Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I bought this book to give me some guidance on making my first knife. I think that I am the intended audience for this book which stresses starting out and the $50 investement that making a knife can take. However, Wanye is too distracted by his 40+ years of knife making to be able to break down knife making for a newbie. He wants to tell you all sorts of little details that will not help you make your first knife. Like he gives you a history of what quench solutions he has used without telling you the proportions of the different ingredents in his current perfected mixture. So even if you wanted to duplicate his solution you couldn't. Also Wayne likes to scrounge yard sales and create grinders from old washing machines. So he spends a huge amount of time talking about all the gismos he has made and special jigs. Unfortunately he wants you to create all the stuff he has made over 40 years without any sort of details or dimensions. He just shows pictures and gives a few general comments about having found the parts at various yard sales and salvage yards. He makes assumptions that you know things. Like he glossed over pinning a handle onto a knife by just saying to "pin it". I was left wondering, what is the pin for, what is it made of, how do you do it, ... What I was really hoping for was a set of clear instructions to make "this" sample knife do 1, 2, 3, 4, ... but he does not give you that. I have been more helped by doing a google search and finding a few web sites that in just several pages tell you what to do step by step with enough detail that you can follow it. I do not recommend this as your first book on knife making.