Montana Man Has Spent 20 Years Forging Weapons To Stave Off A Zombie Uprising

If Joey Arbour were naming his company today, he’d probably steer clear of the word “zombie.”

Back in 2007, fresh off a months-long project building a Wild West, zombie brothel-themed Halloween show in Missoula, Montana, Arbour and two friends were trying to come up with a memorable name for their fledgling business. 

They wanted to make cool blades of all varieties, so they didn’t want a business name that implied anything too historical, tactical or rooted in fantasy lore. What if, one of the guys suggested one day over beers, we made tools for the zombie apocalypse? 

And that’s how Zombie Tools got its name.

That name proved prescient when the early 2010s arrived alongside peak-zombie obsession. Some people became convinced the end of the world was nigh thanks to a misreading of the Mayan calendar, while millions were tuning into the TV show “The Walking Dead” each week. 

“Everybody was all apocalyptic-minded and had zombies on the brain, so that really helped us grow,” Arbour said of the 2011 to 2013 period. But even he became over-zombied.

“The name, especially lately, hasn't necessarily been doing us any favors,” Arbour said. “Everybody's sick of zombies now.”

But people aren’t sick of the hand-forged steel blades that each take about 24 hours for Arbour and his team of eight fellow blade-makers to laboriously craft. In an average year, Zombie Tools sells about 2,500 blades that retail for $210 to $770 each.

While some blades have especially evocative names — The Rat Bastard, say, or The Traumahawk — the company’s best-seller is The Apokatana, priced at $565.

This 28-inch blade is Zombie Tools’ take on the iconic Japanese katana-style blade and is described on the website as such: “For the runnin' and gunnin' warrior who knows how to choose his battles and vigilantly maintain a corridor of retreat.”

Peck around on the Zombie Tools website a bit, and you’ll put to rest any notion that the crew takes itself too seriously, even if they are serious about their craft. 

A wall in the company’s black-painted showroom is filled with several retired blades, including some early ones. Pickingup one such early Zombie Tools-era blade, Arbour can immediately see what an untrained eye cannot — gapping in the handle, say, or a not-great grinding job — that reveal the mistakes of a beginner.

“It’s nice to have on our wall for posterity and to see where we came from,” he said.

Rise Of Zombie Tools

Where Zombie Tools came from is relatable to the beginnings of many businesses — it was born of necessity.

Back in the early 2000s, Arbour and his friends were in a sword fighting club that was proving to be an expensive hobby for the cash-strapped crew. The metal blades, while sturdy, would eventually break and it was becoming costly to replace them.

Reasoning that “it can’t be that difficult to make them,” Arbour reached out to a blade-maker in Florida to learn about the process and then the trio decided to try their hands at it.

They held a garage sale and parted with some old band equipment — “giving up heavy metal for sharp steel,” as he quipped — and secured the necessary funds to buy a belt grinder and some other equipment.

In the early days, Zombie Tools found customers mostly through word of mouth, but as the zombie obsession picked up, so did business. Arbour eventually quit his day job as a graphic designer and started acquiring more (and better) equipment. 

Around 2013, the blades were in such high demand that customers had to wait about 16 weeks to get their hands on one.

“That’s when I said, ‘All right, looks like this business is actually going to make money and I kind-of put things in fast forward,’” Arbour said.

Evolution Of Zombie Tools

Fast forward to today, and Arbour is the sole founding member still involved in the company, as one of the other founders cashed out while the other “kind-of got chased out.”

In the 14-plus years that Zombie Tools has occupied its current warehouse space, years and years of learnings have gone into informing today’s blade-making process. The blades move back and forth through the various bays as the crew brings them to life. 

It’s a process that’s technical, while also requiring an attention to detail and pride in craftsmanship. Training new hires is time intensive and can be particularly expensive when someone doesn’t know what they’re doing yet, Arbour said.

Every Zombie Tools blade begins life as a two-dimensional design in Adobe Illustrator, and is then converted to a DXF (short for drawing exchange format) file that’s needed to cut the steel with a water-jet cutting machine.

Aa metalsmithing company in nearby Bonner now handles all the water jet-cutting of the Zombie Tools designs. But that company is closing up shop, and its owner offered to sell the machine to Arbour.

But it’s much easier to move to the machine than move the machine.

That means come May, Zombie Tools will move its operations to Bonner and, for the first time, every single step of the process — from the sheets of steels that arrive from Germany to packaging up the boxes of sharpened blades that are shipped off to customers — will happen in one location.

Arbour also wants to preserve a showroom of sorts so that people traveling through the Missoula area can get their hands on a blade to see what it looks and feels like. 

Finding Good Grinders

As with any type of change, however, Arbour anticipates some growing pains when the Zombies overtake the new location.

But there’s still a job to be done and orders to fulfill, with a current wait time of four to six weeks for blades.

Grinding is the hardest stage of the process to train because it’s physically taxing, time-consuming and requires a great deal of skill.

Employees must wear a respirator, eye protection, gloves and other protective gear to protect themselves from steel shavings that might be 600 to 700 degrees when they come flying off the blade.

Suffice to say, grinding isn’t for everyone. Arbour estimates that since Zombie Tools began, he’s personally made as many as 10,000 blades, even if he’s slowed a bit with age.

“Finding good grinders is hard,” Arbour said. “Every once in a while, you run across somebody that just has the knack for it.”

Tools For More Than An Apocalypse 

People likewise have a knack for finding all sorts of uses for Zombie Tools. Some people buy the blades for display or to take to fairs, while others might like one for home defense or to take camping or hunting.

For a while, there was a surge of interest in backyard cutting sports that likewise benefitted sales. The Zombie Tools crew has also experimented in these competitions, seeing how many beer cans they can slice through with a blade. (The record stands at 36 cans.)

Despite the name, people aren’t necessarily drawn to Zombie Tools because they’re worried about imminent doom, nor has an apocalyptic-themed line of work changed Arbour’s otherwise “fairly positive outlook” about the state of the world.

That’s not to say he doesn’t have some what-if thoughts from time to time. “A small apocalypse might be good for humanity.”

Zombies Go Hollywood

Over the years, the Zombie crew has popped up in some, perhaps, unlikely places. There was a collaboration with a local brewery on a Zombie Tools-themed stout and in the 2010s zombies craze, the team appeared on a short-lived reality TV series, “Surviving Zombies.” 

The team has won awards for its blades, along with the adoration of its loyal customers, but the blades have also caught the eye of Hollywood types. 

The first major movie featuring the company’s blades was “The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones” that was released in 2013.

Another blade made a brief appearance in a soldier’s pack during one of the “Planet of the Apes” sequels even if Arbour was disappointed it wasn’t used in a fight scene to inflict carnage.

But redemption came in the 2021 blockbuster, “Dune,” in which a slightly shortened version of the company’s blade, The Felon, was featured in an arena fight scene. 

These experiences, while “weird,” don’t surprise Arbour so much as the company’s nearly 20 years of success. 

“There are some nights, I’m sitting in here and everybody else has gone home and all the lights are off except for these ones,” he said, gesturing to the lights near the display of retired blades. “And I’m just looking up at this wall and going, ‘Wow.’”