This month, Black Rifle Coffee Company has partnered with one of the best veteran knifemakers in the country for an exclusive, limited-edition BRCC Shirt Club release featuring iconic designs from Lucas O’Hara of Grizzly Forge. This badass shirt is available only to Black Rifle Shirt Club members!
The back of the black T-shirt features a custom design with one of O’Hara’s larger, multi-purpose outdoor blades in his signature style — The Revenant — right at the center. Two of O'Hara's distinctive tomahawks are crossed behind the knife, with the Grizzley Forge logo above and the Black Rifle logo below.
It’s a mean shirt that encapsulates the spirit and determination with which O’Hara infuses his blades.
“Those two tomahawks and the Revenant are my two favorite designs that I have made,” O’Hara told Coffee or Die. “The Revenant is the blade that I designed for Jack Carr and it turned into my bestseller and a staple of Grizzly Forge.”
“It took me a little over a year to come up with a design that I really liked for the tomahawks,” he added. “The front profile resembles a Cherokee tomahawk with a Grizzly Forge twist on the rest.”
The logos are repeated in a circle around the Grizzly Forge anvil logo on the chest side.
“The anvil is my 18th-century 242-pound Hay Budden anvil, which is the centerpiece of any forge,” O’Hara said. “It’s the first anvil I purchased and it’s still the one I use every day.”
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Journey to the Forge
O’Hara served in the U.S. Army for eight years, which included two tours as a sniper with the 3rd Infantry Division and a post in the Continental Color Guard at Arlington National Cemetery. His transition out of the military into civilian life was what he calls “the same old sob story.” It was rough.
“I loved every second of it,” he said of his military service. “But I had a hard time balancing civilian life and the military. Like, I’m an all-in kind of person. I have to be super in it or I don’t give it my all. So, right when I hit like my eight-and-a-half years, I got out. And that was when it was time to figure out what to do next.”
First, he bounced around his hometown of Atlanta and did private security work for a guy he’d later find out was a “Wall Street scammer.” Then, he went back overseas and worked as a contractor in Kuwait for a while. That time in his life was a series of peaks and valleys financially, mentally, and emotionally.
One fateful afternoon, back in Atlanta, when he was at a particularly low point, he went into a place called Goat n Hammer after watching some YouTube videos on blacksmithing to take a $120 knife-making class.
It forever changed the trajectory of his life.
He had already decided to make a big course adjustment by putting his GI Bill funds to good use; he went to school for welding, figuring it would make a decent career that could provide for his family.
“At that time, I felt like I had failed as a father, a husband, at everything. I took the blacksmithing class, and it made everything in my life — the noise in my head — go away,” O’Hara said. “I could focus on this one moment, making a knife, like a moment of Zen. Driving does that for me, too. And now archery. I wanted more of it, so I chased knife making.”
After that first class, O’Hara said he “was so keyed in on that. And it was the first time anything like that [I] had ever done. I bought every class they had on the calendar after that. Like, I didn’t care who was making a bracelet. I was there. If it was making a knife, I did it.”
Lucas O'Hara at work on the same anvil he's been using since he began blacksmithing. It's featured on this month's BRCC Shirt Club exclusive T-shirt.
But it would take an opportunity offered by another veteran who had made good in the business world — Evan Hafer, the CEO and founder of Black Rifle Coffee.
“I could focus on this one moment, making a knife, like a moment of Zen. Driving does that for me, too. And now archery. I wanted more of it, so I chased knife making.”
After that first class, O’Hara said he “was so keyed in on that. And it was the first time anything like that [I] had ever done. I bought every class they had on the calendar after that. Like, I didn’t care who was making a bracelet. I was there. If it was making a knife, I did it.”
But it would take an opportunity offered by another veteran who had made good in the business world — Evan Hafer, the CEO and founder of Black Rifle Coffee.
Stoking the Fire
One of O'Hara's signature blades, the Revenant. It's front and center on the new BRCC shirt design.
O’Hara had met Hafer before and when he called with an idea for a coffee-bag opener, O’Hara came up with five designs, made them, and delivered them to Hafer in about an hour.
Hafer dug one of the designs and asked O’Hara to get to work on a batch of 50 openers.
“There was money in my account two hours later. One of our friends literally loaned us the [$100] to get the water back on at our house,” O’Hara said. “We didn’t even have that, and this money showed up from Black Rifle. It took me four or five weeks to make the first bag openers; Evan got them, he called, and said, ‘Hey, I want 250 more. Can you do it in two weeks?’
“I said yes, and once I commit, I’m committed. It forced me to create a process, and once I had my process, that’s when I took off.”
Some more of O'Hara's work. O'Hara says the blade of the tomahawk is inspired by a Cherokee design.
Things got humming, but for a while, O’Hara was doing custom work that he says he didn’t really connect with. After all, he had to take the work he could get if this was going to be his sole profession. Then, he decided he was “only going to make what I love.”
“Once I started that, people started buying them up, and I learned to speed up my process without losing quality.”
“Now, on average, I do about 15 to 20 knives a week — up from two. That’s full handles, a sheath, everything. That’s working 12-hour days,” he said.
O’Hara has moved around a bit since, but is now forging his blades back in his home state of Georgia.
"I’ve never been driven just by money and didn’t start this looking to make millions," he said. "I got into knife making purely on passion, and I don’t ever want to lose that.
"I’m so blessed to get to do what I love every day, and it gives me the opportunity to give my family an unbelievable life that I never expected. And it allows me to help out a lot of people along the way.
"Grizzly Forge will continue to grow over the years, but it will be done slowly and smoothly so as not to lose what got us here in the first place."
You can get the exclusive, limited-edition Grizzly Forge x BRCC shirt by signing up for the BRCC Shirt Club now!
Coffee or Die is Black Rifle Coffee Company’s online lifestyle magazine. Launched in June 2018, the magazine covers a variety of topics that generally focus on the people, places, or things that are interesting, entertaining, or informative to America’s coffee drinkers — often going to dangerous or austere locations to report those stories.
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