All About Pocket Knives

I picked this Camco Scout #450 in an antique store last weekend.
It is pretty typical, of the Camco Scout patterns with the exception of the shield.

Has anyone seen a Camco shield before? If so, what pattern(s) were they on? Out of curiosity I looked through the Let's See Your Camco Knives! topic and I didn’t see any Camco knives with a shield unless you count the bullets on the Lone Ranger knives as shields. So now this #450 really has me intrigued; not only does it have a shield, but it has a nice shield with CAMCO on it!

Yea Dale I have one with serious shrinkage

One of these came from a scout/utility, the other from a 2-blade jack. Both had shrinky dink handles. I recently rebuilt another Camco scout that had a "scout" shield, same handles.
WB

Thanks guys, keep the info coming!

Now some more info on the knife I posted above:
I talked with Tom Williams today. I asked him about this knife and he thought it must be an early one as the Camco line was introduced to be an economy line; less finish work, thinner blades and often made with steel liners & bolsters, which were less expensive than nickel silver & brass. Often they did not have shields and usually no grooves on the bolsters as that is another separate step in manufacturing and therefore more expense.
Tom thought this was an early knife and that later Camco versions of this pattern were changed to make them less expensive to produce.
Tom said there were display cards made that held several of the smaller Camco knives.
The knives were selected for the price point, and all the knives on the card sold for $1.00 each.
He said it was a direct effort to compete with Colonial Cutlery, which usually had the cheapest knives, (at that point inexpensive imports were uncommon).


As Tom & I were talking we were looking at old catalogs and I found a knife listed in the 1951 catalog that seems to be the knife we see here in this thread. The description is spot on with my knife with the one exception of the shield. The knife in the catalog had no shield, though the picture does shoe the grooved bolster. As you can see the model number of this Camco camper pattern is #410. My Camco 410 has brass outer liners and a steel center liner that is quite a bit thinner than the brass center liner on a Camillus 99 I grabbed for comparison. I thought it was of interest to note that my 410 does have nickel silver bolsters. The Camco is the top knife in all three pics.


So, it appears Tom was correct, the knife is an early Camco; the Camco line was introduced in 1948 (per Tom)
and this knife was introduced in 1951, the 4th production year of the Camco brand.

I get great satisfaction when I can identify a knife and the rough date that is was produced.
It sure makes it easier when you have help from a guy who worked in the factory.

...dale, that's the first one I've ever seen that just said "scout"...I've got an early 4 line Camillus scout knife that has the compass in the handle and has an elongated shield like that , it has "scout knife" on the shield. I think you posted pictures of it for me a while back somewhere in the Camillus forum!!.....

Tommy, I have a couple that just have Scout on the shield. One is an arch toped Utica and the other is an old Imperial.

......that's a new one to me , jerry!!...btw, I did find the photos of mine..on Camillus cutlery collectors forum-page 3,early 4 line scout w/compass................. .......................

Thanx for the research Dale interesting