Dmitry Sinkevich

Dmitry Sinkevich is the Belarusian designer from Minsk who has drawn for the Shirogorov Brothers Workshop since 2010, sixteen projects in the workshop’s longest partnership with any outside designer, and who had the sub-frame lock on a custom before Zero Tolerance put it on its 2011 Knife of the Year, and before the two had met.

Todd Eby, NIIVES

Biography

Sinkevich was born in Minsk in 1978, trained as an engineer at the Belarusian National Technical University and worked in aircraft building before knives, a childhood interest, took over as his profession. He made his first knife at eight, from a broken hacksaw blade, in a school shop class whose teacher let him. The first knife he bought was a Spyderco lookalike, and the makers whose names he read then seemed beyond reach; the dream that Spyderco would one day make a knife of his stayed with him. Among collectors he goes by SiDiS.

The partnership has lasted because the two men design in the same language. Sinkevich and Sergey Shirogorov share a technical-school background and, as Sinkevich puts it, talk to each other mostly in engineering. They’d watched each other’s work from a distance, each posting a knife the other would answer, until Sinkevich walked up to Sergey at an Arsenal show and proposed working together. The Nura of August 2010 was the result, and the Dark followed four days later. Asked in 2019 which designers he rated, Sergey named none until Sinkevich’s name was put to him, then called him the best in the post-Soviet space and beyond it; the assessment is on Sergey Shirogorov. Sixteen projects later the partnership is still running.

The Zero Tolerance partnership began with a knife nobody had licensed. Sinkevich’s Pryzhok custom put the lock bar on a carbon fiber or G10 scale instead of a titanium frame, and he posted it in his workshop thread on Guns.ru. Some years later Zero Tolerance (ZT) released the 0777 with the same arrangement, which it called a sub-frame lock, and took Overall Knife of the Year at Blade Show 2011. Collectors asked whether the lock was his. He posted the Pryzhok again. The head of Zero Tolerance got in touch, they met at IWA in Nuremberg, where Sinkevich had traveled with Sergey Shirogorov, and the ZT line that followed began with the 0454. KAI’s patent on the lock cites his Guns.ru thread.

He draws to size on paper and rarely makes an ergonomic prototype. He prefers flippers to automatics because the flip puts the opening in the user’s hand, and calls himself a designer in the sense of a modern artist who is also an engineer. Copies don’t move him much: a knife he made at sixteen is produced on AliExpress, and his rule is to talk to a copyist once and then design something new, because, as he puts it, the closer the thief stands, the larger the signature of the thief’s own helplessness. What keeps him from burning out, he says, is the sommelier knife, the Caviste with its corkscrew, and the narrower one he was finishing at the end of 2024.

Designs and contributions

Shirogorov projects, by year:

Each project’s run, specifications and release mechanics are on The Sinkevich projects. The Kami reworked the handle pattern of his Rockstead SHUN with a shorter edge, S110V in place of ZDP-189 and an altered grind. The Touch sets, show editions of the workshop’s own models that Sinkevich finished for the California Custom Knife Show, are on Sinkevich Touch sets; the Ambi-Tool, Capsule Tool and SiDiS pen screwdrivers are on Tools.

For other makers: Zero Tolerance’s 0454, 0450, 0452, 0456, 0460 and 0470; Kershaw’s Tumbler, on a sub-frame lock, and Concierge; Spyderco’s Drunken, named for a milled texture he drew with a glass of wine, breaking straight lines; Pro-Tech’s Oligarch, an automatic and the knife he carries most; and Rockstead’s SHUN, a limited run that took the Japanese maker years of approvals. His own customs include the Pike, the Kami and the Caviste.

At Blade Show Atlanta the ZT 0454 took Overall Knife of the Year in 2013, his custom Pike took Best Tactical Folder in the 2024 custom competition, and he took Best Custom Tactical Folder in 2025.

What NIIVES tracks

Every Shirogorov collaboration he designed is on niives.com, and the Sinkevich projects register dates each of them; the Touch sets and the tools have their own pages. Market observations for his Shirogorov projects sit in the price record under the collaborations. NIIVES reads sinkevichdesign.ru and his Instagram account, sinkevichdesign, for his customs, his show releases and his US show appearances at the Friday Night Blade Affair, the R1 Invitational and the Tactical Knife Invitational; his production work for other makers is outside the catalog.

Related

• The Sinkevich projects
• Sinkevich Touch sets
• The collaborations
• Tools
• Sergey Shirogorov