Hasta La Ideas

Tonight, Core77 enthusiastically welcomes Matt Foster, Co-Owner and Designer of Foster Knives, to the Hand-Eye Supply Curiosity Club hosted at the Hand-Eye Supply store in Portland, OR. Come early and check out our space or check in with us online for the live broadcast!

Tuesday, Oct. 11th
6PM PST
Hand-Eye Supply
23 NW 4th Ave
Portland, OR, 97209

The focus of Matt’s talk will be an overview of his design process when creating knives. Foster Knives are designed initially with a purpose driven or market driven perspective. Each influences the design in its own way, affecting the blade shape, the materials, whether it is locked or fixed and other factors. Then we’ll examine how marketing and manufacturing influences are integrated into the design process. Finally Matt will go over some specific processes as examples of how those influences play out, and the importance of not allowing the manufacturing to be the only things that mitigates the design.

Matt Foster has spent his entire career working in the sporting goods and shooting sports industry. His professional experience with knives and design began at Gerber Legendary Blades. Noticing that there was a market niche not being served by existing makers and designers, he taught himself to design and make his own brand of knives. Experience gained from designing his own knives led him to design and create other products relevant to his career: scope mounts, shotgun stocks, gun cleaning equipment and firearms accessories.

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Portland Film Makers Justin Koleszar and Spencer Gentz have been putting together short promotional videos for local businesses such as Lille Boutique and the Woodlands. Hand-Eye Supply was fortunate enough to have a piece done as well. Koleszar directed and Gentz did the cinematography and music. We feel they did a great job capturing the breadth of product in the store as well as the maker spirit of our brand!

Core 77’s Hand Eye Supply from Justin Koleszar on Vimeo.

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With the next Curiosity Club less than a week a way, we came up with a few queries for our speaker, Kurt Mottweiler, to get an insight in to his work. Kurt meticulously designs and builds traditional, film-based cameras that range from the simplest, lensless, wooden cameras to fully computer-controlled, rotating panoramic cameras.

Kurt will be speaking next Tuesday, April 19th at the Hand-Eye Supply store in Portland at 6PM.

You work in both wood and metal to create your P.90 Pinhole Cameras. Are there any tools you find indispensable in your work?

I work with a range of tools and equipment much of which would be familiar to a typical woodworker or machinist and some of it to a mad scientist. But similar to the craft of luthery in which I worked, there are a wide variety of special tools, machines and equipment involved in craft-based camera making. Perhaps my favorite is the Swiss-made, Aciera F3 compound milling machine. I’m also slowly building a small CNC machine. I’ll show images of a few others during the presentation.

Cameras have a chronological component in that they record a moment in time. Does that interest you and how does it affect your work?

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