KG in the Chicago Reader!
We were recently interviewed by the Chicago Reader.
Handmade Knives
Show us your . . . handmade knives
Dan Koentopp’s guitar-making plate is full. Like, until 2015. The professional luthier—that’s the fancy word for a crafter of stringed instruments—only accepts custom orders, and each guitar takes a little over two months to create. He does almost everything by hand—and some of it with tools he made by hand.
The surfaces in his Lincoln Square workshop are strewn with all sorts of files and hand planes and other woodworking implements, but some of his favorites are the knives he made while working as a violin-restoration specialist downtown. (Chicago is, according to Koentopp, a “huge center for violin making”—the Stradivari Society of North America is headquartered on Michigan Avenue.)
“The special tools,” he says, “are the ones I make.”
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