YORKTON - Joe Lozinski makes knives, rustic knives harkening back to the days of the mountain man.
“I read about the early mountain men and trappers,” he said while manning a table at the Yorkton Gun Show Saturday.
Lozinski, from Regina, said the men headed into the mountains with a muzzleloader rifle, some traps and the hope of making some money – beaver pelts were as valuable as gold at times.
If they lost a knife, something that would happen often, even to Lozinski this past fall, the mountain had to improvise.
But, there weren’t many sources of high grade, tempered steel.
One handy source was the spring in the traps they used.
Lozinski decided to trying crafting such a blade, and while suggesting it was nothing special, when a buddy saw it he wanted one.
And then a friend of a friend asked for one and suddenly Lozinski was a knife maker.
The process is actually rather straight forward. A trap spring is straightened, the knife shape cut out, and then is heat treated. The rest is getting a cutting edge and adding a handle.
“They’re the easiest of what I’m doing now,” said Lozinski, who has branched out to making more than trap spring blades.
But the trap spring knives hold a special place for Lozinski.
“It’s a link with the past,” he said, adding it’s also fulfilling to make something useful out of an old trap.
As much as Lozinski enjoys making knives it is still very much a hobby, one he enjoys pursuing in what he terms his off season – that time of year where he isn’t hunting, or trapping.
Lozinski said his interest in hunting and especially trapping began as a youth growing up on a small farm between Ituna and Balcarres.
“My family hunted and trapped from the time they got here from Ukraine,” he said, adding the original settlers in his family were amazed they could actually harvest animals on their land, something not allowed in Ukraine.
“They thought (here) was just the best place in the world.”
So when Lozinski was young he took up the challenge when he was nine.
“I wanted a gun and my parents wouldn’t buy it,” he said.
A trapline was a way to earn some money.
“I trapped 12 muskrats,” recalled Lozinski, adding he prepared the pelts and sent them off to the Saskatchewan Fur Marketing Board.
When he got the cheque it was enough money to buy the coveted .22 single shot, and a box of bullets.
“I was king of the world,” he said. “. . . I was stoked.”
Lozinski said he spent the summer doing odd jobs just to buy more traps, adding he made good money back then trapping.
In a way he was following in the footsteps of the mountain men who turned to trapping as a way to make money too.
“It was an opportunity for a young guy with nothing to make his way in the world,” said Lozinski.
While Lozinski would step away from trapping to pursue various jobs when a friend called in 2007 asking him to go hunting muskrats – worth $10 apiece at the time – he was back into it.
“When I retired in 2016 I really got back into it,” he said.
