At this stage, the blade will have morphed from a ‘soft’ steel into a hard brittle version: if dropped, it will shatter like glass. This begins with the blade being fired in a small kiln at a temperature of 1 070☌ for 10 minutes before being subjected to a temperature of -40☌ for a day. His favourite steel includes German (Böhler) and Swedish (Sandvik). Raw steel is pliable and knife patterns are cut, shaped and sharpened in preparation for a tempering process. Oom Bok sources his steel from Knife Machines, Tools and Supplies in Pretoria along with an array of other materials including screws, pivot pins and titanium liner-lock liners. It is for this reason that every knife he produces is first carefully acid-etched with the brand name ‘Boni’ – a combination of the first two letters of the the names Bok and Niel. He is quick to mention that he appreciates Niel’s role in rekindling his childhood passion. It is obvious that Oom Bok is thoroughly at home here. Previously the home’s sunroom and garage, the workshop is now cluttered with machinery (much of which was built by him), freezers, a kiln, long sandpaper belts, tools of various sizes and shapes, steel, wood, bone and horn.
In fact, his production has intensified with age and today Oom Bok produces a knife a week from his workshop. Oom Bok made a knife for his grandson, and then went on to consistently produce hundreds more in the next two decades.
But he wouldn’t take no for an answer!” he recalls. “He asked me to make a knife for him, and I told him that I couldn’t.
BOK BOK SHOTGUN FARMERS FREE
Oom Bok van Niekerk in his knife-crafting workshop in the southern Free State town of Zastron. It proved to be the catalyst Oom Bok needed to make up for lost time. This situation changed in the early 1990s, when Oom Bok’s five-year-old grandson Niel asked him to craft a bone-handled pocket knife for him. Bok then promptly produced a replacement knife for himself, and continued to craft knives right into adulthood whenever a suitable piece of metal presented itself.īy the 1970s, however, his stone crushing and coal distribution business, which supplied most of southern Lesotho and northern Transkei, had reduced his leisure time and hence his ability to produce knives. The young Bok clearly had an innate knack for knife-making: soon after the completion of this first knife, his neighbour, Daan van der Berg, bought it. In addition, Oom Bok admits that he coveted his father Ben’s small pocket knife. “So I got an old, thin, flat file, and, with an old grinder that I turned by hand, I made my first knife.” The Second World War had led to the collapse of imports – especially of steel – into the country, and there simply were no new knives to buy.
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