SEPTEMBER 2019 blademag.com 73F
ew people in any fi eld achieve the
status BLADE Magazine Cutlery
Hall-Of-Fame® member Buster
Warenski reached at the height of his
custom knifemaking career. Th e rea-
sons are simple. Yes, he was gift ed be-
yond belief. However, in addition, he
was inventive. Th en, perhaps most of
all, he was relentless.
For most of the custom knife world,
when the name King Tut is uttered,
people conjure up images of the
breathtaking dagger that Warenski
labored for seven years to produce. It
is not the boy pharaoh of Egypt whose
mummifi ed body lay undisturbed in its
tomb for 33 centuries before its discovery
in 1922. It’s quite an achievement when,
among his peers, a knifemaker supplants
a legendary historical event with
something of his own creation.
Warenski’s road to, for lack of a
more superlative descriptive term,
“knifemaking immortality,” began with
his fi rst knife made in 1966. He had seen
a knife made by Cutlery Hall-Of-Famer
Gil Hibben, toured Hibben’s shop and
learned some of the basics. In 1972, just
shy of his 30th birthday, Buster went to
work for Harvey Draper, grinding blades
for Draper Knives until the operation
closed its doors at the end of the year. In
1975, Buster became a full-time custom
knifemaker, and the future was to
become, simply put, an incredible ride.
“I fi rst heard of Buster from Dave
Lyman, Harvey Draper’s sheathmaker
at the time,” remembered knifemaker
Steve Johnson. “I was working in
the Draper shop in Ephraim, Utah,
aft er I had left the Hibben shop in my
hometown of Manti, Utah. I saw a knife
of Buster’s and I was very impressed. He
was actively painting, mostly interior
work on houses at the time, and the
reason I remember this is because he
had given me a few tips on what to look
for in a good house painter later on
when we were building our own house
in the southeast part of Manti.”
Buster’s early work consisted mainly
of hunters and skinners, but by the time
he committed fully to knifemaking,
he had already shift ed his focus to art
knives. During his career, he served two
terms as president of the Knifemakers’
Guild. He passed away in 2005 at the
age of 63.JulieJulieandandBusterBusterWarenski.Warenski.
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