Local engraver is master of his craft

ALTAVISTA — To some town residents, Tim George is the guy next to whom they work out at the YMCA in the morning.

From his ponytail and modestly hip glasses, one could guess he’s an “artist type.”

That he’s a world-famous master craftsman who can charge more than the worth of the cars sitting in your driveway to engrave your shotgun or that he has a three-year waiting list for his knife engraving services may come as a surprise to some.

“I joke and say I’m world famous,” George said. “I’m known all over the world by a few people. I have customers all over the world, but my neighbor probably has no idea what I do.”

The amount of information on the Internet and modern pneumatic tools have made it easier for would-be engravers to become good quickly, he said, but he thinks most people don’t think of guys like him sitting in a workshop with a hammer and a chisel.

“When you say ‘engraving,’ they think of Things Remembered at the mall,” he said.

Clamped into a small vice attached to a shiny ball joint about the size of a really big grapefruit, George tinked away at a knife handle, engraving the image of a mythological goddess, one strike at a time, into stainless steel.

“There’s Athena in her brass bra,” he said with a laugh.

He makes his own tools by grinding them out of drill bit blanks. Other than his lights and a visor with magnifying lenses, he said, the same tools and techniques were used by engravers thousands of years ago. All the work from design to the engraving is done by hand specifically for each client, he said.

Although he says his work is obscure and can be expensive, smaller knife projects are measured in weeks and hundreds of hours. Gun engraving involves epic amounts of labor, he said.

George started working as an apprentice in 1981 under former Colt custom shop master Ken Hurst in his Lynchburg shop. It took him six weeks of chiseling on steel plates before he became good enough to cut Hurst’s designs into shotguns.

“You didn’t have to be an artist, you just had to have the mechanical skill,” he said.

Paid per gun, George cut one shotgun the first week, two the second week and so on until he was good enough to train other apprentices. He left Hurst’s shop to start another company with some coworkers, but decided to strike out on his own by the early 1990s.

American Custom Gunmakers Guild Executive Director Jan Billeb said George has an outstanding reputation in the field.

“Particularly in the fact that he acquired it at such a young age,” Billeb said. “He is definitely one of the younger ones.”

His tie to Hurst and the Colt custom shop is what landed me in his cinderblock-walled basement shop. My own development from elementary-age book report writer to award-winning small-town snoop made an important stopover in a research paper about the Colt custom shop written for my seventh-grade metal shop class.

Though George, who is 48, learned the craft on firearms, it turns out he is way, way more into engraving knives. Based on his pedigree, I wasn’t expecting art deco and art nouveau ladies on folding knives.

He said he considers many knives works of art before he even starts embellishing them. Before they’re engraved they range in price from $2,000 to $15,000.

He compared the closure on one small folder, a Ron Lake knife, to that of a door on a Mercedes.

“That’s a $12,500 knife,” he said as I stood there leaving my sweaty, nervous fingerprints on the handle. Colt who?

A gun project, he said, is like writing a novel. Knives are more like poems or short stories, he said. He enjoys carving knives because he can do things that would probably be inappropriate on a gun, he said.

“It’s really more of an expression of art. You’re able to go outside the box a little bit,” he said. “I’ve also found people who collect knives are more interested in the things that I’m interested in.”

George said his engraving is a vocation. While he appreciates the workmanship in the guns and knives that cross his workbench and he is a fan of other engravers, time away from engraving is money he’s not getting paid.

“It’s the ultimate no-work, no-pay job,” he said. “I mean, I guess if I hit the lottery, yeah, I’d buy a couple of pieces.”

In spite of the amount of money he can charge for his work, customers are paying for hundreds of hours. It translates into a modest lifestyle in a modest home in a modest town, he said.

“You have to love doing it. It’s a lonely occupation,” he said. “When you finish a job, you have the satisfaction of a job well done. And I’m not ancient, but I’ve been doing this for a pretty good while. I feel like I’m still getting better. It’s a desire to continuously get better.

“There’s also a desire to make your car payment, house payment and pay for your kids’ college and all that good stuff.”