Scott Cook
Collaborating designer, Russian Lochsa
Scott Cook is the Idaho custom maker whose Lochsa, an integral folder with the handle from one piece of titanium, became the Shirogorov Brothers Workshop’s first integral, the Russian Lochsa, announced in May 2021 and released by lottery in November 2024.
Todd Eby, NIIVES
Biography
Cook, of Meridian, Idaho, made his first knife in 1991 while he worked as a hunting and fishing guide in Alaska. Chris Reeve Knives took him on after that, and he built knives there for a time before he opened his own shop, Scott Cook Knives, where the work runs to fixed blades and folders, the Owyhee Hunter among the fixed blades, made in a large and a small size.
His flagship is the Lochsa, a folder named for a river. He was making it by 2003. It’s an integral on a frame lock, the whole handle cut from one piece of titanium, and it opens on a thumb stud and runs on a pivot bushing with bronze washers. That’s the knife the workshop took up.
The Lochsa came to the workshop the way its design collaborations do, an outside maker’s existing model for Sergey Shirogorov to rework under a new name, and the Russian Lochsa came out of that rework still an integral. It was the first the workshop had ever made. At the opening the change is a flipper in place of Cook’s thumb stud, and the pivot is a bushing, as on Cook’s, where the workshop’s other Western collaborations run on rollers. Announcement to lottery took three years and five months.
Designs and contributions
The Russian Lochsa run, by release:
| Model | Released | Pieces | Steel | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Russian Lochsa | November 2024 | 100 | S90V | Integral titanium handle |
The workshop announced the Russian Lochsa as a joint project with Cook in May 2021. The handle follows Cook’s, one machined piece of stonewashed titanium, and there is no handle screw and no backspacer, only the pivot; the lock is a frame lock with a steel insert on the lock bar. Its blade is 95 mm long and 3.5 mm thick. Overall it’s 218 mm and 145 g. The run was split between a lottery in Russia and a lottery in North America, the North American draw through Recon1, the workshop’s distributor in the United States, and each numbered piece went out with its factory certificate. The full specification of the run sits on the Russian Lochsa record.
What NIIVES tracks
The run is on niives.com under the Russian Lochsa record, which dates the announcement and the lottery and names Cook as the designer, and market observations for it sit in the price record under the collaborations, beside the workshop’s other Western projects. NIIVES reads the factory news feed, where the announcement and the release post appeared, and Recon1’s pages for the run, its lottery listing among them, and the dealer listings that carry the serial numbers. Cook’s own Lochsas are outside the catalog. So are his hunters.