THEBACHA/FORT SMITH - When he was six years old, Dwade Hawley received a three-bladed pocket knife as a gift from his grandfather.

Fort Smith's Dwade Hawley, a sharpener of precision blades, holds a kitchen knife he just sharpened. - Paul Bickford/NNSL photo

"He gave me a dull pocket knife and a sharpening stone," recalled Hawley. "He said, 'You can have the knife when you get it sharp.' It took me a long time to get it sharp."

That was the start of a life-long interest in sharpening blades for Hawley, now 56 and living in Fort Smith.

"Anything that's got an edge I'll sharpen it for you," he said.

Most of his part-time hobby business involves sharpening kitchen and hunting knives, and some axes.

"I've sharpened every knife known to man," he said.

However, Hawley has also sharpened an impressive array of other blades, including some that are occasionally sent to him from other parts of Canada and the United States.

For example, he has sharpened augur blades for cutting holes in ice, 59 special pen knives to sharpen quills for a museum workshop, and even microtome blades for cutting extremely thin biological samples to examine under a microscope.

His experience with microtome blades goes back to when he was 12 or 13. At that time, his father was a wildlife biologist in Inuvik – where the family moved to from Montana in 1961 – and somebody dropped a microtome knife on a floor and took a big chip out of it.

"It took me two days to get the ding out and move enough metal that it finally worked," Hawley recalled. "By God, it was sharper than what we were getting from the company that was sharpening them."

The most unusual thing he recalled sharpening was from Grande Prairie, Alta. It was a six-foot-long drag knife used to shave solid wood floors.

Hawley, who has lived in Fort Smith since 1980 and works full-time as a records clerk with the GNWT's Department of Public Works and Services, has had his part-time sharpening business for four or five years.

That was after he had made some large purchases of sharpening equipment, he noted. "Finally, my wife said, 'You better start making some money at this.'"

Hawley became known outside Fort Smith after a friend asked him to sharpen a 290-year-old Japanese cleaver for his mother-in-law in Vancouver.

The woman told her friends about his work, and his name spread by word of mouth. Most of the items sent to him – about a half-dozen a year – come from the Vancouver area, plus a few from Toronto and the U.S.

Hawley said one of the things he especially enjoys about sharpening is working on Japanese knives, noting some are hundreds of years old and create an historical connection back to the time of Samurai warriors.

Three years ago, he also collaborated with a Louisiana man to alter a bench grinder to create an adjustable-speed power-sharpening machine. It prevents a build-up of heat that could take the temper out of knives.

Hawley noted sharpening blades is not rocket science.

"It's not hard," he said. "It just takes some thinking. Anybody in the world can do it if they want to. It's the three or five or 10 years that you'll spend learning to do it."

Hawley doesn't sharpen saws and only very rarely sharpens skates.

"I don't find much of a challenge to it," he explained.

However, he said he does have fun sharpening an expensive knife and putting an edge on it like the day it left its maker's hands.

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