Let me first and foremost thank all of you for your warm welcome and very kind words, and Tracy for having the confidence in me to ask if I would come on board. I would also like to offer a little more explanation on some of what our Boss Dog touched on in his original post.
The single most rewarding thing I have done in my life (even more than creating blades) has been the privilege of teaching and helping others in solving the technical mysteries of our craft at countless schools and venues as well as on the internet. However, in accordance with some universal structure of karmic checks and balances, along with that joy has also come the single most painful regret of my life. It appears unavoidable that in the process of clearing away common perceptions and myth, in order to see the fascinating facts underneath, one will offend those who are deeply invested, emotionally or otherwise, in those same myths and perceptions. Not a day goes by that I do not do some level of soul searching over the people who could have been friends but I lost their good will by providing information which countered their beliefs on heat treating a knife blade, topics quite trivial when compared to so many more important things in life. But in providing the offending information I have managed to help exponentially more people who I may with great pleasure call friends, as is evident in the kind posts of this thread.
But no place has the acrimony been more intense than on other forums on the internet, and I was so pleased to see the friendly, learning atmosphere here at KnifeDogs that I was inspired to limit my participation in order to also limit the polarizing effect that my participation could bring. Thus I was quite hesitant when Tracy suggested any moderator position, pointing out that correcting bad information is what I am all about, while correcting bad behavior is what moderators are all about. But with his assurances that my duties as co-moderator could be limited to helping provide good information on heat treating, I agreed to the title in order to let people know that I was available to them.
Does the internet already use up vast amounts of my valuable shop time? Yes, but the satisfaction of helping others makes up for it. Years ago when I decided that I was going to make bladesmithing my full time profession I had a dream and goal of being known as the guy who made better knives, and while I am quite happy with the level of my knives, along the way things changed and I now consider it a much greater honor to one day be known as a guy who helped others make better knives.
I can offer these tips of advice that experience has shown me to be more valuable than all the metallurgy in the world:
It is always more important to question the answers than it is to answer the questions.
The words “it works just fine” are more dangerous to the pursuit of knowledge or excellence than a massive brain injury.
No single test is more than one piece in a very large puzzle when trying to see the whole picture and the greatest pitfall is in the interpretation of the results.
The steel doesn’t give a rip about our beliefs, views or desires, so all we really need to do is be smarter than the steel.
“Trust but verify”, the greatest compliment one can pay me is to say they learned things while researching something I said that they had doubts about. The most contemptible disservice one could do to me is utter the words “Kevin said it, it must be right”, and thus make me just another part of the problem.
P.S. Yes, the book is going to happen!