Timber Knives is a camping and overland brand headquartered in Heber City, Utah.
Most of what Timber Knives sells on Main Street in Heber City was made by someone else. Benchmade folders sit out on long wooden tables with no glass in the way, and the axes hang on the walls. The exceptions carry numbers. Banshee No. 013, for one, was ground, heat treated, sharpened and fitted with handles in the same building, according to the shop, and it is the only Banshee No. 013 there will ever be.
Bruce Dahl bought the store from its original owner a few years before 2023 and runs it with his sons, Kevin and Sam, the Park Record reported that June. The family had pushed sharpening and engraving and launched a website that was already drawing orders from across the country. Within the week, the paper said, the Dahls planned to start selling knives they made themselves from scratch.
That line now has its own section, called Made in House. Each knife is built one at a time from 80CrV2 carbon steel or AEB-L stainless, among others, with handle scales shaped by hand on the grinder and a Kydex sheath formed for that blade. The listings are blunt about the result: the knife you receive is the one in the photographs, and "When it sells, it is gone." Sold pieces move to an archive page, which reads like a guest book for knives.
The Banshee, a 3.5 inch fixed blade, is the model the shop says it makes more of than any other. Axes came later. The Bruiser is an 11.5 inch pack axe cut from quarter inch stock, and some carry Ultrex, a Micarta with rubber worked in so it holds when your hands are wet or cold. Its sibling, the Berserker, has a bearded Viking profile and, the shop says, is the one people pick up first when they walk in.
The honest note is the ratio. Timber's own blades are a small shelf beside hundreds of other makers' knives, and warranties on those come from the manufacturers, not the shop. What the Dahls build, they build to sell one at a time, at $200 to $350.
Bruce has a theory about why any of this works. "One of the first things that changed the world was a knife," he told the Park Record, since it led to better hunting and building and left people more free time. Then he simplified it: "People like knives. They still like knives after all these years."
Timber Knives melts and pours its own Everything Wax, made with locally sourced beeswax and carnauba wax, in small batches in its shop.
