Bob Terzuola
Collaborating designer, Russian Starfighter
Bob Terzuola is the American custom maker who coined the term “tactical knife” and whose Starfighter is the basis of the Russian Starfighter, Sergey Shirogorov’s custom prototype for a future joint project, shown as three auction customs in 2026.
Todd Eby, NIIVES
Biography
Terzuola was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 14 September 1944 and went to New York University. After graduation he joined the Peace Corps in Panama; later, in Guatemala, he taught himself jade carving and ran a jade jewelry company in Antigua. By 1980 he was making knives. The first were fixed blades for soldiers in Guatemala.
Bob Loveless endorsed him to the Knifemakers’ Guild in the early 1980s. In 1984 he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he built the titanium and Micarta folders he named tactical knives, among them the Advanced Technology Combat Folder (ATCF). His book, The Tactical Folding Knife, on the anatomy and construction of the liner lock folder, came out in 2000. The Cutlery Hall of Fame inducted him on 3 June 2023 at Blade Show Atlanta.
His designs are in production at Spyderco, Pro-Tech, which makes the ATCF as an automatic, Custom Knife Factory (CKF) and CIVIVI. He is still designing.
The Shirogorov Brothers Workshop’s design collaborations take an outside maker’s shape, and Sergey Shirogorov reworks it; the shape he has taken up from Terzuola is the Starfighter. In 2026 three of Sergey’s own customs carry the name Russian Starfighter, full customs from his bench with Terzuola as the collaborating designer, and the workshop captions every one of them “the custom prototype of our future collaboration project with Bob Terzuola”. They went to auction one at a time.
Designs and contributions
The Russian Starfighter prototypes, by date:
| Date | Piece | Channel |
|---|---|---|
| 5 June 2026 | S125V blade, mirror polished, Ti-Damascus scales | Blade Show Atlanta auction, Friday |
| 6 June 2026 | Mike Norris Damascus blade, gray anodized titanium scales | Blade Show Atlanta auction, Saturday |
| 17 September 2026 | S125V blade, 95 mm, 213 mm overall, 129 g, frame lock | shirogorov.com auction, lot 148 |
All three run on DRRBS. That is the workshop’s double-row roller bearing system. The Starfighter they take their name from is a Terzuola custom folder on a liner lock, made as the Century Starfighter and as the 3/4 Century Starfighter, the smaller of the two with a CPM 154 blade of 3.375 in, titanium liners and carbon fiber scales that carry a Century Starfighter inlay. Spyderco’s Starmate of 1999 drew on the Century Starfighter and on the ATCF. The workshop’s design collaborations with Western makers, from Tom Mayo’s Russian Dr. Death of 2015 to Charles Marlowe’s RKMP of 2025, are on The collaborations.
What NIIVES tracks
The Russian Starfighter customs are in Full customs, Sergey Shirogorov’s custom register, under the Russian Starfighter name, one entry per knife with its auction date and channel. The three customs are the catalog’s only Russian Starfighter entries. Market observations for the prototypes sit in the price record alongside Sergey’s other full customs. NIIVES reads the workshop’s Instagram account and the shirogorov.com auction pages for them; his customs and his production work for other makers are outside the catalog.