Barras Blades the back story
Born many years ago on the west coast of Scotland. I grew up on the Isle of Cumbrae where I first learnt to sharpen using oil stones from my father who was a trained shop fitter.
However I was not destined to join the family business as I was drawn towards the sea and engineering.
I joined the merchant navy and served my cadetship in Glasgow before joining BP as a junior engineer. I spent many years working on various kinds of ships and for various companies working my way up through the ranks. On this journey I learnt to fix and maintain just about anything as the team of engineers on a merchant vessel can normally be counted on one hand.
Eventually I ended up in the rank of cargo engineer on LNG carriers running out of Qatar. A job where if you got it badly wrong you'd make the news at 10, everywhere.
Then life took one of those hard right turns and I ended up working shoreside in the oil and gas industry as a yard grunt fixing nitrogen pumping units. Round about this time we bought Skene Croft after we made an offer we couldn't afford. I worked my way up through a couple of companies becoming a valve expert while my better half Helen worked her way up to being an inspection software engineer.
Using our oil money we bought and did a few things which turned out to be the embryo of Barras blades and Barras cages
Helen spent some of her oil money on some really nice kitchen knifes as well as catching the show dog bug after we got Daphne the first of our great Danes.
Daphne and me
Taken in June 2017 at a dog show in Dundee, she likes to sit on your lap
To keep her knifes in top condition I invested in a Tormek sharpening system to keep them constantly razor sharp and I ended up sharpening the knifes of friends, neighbours and family who would normally appear at our door with a few knifes needing my attention.
Daphne also meant my daily driver of a fiat panda wasn't really working out well so a VW caddy was purchased which I hurriedly converted into a dog van. Very hurriedly, van bought on a Tuesday, first dog show on the Saturday. See the results HERE
Barras Blades HQ
I also found my existing workshop to be a wee bit damp and cold so like any other sensible person.
Then the oil crash and covid happened and like many I found myself unemployed. With time on my hands I built a set of dog cages for one of Helen's friends HERE and I thought I'd might as well get paid to sharpen knifes and launched barras blades.
At the same time as barras Blades was starting to grow I hedged my bets and launched Barras Cages as a brand.
The logo was designed by the same person who mades barras blades logo as well as the masterpiece of the Steel and Jewels logos
See more of her work here
Customers kept asking if I could sharpen clippers or hairdressing scissors so I looked into it and priced up the machinery. Arranged to spend a day with another professional sharpener Northumbrian sharpening liked what I saw and then stepped up a gear. Got a bank loan, purchased the machinery, booked the training and that brings us to May 2021 when this page is being launched.
If you want to see more of the growth of barras blades then go to the Blogroll