WRITTEN BY GREG ATKINSON PHOTOGRAPHED BY MIKE SIEGEL

Bob Kramer's knives bear the distinctive marks and have the sturdy feel of handcrafted tools.

NOT LONG AGO, master bladesmith Bob Kramer sent me one of his handmade knives so I could see what it was like. As soon as I held it, I realized it was quite unlike any knife I had ever used.

Instantly, my forefinger found its way to one side of the blade as my thumb attended the other. The front of the handle settled into a cradle formed by my other fingers even as the weight of the blade pushed the top of the handle into the base of my palm. The slow, barely perceptible curve of the blade as it swung in an easy arc toward the cutting board made me feel profoundly secure. I liked this knife a lot.

I cut an onion, and the two hemispheres fell away from the blade. As I trimmed the blossom ends and roots from each half, the onion surrendered its skin, and the two pearly halves lay ready to be sliced. The knife flowed through the fabric of the bulbs, and in a matter of seconds, slim ribbons of onion lay in magically neat rows beside the blade.

This sort of thing makes a chef happy. When you spend four or six or even eight hours a day cutting things up, it's nice to have a tool that makes the job a pleasure. Metal, especially the hard steel from which knives are made, has life in it.

At the molecular level, there is motion — electrons spin in ferociously precise orbits around the charged nuclei of the atoms — and at the macro level, a good blade sings a soft, vibratory song to those who will listen.

The shish-shing of a blade against the sharpening rod is at once ominous and reassuring, a sound as filled with meaning as any words. The soft tapping and steady knocking of steel on a wooden cutting board is a happy, productive sound that puts cooks at ease. And long before he became a bladesmith, Kramer was a cook.

"I noodled around in restaurants for years," he recalls. "When I was 21, I had two restaurant jobs at once." He lived in Atlanta then.

"By day, I worked at a place called The Uptown. I got there at 7 o'clock in the morning, and by 3 in the afternoon, we would have done 400 lunches." At night, he worked at a place called Carbos Café. "It was one of those small houses that served Steak Tartare, Caesar Salad, Grand Marnier Soufflé, that kind of thing. And about once a month this old-timer named Jack showed up and sharpened everybody's knives."

Years later, when he was cooking at the Four Seasons (now the Fairmont Olympic Hotel) in Seattle, he struggled to keep his own knives sharp. "I was working with these amazing cooks, and they were doing amazing things. But every now and then, I would ask someone if I could use their knife, and their knives were really dull. So I got it into my head to sell them better blades." Kramer loaded up a bag with the best knives on the market and started bringing them around to the back doors of restaurants. "I offered high-end Wüsthofs, Henckels and Forschners," all status-laden chefs' knives, which, like high-end German cars, afford their owners a certain amount of swagger.

"But, of course, most cooks couldn't afford those knives, and instead they would ask me if I could sharpen the knives they already had. I tried, but I needed to learn more about what I was doing." So Kramer set off to learn everything he could about sharpening knives. "I wanted to be as good a sharpener as old Jack."

In those days, recalls Kramer, "Eastern Airlines offered a deal where you could buy one ticket for $600 and make seven stops. I went to all the best cutlery houses in the U.S. and asked to see their sharpening rooms. A lot of them said 'no way,' but they did allow me to look at the knives they sharpened, and I realized that most of what they were doing was not all that impressive." Then, in San Francisco, at a place called North Beach Cutlery, he met a Sicilian named Peter Otillia, a man who not only sharpened knives as well as "old Jack" but was willing to show him how.

"That place was Mecca for me," says Kramer. "And after that, I met a guy in Tacoma, a one-armed Austrian man named Ben Obermeyer. He used exactly the same technique." Kramer realized that this was not a fluke; that there was a traditional way of sharpening blades. Armed with the skills he picked up from his new mentors, he became a vital part of the Seattle restaurant scene, eagerly anticipated at the kitchens where he made his rounds.

"But after five years or so," says Kramer, "I got bored. Sharpening knives was not enough. I wanted to actually make knives." Kramer enrolled at the American Bladesmith Society school in Arkansas. "I came home and put a propane forge in my garage and started making knives."

In 1993, the roving sharpener stopped going from kitchen to kitchen and invited the chefs to bring their knives to him. "It's a guy thing, I guess," muses Kramer. "A knife speaks to us at a very primal level. You hold a piece of hard, sharp steel in your hand and you think, this thing can help me live. It's a very ancient form of respect, almost as basic as the feeling we have toward fire."

I put a red pepper on the cutting board and took off the sides, leaving the skeletal core of the pepper standing with its seeds in place. As I tapped the knife rhythmically against the planks of the pepper's flesh, the skin offered no resistance, and they were rendered instantly into thin strips. I felt as if I had traded my 1988 Volvo wagon for a brand new BMW.

Find out more about Bob Kramer and his knives at www.bladesmiths.com.

Greg Atkinson is a contributing editor for Food Arts magazine and a culinary consultant. He can be reached at greg@northwestessentials.com. Mike Siegel is a Seattle Times staff photographer.