So...who am I and how did I start?....

I was born in 1969 and currently work as a professional consultant in radiation safety for Foxfire Scientific Inc. from my home office here in Bryan, TX. I started putting knife kits together as a teenager, then "graduated" to grinding down my dad's files and similar methods for making knives. I quit messing with things like this for a while, then picked it back up my senior year in college. I had spent summers doing class II machinery work for NASA building shuttle training systems' hardware. This gave me my first more advanced look at metalworking. I learned welding, sheetmetal work and tooling applications for a variety of materials. At this same time, I became involved with the SCA and started getting into the whole medieval scene. The average quality of blades and such found at most of these events was dissappointing to say the least. I knew I could do better... and so launched the new path of what is now KragAxe Armoury.

After getting a double bachelors in Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Health Engineering, I started grad school. Around this time I also worked a semester in a materials testing lab looking at embrittlement of steel and other materials such as zirc-4 due to neutron irradiation and cobalt/stellite production within the iron matrix. This started the interest in the whole crytalline structure to steels and phase manipulation. I've also helped with structural constructon projects for the interphase transport phenomenon group...which is just a fancy term for bubbles in space...and kept up with current trends in space based power systems! The more focused research I became involved with, the more I found myself facinated by the more basic aspects of bladesmithing and armouring! Using fire and hammers to create metal art has now become more of an obsession!

I'm now closing up on my doctorate in nuclear engineering in addition to working full-time, but still find time to run a part time business making armour for re-enactment groups, building historical blackpowder artillery and forging all sorts of bladed weapons. I currently make damascus billets and have recently added mokume to my wares. I love the whole pattern welding scene, but still tend to stick with the less fancy styles of early historical blades (600-1200 AD). I really am drawn to the late migration era and Viking ages. I still occasionally do more artistic blades as well. I seem to have a bad habit of starting something new, then reading a new article or seeing a new material and then starting a new project without finishing the old ones! My shop and house are littered with blades of varying degree of completion. This is why my site is kind of lacking in pics of recent work, but I'm working on getting it updated.

My longterm goals are to work towards the eventual title of "Mastersmith" within the ABS, as well as to produce museum quality armour pieces (as opposed to "field" grade SCA variants of such). Short-term goals are to just make the best armour and weapons I can and learn as much as possible! Please email me with any questions or comments. Thanks for stopping by!