EDITOR’S NOTE: I tried to credit the above photo correctly. If it is not credited correctly or the actual owner wants it removed let me know. In other words, Jim (my friend and podcast guest Sharp by Coop), if this is yours email me and I will fix it.

Michael Walker is the greatest knifemaker of all time. If you agree, great, your smart and you can spend the time you normally spend reading this site, listening to GGL82 where Michael Walker was a guest. If you don’t keep reading.

In many ways, greatness in the knife realm is hard to define. We will never have metrics like they have in baseball, as knifemaking is, in part, an artistic endeavor. And so GOAT (greatest of all time) determinations will probably always be “merely” opinions, but opinions can be stronger or weaker, I think there is a good argument for Walker being the GOAT. The genesis for this post was a IG post on Knife Critiques page where he called Tom Mayo the GOAT. I truly love Mayo’s knives and he is unquestionably a great maker, but he makes titanium framelocks really well. Walker, on the other hand, has invented more lock designs there are teams in the NLF, he designed the most influential lock of all time (the liner lock), and he produces knives that routinely sell for tens of thousands of dollars. In that quick rebuttal you have the three key elements, in my mind, for determining knifemaking greatness: mechanical contributions, impact, and artistic contributions. There are folks that rival Walker in each one of those aspects of knife making but no one beats him in all three, hence my belief that he is the GOAT.

Mechanical Contributions

In this aspect of knifemaking Walker really outdistances the competition. He does so for three reasons. First, he invented the modern linerlock. Second, he solved one of the oldest problems in knifemaking. And third he has invented more lock designs than anyone in history.

While there were knives that had locking leaf springs before, they were not designed the same way, they did not function the same way, and most importantly they were not the primary locking mechanism. The modern linerlock, that simplest of designs, came from the brain of Michael Walker. He implemented the detent ball some time after making the first linerlock. Once that was in place we have all the elements of the lock that dominates the knife industry today (which the acknowledgement that the framelock is a variant of the linerlock). The linerlock is simple, easy to produce in large numbers, safe, reliable, and easy to use. The linerlock is by far my favorite lock, and other than two small issues—the fingers passing through the blade path when closing and its distinctly non-ambidexterous design—it is a superb design. As a right hander, I have nothing to complain about.

But that’s not the only major mechanical innovation Walker brings to the table. Since time immemorial the world of edged tools has faced a dilemma. You want a hard material at the edge to resist dulling and a soft material at the spine to reduce cracks and damage from shock. There have been dozens of different ways to solve this problem—damascus steel, differential hardening, and high polish edges—but none are as impressive or mechanically spectacular as Walker’s solution, the zipper blade. Through mecticulous care, he is able to fit together steel at the edge with titanium on the spine, giving the blade an ideal composition. The process takes months, but the end result is a solution to a problem that has vexed humanity longer than governments have existed.

Here is where its starts to get crazy (and infomercial like). There is more. Many custom makers have their own lock design. Scott Sawby, another great maker, has his self lock. Andrew Demko invented two locks—the Tri-Ad lock and the Scorpion lock. But Walker’s catalog of invented locks is staggeringly large. You see, Walker wasn’t content with the linerlock. Instead he went on the devise lock after lock after lock, in total creating more than 40 entirely new lock designs and many of those have variants. Supposing there are something like 70 or 80 distinct lock designs (which is really pushing it, I think there are probably something like 30 non-Walker designs), to be generous to the other side the argument, Walker has still invented more locks than the rest of humanity combined.

While the other areas of knifemaking have close rivals and maybe some that are equal to Walker, here, in terms of mechanical contributions, he literally laps the field, and that field is all the rest of the non-Michael Walker portion of the human race.

Impact

Walker’s impact on the knives is tremendous—through his linerlock he has altered how even the most frugal of companies produces knives, and through his high end customs he has reimagined what is possible in the art of knifemaking. Those two double barreled influences are unique.

Compare Walker to another all time great knifemaker—Sal Glesser. Glesser, through his company Spyderco, has made tremendous strides in introducing design-first blades to the general public. Confined to just production knives, Glesser and Walker have similar impact. Glesser’s inventions make knives better. Walker’s linerlock does something similar. But Glesser’s contributions to custom knives are basically nill.

Then there are Walker’s contemporaries or peers. Someone like Ron Lake, for example, has had a similar run of success in the custom world, but his contributions to the production world are limited, especially when compared to the widespread success of the linerlock.

And so again, even when judging Walker, just in terms of impact, no one is truly better. Some are close, Glesser, Chris Reeve, Pete Gerber, Chuck Buck, on the production side, but all these folks are basically non-entities in the custom world. The reverse is true of high impact custom makers. They have hugely important and pricey knives, but nothing that an everyman can afford.

Artistic Contributions

Buster Warenski’s trio of high end daggers (the King Tut dagger, the Gem of the Orient, and Fire & Ice) are the high watermark for art knives, both in terms of their execution and their price. Walker is, in my estimation, only slighly behind Warenski. And Walker is still making knives. It is entirely conceivable to me that he could either outpace Warenski or that over time the volume of his high end output will come to be regarded as equal to Warenski’s.

I am also not certain how Walker’s body of work would compare to those in the Japanese nihonto tradition. We gasp as the prices associated with the King Tut dagger, but nihonto swords can easily best that price in private auctions. They are older, rarer, and harder to duplicate. Which leads me to this point—there are probably makers lost to the mists of time that have had huge artistic impacts but no longer get headlines (or, as with Japanese swords, get headlines in other parts of the world). I am not certain enough here to rule out the possibility that some Japanese swordmaker is just more important to the art of cutlery than Walker is.

But even with these cavaets, I think Walker’s best knives rank with anyone else’s cutlery. And while Warrenski and some Japanese swordmakers might be his artistic superior, I am not certain that is the case. What I am certain about is that none of these people rank in the other two aspects of knifemaking greatness.

When looked at from this perspective, its hard to find one person where their mechicanl inventivness, their impact, and their artistic merits surpass Walker. Some are close in one, but not in the others. In fact, I think his greatest rival (and the other acceptable opinion in terms of the GOAT) is Bob Loveless. But he made fixed blades and while they are spectacular, they are not the mechanical marvels that a sharktooth zipper is.