All About Pocket Knives

I'm looking for someone to put a nice grind and maybe some custom scales on this 7 1/4" knife with a 3 1/2" blade. It's a Camillus barrel find from their final days. I think it would be a great user.
Any ideas?
Thanks,

This is how they were made for sale back in the day.

Those are great knives.
The difficulty with grinding those knives aside from the fact that those appear to be ground on a flat disk instead of a belt, is that Camillus hardened all of their blades before they were ground. Phil Gibbs, who worked at Camillus for many years, told me that it only makes sense in a production setting to do it that way. If you grind the blades before hardening them you will have a percentage of blades that warp. He explained that from a production standpoint it is much easier to harden them at full thickness so they don't warp then grind them on special machines that have a coolant that circulates over the work constantly.
Phil told me the brand name of the machinery they used but I don't recall what brand it was, other than they were large expensive machines made in Germany.

It would be hard for someone with a 2 x 72 knife grinder (belt sander) to grind that blade with the same type of grind that Camillus achieved at their factory on their special machinery.
To grind that knife without an expensive liquid cooled grinder someone would have to make a pass on the belt sander then quenched the blade. Another pass another quench, etc. and so forth. It would be a long, slow and painstaking process, and you still would not get the grind that Camillus used on that blank.

I can see how someone with a Wilton knife grinder or another good brand that was set up for hollow grinding, could hollow grind that blade, very slowly and they would probably use several belts doing it, but it could be done. However the resulting grind would be far different than the grind Camillus used. The price of the belts they used in grinding it would probably be more that it would cost you to buy a completed Camillus Sharpfinger with handle.

I am not an expert on grinding blades. I don't grind my own because my Grizzly grinder is a very basic grinder and not set up with hollow grinding wheels. What a was based on what I have been told and on my very limited experience grinding blades.
Someone else may have the proper equipment or know a way to grind this blank, but from what I have been told without the high quality cooled grinding equipment in a knife factory, it is really not practical to grind a hardened blank, especially not one was such a unique grind as a Sharpfinger.



Addendum:
If there is someone here who knows how and has the proper equipment to grind hardened blanks, please speak up! I have a pile of Camillus and Schrade blanked and stamped blades that are underground.
I would love to have them ground!

Thanks for the info Dale
I"ll probably load it in a sheath and let my Grandson walk with it on his belt when we camp and fish. The little Guy will get a charge out if it
Of course I'll have to buy him one when his mother let's me. I think it will be cool for his first fixed blade to be a Gran'Pa knife.

wazu013 wrote: I"ll probably load it in a sheath and let my Grandson walk with it on his belt when we camp and fish. The little Guy will get a charge out if it
Of course I'll have to buy him one when his mother let's me. I think it will be cool for his first fixed blade to be a Gran'Pa knife.

Awesome idea!

wazu013 wrote:I'm looking for someone to put a nice grind and maybe some custom scales on this 7 1/4" knife with a 3 1/2" blade. It's a Camillus barrel find from their final days. I think it would be a great user.
Any ideas?
Thanks,

wazu013
I must have been lucky,when I purchased mine it had the blade ground but not sharpened.
I do lathe work and have ground blades on a wet stone (12" diameter ) I use to sharpen my lathe tools.It's a slow process and you have to use the side of the stone.( Not the best for the stone ).

Grant

I bought several of the Camillus Sharpfinger (Schrade's name for the pattern) kits after the Camillus auction.
I think Blue Ridge or SMKW put them together in the kit form.

I think Camillus probably did some of the blanking for Schrade on the Sharpfinger pattern, as well as many others.
Tom Williams told me the Gran'pa series was made up of the patterns that Camillus made for Schrade.
I think he was right, with the exception of the Gran'pa Lockback #CGP7B. Tom was unaware that that was a Camillus pattern and not a Schrade pattern.



Here is a picture of the 5" lock back in the Gran'pa series copies from the Camillus web site before it was taken down.

Can you still buy these kits Dale?

I have one of those Camillus "Grandpa" knives. It's a little bitty feller. ( I think around than 3" closed) The shield is almost bigger than the knife.

Miller Bro`s wrote:Can you still buy these kits Dale?

It has been a few years since I have seen them for sale. I think I got mine 5 or 6 years ago.
But hey, you never know what will pop up on ebay!


Here are some more pics of the Gran'pa series I copied from the Camillus web site before it went down.

Patterned after the Old Timer 152OT which was 7-1/4". Camillus lists the GP152 as 7-1/8".

Like the Old Timer 12OT, however the 12OT was 2-7/8" and the CGP12 is listed as 2-3/4".
Supposed to be like the Old Timer 34OT which measured 3-5/16". The Camillus CGP34 is listed as 3-1/4".

This is the only one that is the same size as the Schrade pattern. Corresponds to the 104OT; both Schrade & Camillus knives are 2-3/4".

I knew the CGP7B was a different pattern than the 7OT, that is pretty obvious from a quick glance. When I mentioned that to Tom Williams as near as I recall his response was that he was told these were knives they here the same as the ones they had made the parts for when Schrade was buying parts from them.

The Gran'pa series came out after Schrade went out of business which was just 3 years before Camillus closed their doors. As I recall those last 3 years were quite a struggle for Camillus. I would postulate that Camillus was trying to fill the void in the knife market left by the closure of Schrade. Perhaps Camillus lacked the exact parts to make the knives as exact replicas of the Old Timer patterns and just used patterns that were close. It could have also been done for legal reasons.
It could also be that the measurements listed on the Camillus web site were in error. It is pretty easy to misread 1/16" on a ruler.

When I get time, after the holidays, maybe I can locate all the Gran'pa patterns I have and photograph them next to the corresponding Old Timer patterns.
I think I have all 5 knives in the Camillus Gran'pa series.

orvet wrote:It has been a few years since I have seen them for sale. I think I got mine 5 or 6 years ago.
But hey, you never know what will pop up on ebay!

I don`t really care about the whole kit, I would like to get just a blade blank like the OP knife and see if I can bevel it on an old wet stone I am working on.

Did you want it ground or unground?
I may have one that is unground, but I will have to do some searching.

Unground if possible

Ceramic coated belts can grind a hardened blade with no problem, but like Dale said, it's grind and quench, grind and quench, rinse and repeat, etc.