Dating an Eye-Brand

[Metalhead]

I am trying to get an approximate age for this Eye-Brand stockman. The main blade has opposing eyes etched with"SURGICAL STEEL HAMMER FORGED SOLINGEN GERMANY" in between the eyes, and then it has another eye with "GERMANY" on the tang. The back of the tang is stamped "RUSTLESS." The shield has another eye with "Solingen" underneath. It does not say "Carl Schlieper" anywhere on it. I have had it 10 - 15 years, but it is anyone's guess how old it was when I got it. I did see a thread on here from several years ago with a similar knife guesstimated to mid 70's to early 80's based on the shield, and I saw an even older thread referring to a "triple eye" stamp being from the 70's. Can anyone confirm or second that? Sorry the photos are upside down

[kootenay joe]

Your knife is the so called "3 Eye" as there are 2 Eyes with the etch and 1 Eye on the tang.
From early 1970's on Eye Brand used a variety of blade etches, tang stampings and shield types. I think they mixed these up as they went, meaning a certain blade etch was used for a few years and then dropped in favor of a different etch and then a few years later switched back to the first etch. Do this with tang stampings and shield as well and there are many possible combinations most of which might have been used for more than one time span.
This is how it seems to me. A complete set of Schlieper catalogs is need to sort this out with any certainty however i have never seen a Schlieper catalogue but i am assuming they exist.
As a guess your knife might be from mid 1970's to mid 1980's.
kj

[Metalhead]

Thanks Koot. As I was obsessively reading through the thread about tang stamps, I came across this in a post from Keithw who is obviously a better researcher than I am. It seems to corroborate your estimate, and that's good enough for me!

[keithw]

Thanks Metalhead.
I can't take much credit for the "research", it's mainly info that I gleaned from people who know much, much more about Eyes than I do, like Paladin (Ray), EyeBJoe (Joe) and Muskratman (Kaleb).