Some Medford Knives (and Greg)
“Greg Medford is deeply, deeply romantic…”
I wanted to write a review of a Medford knife, but found that that doing so was harder than it seemed. It wasn’t simply a matter of listing some specifications and checking them off against a table of “approved” design features. It was inextricable from discussion of Greg Medford himself, for reasons that will become apparent and have everything to do with the internet. Bear with me.
Greg Medford is a knifemaker, the founder of Medford Knife and Tool. He’s a former Marine, adamantly supportive of Donald Trump, by his own account a provocateur, and the owner-operator of a Youtube channel where he relishes detailing his views on matters from Trump (yay) to China (boo). Medford Knife and Tool — the company — produces what are commonly described as “over-built” tactical knives, the diametric opposite of the online fascination with fantasy edges and allegedly “exotic” handle materials. You can imagine how well that goes down. In the tiny hothouse environment of internet knife aficionados, real and self-appointed, Medford Knife and Tool is regularly accused of selling middling steel knives for higher-than-justified prices, of being a dinosaur, of having bad blade geometry and for the fall of the Roman Empire with all the woes that caused.
This is a Medford knife.
To appreciate the shrillness of this discourse you have to remember that the internet, for all its other richnesses, is centrally informed by hormonal young men arguing about minutiae. You also have to understand that the reaction to Medford knives is inextricable from the reaction to Greg’s public persona itself: bombastic, deliberately antagonistic, often crass. He’s a target for people who find that offensive, and, equally to his detriment, a hero to people who struggle to spell “bird” with all the letters in order.
Over time, though, I’ve come to appreciate my own Medford knives as uniquely different to other knives. I mean, look at this below, for fuck’s sake. Knives like these were carried in the Colosseum. Roman senators wore expensive versions under their togas while Roman centurions wore cheaper versions on their belts as they waded through bars and borderlands.
It’s a fisherman’s knife, and a farmer’s knife. It’s all those things and it carries itself with an easy grace. The upper and lower edges of the blade flow into the handle seamlessly, the upper on a graceful curve from tip to handle, and the lower facilitated by the arch of the sharpening choil (the notch at the bottom of the blade), which mirrors the inner arch of the handle. The handle is filigreed, a completely unnecessary, necessary touch. It’s delicate and brutal at the same time, and very, very romantic.
This is the story of how I came to think that romance is central to the Medford design aesthetic and central to the experience. It’s also, inevitably, the story of a complicated, sensitive person, someone curious and smart enough to draw their own conclusions; a story of someone not intrinsically cut out for the limelight and the persona they formed to shield them from public life. (Not me, dummy. Greg.)
My lean, efficient M-48
The M-48 was the first Medford knife I bought. I bought it online, partly because I was curious about Medford knives, and partly because, where I live, there’s little chance to handle these in person. This model seemed a reasonable entry into the Medford world because it fit in with the uses I usually have for a knife: easy to carry, good at cutting things around the house and garden, capable of great slashing motions in the bathroom mirror. I had no idea how attached I would become to it, or how quickly I’d become attached to it.
Bill Harsey said the job of the knifemaker is to remove everything unnecessary and this is a study in that. The handle is aircraft aluminium and titanium and it’s very, very thin. Despite the thinness, the knife snaps open with certainty and, once open, radiates security. The blade is a lethal hollow grind, the spine has a very subtle convex curve to the tip, and the tip itself is a complex construction intended to resist impact when piercing. The pictures don’t do it justice, but this is a lean knife in every way, almost skeletal, and it manages to be so without sacrificing strength or structural integrity. I fell in love with it immediately, which was confusing.
I had heard that Medford knives were “impractical”, overbuilt at the expense of utility, and little better than a chisel or pry bar. The people dismissing them advocated for knives that were good at “everyday carry”. I’m pretty sure that some Medford knives are overbuilt and impractical. This knife, however, is not only one of the most useful knives I own, it’s lightweight and nimble, incredibly easy to carry, incredibly easy to use, and cuts like a blind samurai in a Japanese folk tale. As I said, confusing.
My troubled, beautiful Infraction
A short while later, I found myself shopping again. I still didn’t want a “tactical” Medford, mostly because I have many fixed blade knives of varying sizes. Everything I could think of that might need a larger knife is covered by one or more of them. But I did want an Infraction, with a degree of teenage lust that staggered me. It has, to quote the man in the car dealership, beautiful lines. When it arrived, it was smaller than I had expected mainly because I don’t register written dimensions. (To give you an idea of how bad that is, I once bought a television on sale and it sat in my lobby for weeks because it was twice as large as I thought and too big for me to unpack alone.)
Size notwithstanding, the Infraction is a symphony of lines and curves and as beautiful as I had hoped.
It’s also a collection of what I now call “Medford anomalies”. The balance of handle to blade, for example, is awkward. While the blade thickness at the spine is 0.19 inches, each side of the handle is also 0.19 inches thick. The total knife length is 8 inches (per Medford), with a 3.625 inch blade (also per Medford). The handle-to-blade ratio is therefore 5.5-to-4.5 and the width is 3-to-1, both favouring the handle.
The blade is a high-ish hollow grind which removes metal, as does cutting out the deployment hole. All of this metal removal shifts the balance further from the cutting edge and into the handle. Add a backspacer — the metal slab between between the two sides of the handle — and the knife grows even more back heavy. It’s a subtle thing, but it ultimately undermines the intent of the knife, which is to afford application of the cutting edge. (There are a couple of ways that this could be fixed. The easiest of these is simply to replace the backspacer with standoffs, metal cylinders joining the inner face of each handle scale to the other.)
My Infraction also came with issues at the edge itself. (Similar concerns to mine are outlined in detail by others online.) To start with, it wasn’t particularly sharp for a small, pocketable knife. On inspection, that turned out to be a function of the blade grind. Apart from the overly thick edge, the grind on one side of the blade was wider than the other, making the tip skew left. I reground the blade and the problems went away. (If you want the detail, there’s a video on that subject here.) Does any of this make me love the knife less? If anything, the opposite.
But it did make me think about Medford knives more than I have about any other knives and, ultimately, it made me write this article.
My lovely 187 Drop Point
If I haven’t mentioned it yet, I have poor impulse control and another knife came home with me pretty soon. On paper, this one is the most representative of the “Medford-as-pry bar” meme, at least of the Medfords I own. It’s called the 187 because each of the handle scales and the blade stock itself is 0.187 inches thick. It shares this design constraint with the Infraction, which has the same three-part proportions. It would be reasonable to think that it would therefore share the handle-heaviness and balance concerns of that knife. It doesn’t. Due to its size — the blade is bigger than that of the Infraction and less metal has been removed — and the exclusion of a back spacer, the 187, when open, is beautifully balanced in the hand.
The blade itself is made of D2, a tool steel enhanced for durability and performance. That choice elicits a lot of outrage in the internet knife world, D2 being seen as inferior to more modern knife steels. I think it’s a great choice. This is a working tool and the simplicity of both construction and materials is testament to that. I could go into detail about the hardware, about how it “carries”, and its putative practicality, but I won’t. All of that is great and I’m taking it for granted. What I want to talk about, for very specific reasons that I hope will become clear, is how beautiful it is.
The knife on the desk in front of me as I write this, has faded blue-grey anodizing on the handle scales and a relatively plain blade with visible grind lines. Both are beautifully understated and complement each other perfectly. When the knife is open, the line from the handle spine to the blade spine forms a subtle, continuous flow. The downward curve at the tip is echoed at the bottom of the handle, an unnecessary symmetry that is both useful and pleasing. The handle itself tapers inwards, something that makes any potential bulkiness vanish in the hand, where it becomes effortless to hold and manipulate.
This taper also serves to foreground the blade — the handle “opens up” at the top as though it’s presenting the blade to the world. The blade itself is an elegant drop point shape, almost leaf-like, with a tiny recurve at the heel. The outer curves of the blade are echoed within the blade, in the lines of the swedge and the edge itself, in the rounded deployment hole, and in the forward choil at the bottom of the blade. It embodies grace, something that seems so unlikely given its size, until you have it in hand. It always seems to me to be leaping forward, eager and optimistic. It brings me genuine joy and it would not be out of place at all to say that I actually love this knife.
What I learned on my Medford holiday
I’m pretty sure that the four Medford knives I own — the three discussed and the filigreed Praetorian Slim pictured earlier — are not particularly representative of Medford knives in general. There are dozens of Medford knives that, in pictures, look like tank parts or trenching tools. I do think, however, that these knives showcase aspects of Medford design that are easily obscured by more aggressive styling in other models. The combination of delicacy and brutality, for example, or the subtlety with line, the preoccupation with very graceful curves and with the continuation of curved lines from handle to blade. These choices are pervasive across all their knives and their pervasiveness makes me think they’re a function of an artistic intent separate from engineering concerns.
Is that worth paying for, though? These knives are priced in the mid-to-high range, and in that range they’re competing with knives that foreground build quality. For around the same price as my 187, I got a Chaves Liberation 229 made to exacting standards by Reate in China, with M390 steel (review here). But I have several of these kinds of knives, often with extraordinary machining, and very few, if any, make me feel invested in them the way these Medfords do. Perhaps the most apt analogue is to muscle cars. No one argues that a 1968 Ford Mustang is functionally better than a new 5-series sedan, but a good version of the former costs more than a new version of the latter and the reason for that is pure romance, emotive and unquantifiable. Like classic cars, these knives are filled with it.
That said, there’s a minimum threshold. If performance was shitty on that ‘68 Mustang, no amount of romance would compensate. Like old cars and motorcycles, my knives needed tinkering. Once that was done, though, they delivered all the performance I expected and bring something visceral to both ownership and use that I don’t get with other knives. In the case of the 187, that “something” borders on love. How do you price that?
So what about Greg?
When the 187 arrived, it had some scratch marks on the handle scales and a few marks on the blade itself. These didn’t bother me, but I was curious about them and mailed Medford Knife and Tool asking about them. We went back and forth for a while, them asking for photographs and me supplying them, until I got a terse mail from a mailbox named “Greg” saying simply “Call me”. I replied that I was on a different continent and in a different time zone but to no effect. So, at 22h00 my time and on my way to bed I was diverted into conversation with Greg Medford.
Looking back, I think he was a little defensive and probably expected the call to be someone asking for a handout. We dispensed with that pretty quickly, though, and the conversation settled down into an easy back and forth. He was informed about South Africa, where I live, which is always a welcome surprise and — my own defensiveness showing — didn’t detour into the tedious conspiracy theories about South Africa that are currency on the American right. We disagreed about Trump, agreed that corruption is a global phenomenon expressed differently in different countries, and discussed knives. He listened when I disagreed with him and was both quick and reflective in his answers, something I don’t often get. I liked him on the call and walked away with the sense that I’d like him in person.
I thought about that call for several weeks after, flashing back to it in the middle of other conversations. Eventually, I started looking for Greg’s videos online to try put a finger on the feeling I’d had during the call. There are many. Some of them are hilarious, some will cause heart failure, and some probably require a trigger warning. The phrase “cum gargling”, for example, comes up far more often than you might expect, practically never in a congratulatory sense. The one that affected me most, though, was Frankie and Bird’s interview of 2019. The questions are mostly things like what his favourite Pokemon is, but towards the middle of the interview, Greg is asked whether he believes in ghosts. You can see the moment here.
He laughs it off, but then there’s a beat, a stumble, and he begins thoughtfully to navigate his way to the idea that “our brain fills the gaps” — that people report supernatural experiences in the same way that we experience phantom limbs. This is a genuinely clever idea. Sometimes, under great duress, motivated by grief and loss, we “fill the gaps”. We do it out of necessity, because some loss is just too hard. It’s an unusual moment in an otherwise throw-away video and it betrays someone who thinks deeply and sensitively about things in a way that’s not necessarily evident from videos of him yelling at the internet.
Do I disagree with Greg? Sure.
He’s wrong about China, for example, which is not a global hegemon but rather a country ingrained with the kind of cultural PTSD only mass famine can produce and determined never to undergo that again. He’s right about the impact that the globalization of labour has had on the domestic workforce, but the people he thinks will reverse that are as much beneficiaries of the system as anyone else and no more likely to change it. He loves capitalism but may not know that we’ve never had capitalism, nor that the US, like China, prefers a form of state- and crony-capitalism where money gives you access to state power, which in turn gives you the chance to route more money your way. He’s a libertarian and insists, correctly, that the state has no authority over consensual decisions. But he seems to miss that we’re communal animals by evolution and even in a libertarian society there are cases for the kind of collective action without which we’d all just be fossilised leopard-shit.
I’m not sure that any of that matters, though. Here’s an unpopular opinion in an increasingly binary online discourse: I think there’s space in the world for people we disagree with. I also think it’s okay for people to be complicated. Without in any way justifying whatever he may say or do, anyone whose idea of a good time is drinking whiskey while watching Versailles with a dog named after Smedley Butler is someone I can relate to. I hope he’s doing well and that Trump loses, and that he knows that these are not incompatible outcomes.
Hereafter the obligatory caveats. I have no affiliation with any of the retailers, stores, websites, or knifemakers listed, linked, or discussed in this article, other than as a customer. They have, in large part, never heard of me and likely never will. (Nor has anyone else who might be linked.)
The knives discussed are my own, they were bought with my own money — though my bank would dispute that — and that money was earned through my own unwilling wage-slavery. There are no gifts or suggested incentives that would otherwise be inexplicable. Links are provided throughout to allow you, the reader, to read further.
Because this is about Medford Knives and it’s on the internet I probably also have to be clear that I do not (a) support a land invasion of China, (b) wear a Civil War outfit at home, or (c) wish to deny rights to anyone anywhere. I live elsewhere. We have our own problems. My views are written down above and there’s no need to invent more.
