Todd Begg’s thick hands, stained with machine-shop grime, could be mistaken for a mechanic’s.

Instead, they are the hands of one of the country’s foremost craftsmen in his field — the creator of one-of-a-kind knives that buyers are willing to pay hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars to acquire.

To own a Todd Begg knife is special, and his customers come from all walks of life. Business moguls who collect high-end blades to display in paneled offices. Hunters and active-duty military, including Navy SEALs, looking for knives to use in the field. Collectors who see Begg’s art purely as an investment that appreciates in value like a museum painting.

In his shop inside a nondescript North Dallas office complex, Begg cradles a simple folding knife with a mirror shine. With a flick of his finger, the blade snaps open like a snake strike. He grabs another weapon off a table. It looks like the evil spawn of a hatchet and a miter saw. "I call this the Zombie Cleaver," he said, his mouth curling into a smile.

Todd Begg holds the Fear No Evil zombie cleaver he crafted. (Rose Baca / Staff Photographer)

Everyone has the same response when they pick up the cleaver. "They get a big old grin and they just let out an ahhhhh! You just feel powerful when you're holding it, like you can take on anything," he said.

"That's the whole idea of that knife, that grin that people get. That's why I made it."

But those sorts of exotic weapons don’t define Begg’s bread-and-butter work: the beautiful pocketknives with engrained polished blades and colorful hilts that collectors cherish.

Over the past three decades, the 46-year-old craftsman has slowly built his reputation within the exotic world of custom knife-making, a culture that values longevity and a unique artistic vision over mass-produced merchandise. Now a world-renowned, master knife maker, Begg will spend hundreds of hours hunched over just one of his creations, working at it until it's just right.

"When it's done," he said, "I want it to look like it was born, not built."

Knife fight

Today, Begg is worried he might lose it all — and for the saddest of reasons.

At the end of the day, the custom knife business is still a business, and Begg is in a fight over his with his former business partners, including his half-brother, Mark Skaggs.

At stake is the rights to his own name, Todd Begg, and the brand long associated with his work: Todd Begg Knives.

“It’s sad. The whole situation is sad,” Begg said. "It’s heartbreaking.”

Begg grew up the youngest of four boys in a kind of woodsman’s idyll. Together, they often spent their days hunting and fishing outside the rural town where they grew up in Washington state. He was closest to his brother Robert, who died in his 20s. The two were inseparable, survivalists before that became a reality show trope.

“On several occasions we spent almost the whole summer out in the woods with nothing more than a bow, lighter, knife and a tripwire,” Begg said.

Todd Begg poses for a photograph at his shop where he crafts knives in Dallas. (Rose Baca / Staff Photographer)

During those early years, Begg took to whittling little knives out of wood. At 12, his life changed when he saw his first copy of Blade, a magazine devoted to the craft of knife-making.

“I was at a convenience store and it was like the heavens opened up; the light came down,” he said. “I picked that thing up, and I devoured it.”

The magazine featured a how-to article for beginners. He followed the instructions to make his first blade, a hunting knife, which was “ugly as sin,” he said.

When he saw that individual craftsmen made knives for a living, his mind was set. “I was like, that is what I’m doing. ”

After high school, Begg joined the Army. He served 11 years, and when he left, he used his GI Bill to get an applied science degree in machine shop technology.

“I was a knife maker who became a machinist to become a better knife maker,” he said. “By the end of the first semester, my knife-making had taken a quantum leap in quality.”

He worked as a machinist for about five years in aerospace, but gave it up in 2003 to make knives full time. By then, he had three months of back orders and all the tools he needed.

“This has been my sole source of income ever since.”

Showing up

Knife makers and collectors agree on one thing. The only way to establish a name for yourself is to go to knife shows to meet with customers and other knife makers. And then keep coming back, year after year, with new designs.

“You have to show up. You have to be doing something innovative. Your knives have to have something that’s called a face. That means it’s recognizable as your work,” Begg said.

If you show promise, collectors will notice you. “They may not buy anything from you for three or four years because they want to see if you keep coming back, that you have longevity and that there’s improvement," he said.

Todd Begg crafts a knife at his shop in Dallas on Jan. 17. (Rose Baca / Staff Photographer)

Begg is known as a master now, but only after countless hours of labor, teaching himself and learning, bit by bit, from those who were better.

Sometimes friends will tell him they want to do what he does. That’s when he tells them they’ll probably be working for less than minimum wage when they start out. “It’s not a simple way of making a living. I can be sitting there for a hundred hours working on one knife.”

The work is a lot of rubbing metal with increasingly finer shades of sandpaper. "I don't want there to be any tool marks."

He will spend hours upon hours polishing and polishing to get just the right look. "Ninety-nine percent of what I do is extremely boring," he said. "There aren't any sparks."

But the finished product is a work of art in the eyes of those who want it.

Today, Begg has a reputation for intricate designs on the blade and handle. He delves into fantasy and science fiction with knives like the Zombie Cleaver. He fashioned a three-bladed claw that attaches to a forearm like some sort of bionic Wolverine.

Todd Begg holds the Baker Team knife, modeled after the Rambo knife, he crafted at his shop in Dallas. (Rose Baca / Staff Photographer)

Not for the faint-hearted

Begg’s climb to the top of the custom knife business wasn’t easy.

“If somebody thinks they’re going to get into the knife business and make a killing right away, they’re going to be surprised,” said Gene Baskett, president of the 200-member Knifemakers Guild.

“It’s about paying your dues,” Baskett said. “People want to see you’re going to be there from now on. They don’t want some guy who’s selling knives one year and gone the next.”

Begg made it because “he’s a perfectionist,” Baskett said.

Todd Begg sands a knife at his shop in Dallas. (Rose Baca / Staff Photographer)

Brothers in business

The same reputation that brought success brought a taste of wider fame — and the problems that came with it. By 2012, there was a six-year wait list for a Todd Begg knife.

That’s when he decided to team up with his half-brother, Skaggs, and another partner in a business based outside San Francisco called Pride in Making Products. They opened a shop and hired workers trained by Begg to produce semi-custom versions of his more popular designs.

A year later came the reality TV show: Blade Brothers.

The idea was that Begg was so backed up on making his knives that he would enlist Skaggs and his brother John Begg and teach them the art of knife-making.

“Who better to trust but your own family?” Begg says on camera, in one of two episodes that ended up being made.

Whatever trust there was, whether real or camera-made, didn’t last. The partnership fizzled, and a year ago Begg decided to strike out on his own again. In November, he filed suit in federal court in the Northern District of California seeking to regain the exclusive use of the name Todd Begg Knives, which was trademarked by his business partners in 2015.

Begg’s consent to the trademark did not grant his former company exclusive use of his name or any trademark featuring his name, the lawsuit states.

Skaggs and his attorney both declined to comment. In court filings, Skaggs’ attorneys disputed Begg’s claims and denied that the company consented to Begg’s independent use of the trademark. The attorneys also denied Begg’s claims that the company stopped making payments to him in January 2017 or that it denied him access to his tools.

Now, if you Google "Todd Begg Knives," you get a website over which Begg has no control: beggknives.com, which displays knives that Begg designed.

Begg said that while the TV show depicted the three brothers as tight-knit, the reality was that he was closer to John Begg than to Skaggs, his business partner. “We were both military. We’re both very hard workers, hands-on, blue-collar-type guys.”

Skaggs had left home early to become a model, Begg said. “Mark was always the city boy and a pretty boy,” he said. “We really didn’t have that much in common.”

But Begg said the rift between them can’t be pinpointed to one specific problem. “A lot of things contributed to this issue we’re having," he said.

Moving to Texas

Fed up with the West Coast and looking for a fresh start for himself and his family, Begg moved to the suburbs outside Dallas a year ago and brought his knife-making business with him.

“I was living in California and I do not have a hippie bone in my body. I was a fish out of water there,” he said. His family soon joined him and his three sons are now in Carrollton schools, he said.

He likes Texas because he has a lot of knife-making friends who live here that he knows through the Knifemakers Guild. “I knew Texas was a hotbed for knife-making,” he said. “The craftsmen crave that interaction with other people who do what you do. You want to bounce around ideas.”

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Begg’s ideas for strange and extraordinary knives still come regularly and from every sort of source. Sometimes he sees an ordinary object, like a cleaver, and conjures up something like the zombie knife. Other ideas come from watching suspense movies. “I’ll be watching a scary movie and think, 'What would I want in my hand that would make me feel safe in that situation?'”

People often ask Begg how he came to do what he does. Sometimes, for those who are truly interested, he will go to his office safe and take out that first knife he made when he was 12, following the instructions in Blade magazine.

“I use it to show how far you can go if you don't give up. Little did I know that my own work would be featured one day on the cover of that same magazine.”

For years, it frustrated Begg that what his mind conceived, his hands could not repeat.

Today, whatever he conjures, he can create. That is the mastery and the art and the success.

“If you can make what you want to make, exactly how you want to make it, and there are plenty of people out there who are willing to pay you for it, then you’re in a really good spot,” he said.