In all disciplines of antique & vintage collecting, there is a continuum of items that span the spectrum from 100% original and as built in the factory on one side, to the outright fake & counterfeit on the other. In between those easy extremes are many shades of gray that perplex and frustrate many collectors. If you are a collector that buys only pristine, 100% knives with impeccable provenance documentation, then this topic would only affect you if you became the target of a true criminal counterfeiter. On the other end of the scale, if you buy a knife only because you like it and you then stick the knife in your pocket and use it, you are also completely unaffected by any of this. However, for the rest of us that fancy ourselves some sort of "collector", we see all the shades of gray every time we visit Ebay, a knife show or even our own AAPK stores.
It can start simple - just cleaning a dirty knife is a small level of "restoration". Stopping rust is often called "preservation". Buffing takes it up a notch. Then we might start to truly get into the area of "repair" - replacing a missing shield with a period correct part from a donor knife. Or, perhaps disassembly and reassembly just to properly clean and tighten everything up. Now it starts to get a bit more sticky, like replacing a broken secondary blade with a period correct part from a donor knife, or even rebuilding a knife from several donor knives to make one knife that has all period correct parts. Are these "restored" knives, or "cobbled" counterfeits?
Certainly, faking a tang stamp is fraud. So is putting a reshaped Schrade blade on a Case knife and then selling it as a Case. It's also fraud to put a blade with a Tested XX stamp on a 1980s frame and then sell it as a knife from the 1930s. What about the knife artisan that creates a knife using factory parts but with a blade shape or handle material that the factory never produced? Clearly, if the artisan tries to sell it as a "factory prototype", that's fraud. But what if it is sold simply as a homage to the brand they love?
It is also easy to say that as long as the seller properly advertises the knife for what it is, then it doesn't really matter. But what about the second seller? Or the family that takes over the estate of the deceased collector? Or the pawn shop owner? Will they advertise it properly? There are as many different scenarios as there are knives and people. Should we throw the baby out with the bathwater and call foul on all but original, untouched knives? Should we say caveat emptor and simply tell people to educate themselves *before* handing over their money?
What say you?
