire that knife.

pass them from generation to generation, and they wish we'd make more.

To me, it's a tool. You know, it's a utilitarian tool.

And it's one of the first tools ever, if not the first tool.

So knives have been around for centuries.

You have to have a good blade. You have to have a good heat treat in that

product. When I first started here, one of the slams against Case Cutlery was

that they weren't sharp out of the box.

So I reached out to a gentleman at... University of Pittsburgh in Bradford

him if he would come look at our heat treating process and tell me what was

wrong with it. So he did, and we made changes to the heat treating process to

eliminate as much of the retained austenite, and that's a metallurgical

that we possibly could after we did this edge retention and went through the

roof.

There's a lot of blood, sweat, and tears goes into that product too.

Very proudly made in the United States of America by normal everyday people.

And that's what we do for a living.

Dave Skaggs, I'm the technical engineering manager for Case Colory.

there for 32 years, and I have three days left of employment with Case

And then I'll be retired.

Since I've been 18, an adult, an official adult, I've never been

I've worked my entire life.

I've never gotten a handout.

No food stamps.

I don't have people paying my bills.

I'm proud of myself that I did it. I put the work in, and nobody can take that

away from me.

Retired in the military in 2002, and then I've been working for Kay since

And I started out right at the bottom. No matter because you have education or

whatever, I just wanted a job.

ran what they called nickless taper grinders. They're manual gear machines.

You turn a wheel, you throw the switch, and it goes in and it grinds the blade.

Miserable job.

You'd leave after a 10 -hour shift, and it's all over your body.

And then Rich Brandon put up a bid for an engineering technician.

I applied.

I got the job.

And then it was me and Rich, the only people who had engineering staff in that

whole facility.

It was a great career.

I learned a lot.

Obviously, going into knife making, they don't teach that in college or trade

school. So I had a lot to learn.

They sent me to different schools for how to do computerized machinery.

Then we started retooling the factory in 1996.

But the way George did it was we'd bring in fancy machines, and it would

do the job of 13 workers.

And his promise was nobody would lose their job over us bringing in the newer

machinery. And to my knowledge, nobody ever lost their job.

We've been changing the machines and bringing newer machines in and making

better quality Just because you had the better technology to do

What

case

really makes is a tool

and an heirloom product.

So, in some sense, we make memories, too, because people, there's a lot of

nostalgia around this brand.

There's a lot of people who have had an amazing life experience with this brand

or, you know, got it from their grandpa or whatever, gave it, their child, their

first case.

But we don't know if somebody's going to put that knife, you know, in a display

case or if they're going to use it every day. So every knife that goes out here

has to be incredibly functional and durable.

yet beautiful, because if it's not beautiful, we're getting it back.

You'll notice as you go through the factory, when you look at how a knife is

built, it still blows my mind the number of people who touch that knife and what

has to happen to that knife and how that knife looks through the process, right?

When this thing comes out, when it's pinned together initially, it looks like

it's just this rectangular.

weight almost like a wafer you know and that has to be formed and turned to the

right shape and uh the amount of people who are involved in that and it's it's

just amazing the

cool thing for me here is just the difference in technology that we have

know having been in business for 135 years you know we have technology like

automated welder that is essentially days old versus some other technology in

the factory that's 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 years old.

Anything metallic essentially starts here, and it's going to actually go

one of the three presses that you see.

So now we're in our grinding section of the factory.

So this is actually where the blade itself starts to take shape. So coming

of the press through profile grind, through surface grind.

We have a consistent thickness.

So after it goes through taper grinding, we're getting this taper or V -cut

grind in the blade itself.

So it actually starts to form the shape of the blade at this point.

The second leg coming out of one of the three presses is to actually make a

coverage scale or a handle of the actual knife itself.

Behind me over here is the actual brand new piece of equipment. It's our

automated welder.

And what this will do is actually weld the two bolsters to the brass scale

itself.

So now we have an uncovered scale.

So we have to get some sort of handle material on the uncovered scale itself.

we have a variety of options, whether it's plastic, tyranite, G10, wood.

But the majority of what we use is bone.

And it's actually cow bone from the leg of a cow.

We have a certain number of what we call patterns. So that's the model number of

the knife.

And then from there, how do you make each one different? You make each one

different by changing up either the blade configuration or the actual handle

material itself.

So that's why we have a variety of different colors of bone, a variety of

different colors of plastic, wood, etc.

It's to give that variation to the consumer.

A lot of the bone handle knives that we have, we actually burn in.

an enriched color in the bone itself.

So it'll just darken them up, give it a different color contrast.

So for what we can use CNC equipment for, we can.

Otherwise, it's a manual process. On the fabrication side, it's mainly CNC

equipment. On the completion side, it's mainly manual operation.

The next step after assembly is hefting.

So in hefting, when a knife comes out of assembly, it's all squared off, has

brackered nail heads on the bolsters. So here we actually shape the handle of

the knife.

So either with a sandpaper belt or a grease buff wheel, they're going to

actually hand grind the knife, turn off the sharp corners, remove the nail head,

and take the knife from here to here.

As you can see, kind of this whole completion side process, the majority of

work that we're doing is that hand craftsmanship, the artistry of working

your hands.

Not all knives are the same.

You know, each knife has its own individual nuance, whether it comes from

hefting, whether it comes from imperfections in the bone, the way we

bone itself.

So it's almost like each one's your own little snowflake.

In addition to the manual hefting process, we do have robotic hefting.

You know, hefting is one of our most difficult jobs.

It's hard on the body.

You know, we produce about 6 ,000 knives a day.

Each hefter, they can only heft about 125 knives a day. So the role of the

is a little bit different than the role of our manual hefters.

Our manual heifters, they work on, you know, the higher dollar, the tougher

handle materials, you know, and the tougher patterns themselves.

The robotic hefting, they essentially add volume to us.

It's the higher volume patterns like the Trapper, the 54.

Behind me, you see yellow 37 Sidebuster Juniors.

So it's essentially just adding volume.

versus the manual hefters where they add all the value?

We've got the flip joint knives. We've got the more modern EDC. We've created a

line that's in the middle called the bridge line, which melds both of those

worlds together.

We've got six blades we need to think about. We've got new handle materials,

seals, you know, all kinds of new material finishes. All those things

something unique every year.

I've been here for 35 years, and I know where my work ethic came from. I grew up

on a family farm.

You didn't call an electrician. You didn't call a plumber. You didn't call a

contractor.

You either fixed it or adapted and overcame.

Bradford's really a blue -collar town.

The work ethic is unbelievable around here because that's what you have to do

survive.

People that are willing to work for a living, and there are a lot of people in

this area that that's all they've ever known. It's bred into the population

because of the need.

I want my daughter to have a better life than I had.

And in order to do that, yeah, you've got to put in the hours. Are the people

Bradford proud of the fact of who they are, where they're from?

Absolutely.

What's very unique about Case and Bradford and small towns like this is

work as a bit of a family here.

Bradford is like the little hometown America. It really is about commitments

family and making memories.

Bradford is a great place for...

Anybody hardworking to raise a good family with a good income, it's hometown

secure.

You can leave your door unlocked and your neighbors are watching over you.

You feel safe.

People are very much committed to the community, their families, to helping

other here, and it's wonderful.

It's not all about the big house or whatever. It's about are we living life

well? Are we enjoying it along the way? And I think people here are.