All About Pocket Knives

In the last year i have won 6 knives (i think it is 6) from an ebay seller who is also a knife collector and an AAPK member although i believe he has not been active here for a few years. His knives are fine examples and get good bidding. He is generous and always includes a gift with the knife you have won. These are often pens with a flashlight in the end or a key ring with knife blade and mini tape measure, etc. These are well made items, not at all shody. The key ring i use for my house key and regularly use the pens and flashlights. Good quality is always a pleasure to use.
With the most recent knife i won he included a second knife as a gift. Have a look at these pictures. It is a very fine gift from a most generous person.
kj

Please feel free to comment on this knife. If you see anything of concern please mention it. I am not an experienced Cattaraugus collector but some of you here are.
The collector/seller who gave me this knife wondered if the handles being different shades of brown indicated it was once a sample knife showing 2 handle choices. I have seen enough knives with the jigged bone handles not being exactly color matched that i think it is just a normal variation.
Both blades have been used and the master resharpened enough to take a little bit of the belly out of the blade and it is about 1/16" short.
Walk & talk are fine, no blade play and blade spine & spring junction both line up well & are matched for thickness.
Interesting to note that it is a true Easy Open as there is no nail nick for the master. It must be pinch gripped to open, which it does, easily.
Size is 3 5/8"
My request for comments is not to find fault with this generous gift but to educate myself on a brand to which i am a novice.
kj

KJ I like the swell end jacks. The jigging on those bone scales are good looking. Here is a pic of my favorite cat. I think it to be right with the worm groove jigging. I like you haven't held enough cats to be sure I hope this pic helps.






Monte

Thanks Monte. By comparison with your Catt., mine is not a worm groove jigging. Cattaraugus was around for a long time so almost certainly they used more than just the one style of jigging ? May the experts chime in here.
kj

Here you go KJ, another catt. Well this one is a total fake. I've had it for 5 yrs. Before I found AAPK, swell end jack with nickle silver liners and the tang stamps dont look good. I dont beleive cattaraugus ever used these scales. Seen a camillus once that could have been its brother. Had same scales and was a swell end jack.


Monte

Kj if you check the pattern number on the blade with the info here on aapk in the Catt research section you will find it should be 24409. The number on your knife indicates a pattern 39 with ebony handles. There is no pattern 39 shown there so I don't know what it is but there is a tear drop ez open with bone handle shown as a 40 pattern. Still that is a stunning knife and as you said generous gift.

Greg, i did not know of the Catt. information section here. I have not yet looked around all areas of AAPK.
I did just check Catt. numbers in OPGCK by Price & Zalesky. They give 24399 as a 3 5/8" EO Jack with bone handles. My knife has 24396 which they give as the same knife but with ebony handles. This suggests that my knife has been re-handled and therefore the bone might not be Cattaraugus.`
24409 P & Z give as the 3 3/8" EO Jack. Mine is 3 5/8".
Are the handles on my knife Cattaraugus bone ?
thanks for interest, hope i learn more about Catt. bone.
kj

http://www.allaboutpocketknives.com/con ... nce-guide/

Kj here is a link. Scroll down and look at the 24409. Looks just like yours doesn't give a length though.

Yep looks just like it, except for the jigging. The handles on the knife in the thread that Greg supplied have a worm groove look. it looks like second cut jigging to me

Monte

Roland, I'm certainly no expert on Cattaraugus but I do have a Catt scout knife with compass in the handle that has markedly different handles on one side than the other. Very similar to the one you have pictured. I had always assumed maybe it had been re-handled on one side, until I read an article somewhere that many of those scout pattern had handles like that. I'm thinking that article was in Knife World a year or so ago and written by AAPK member bestgear.

Maybe Cattaraugus did that on other patterns also? Hopefully a Catt expert will see this and enlighten us.

Ken

Nice looking knife! and a generous addition from the seller.
Stewart and Ritchie's Cattaraugus catalog reprint lists pattern number 39 as being either a balloon jack or an easy open jack. Kind of confused about the second digit in the pattern number being a 4? The second digit indicates bolster configuration and the Stewart and Ritchie book does not list 4 as one of the options. Anyway, paged through the book, and on page 95, found photos of a 24396 (ebony handles) and a 24397 (cocobolo handles). Other than the handles, the knives are identical to the one posted by kj; easy open, swell end two blade jack, federal shield and no nail nick on the main blade.
I think it would be a copyright violation to post a photo of the page from the book, so won't.
Dan

Thanks Dan. By pattern number on the tang, 24396, this knife should have ebony handles. So, did it get bone by error in the factory or was the ebony removed and bone hafted at a later date ? Whomever mounted the bone handles did a professional job.
kj

I believe the bone covers to be original. And I don't think any of the cutleries got too anal over tang stamp accuracy perfection. What a beautiful knife! Thanks for showing it.

"I don't think any of the cutleries got too anal over tang stamp accuracy perfection. "

I agree. They were making a tool for people to use. The number stamped onto blade tang would have no significance to the original owner. Likely only distributors and knife salesmen had access to the catalogs and it is only there that the numbers have significance.
And further i doubt any cutlery workers ever wondered if 100 years in the future people would be debating whether certain features of the knife are original.
Regarding my above EO Jack: is the bone Cattaraugus bone ? (third time asking; must be a hard question).
kj

kootenay joe wrote:

Regarding my above EO Jack: is the bone Cattaraugus bone ? (third time asking; must be a hard question).
kj

Must be? I just looked through the 26 pages of the Cattaraugus thread in this forum and 25 pages of a Cattaraugus thread in another forum. There are certainly knives posted in these threads with bone that matches your OP knife fairly closely.
Dan

Looks like Catt bone to me.

Thanks Dan. I find it difficult to match jigging patterns. The worm groove and Schrade peachseed are the only 2 i can recognize. Remington bone, Utica bone, Rogers bone, etc. all look too similar for me to differentiate..
So most likely, or at least quite possibly, the knife is all original with mismatched pattern number and handle material.
Not that it matters greatly because it is a fine knife regardless. But it is fun to work on figuring out the probable story of the knife.
kj

Kj, I think your vision of the old cutlers getting a good laugh from our back and forths over a knifes originality is probably correct. After all we already know about these companies proclivity to contract knives with each other. Whose to say that they didn't also trade or buy handle stock and other parts from each other when thier supplies ran short.

gsmith7158 wrote:After all we already know about these companies proclivity to contract knives with each other. Whose to say that they didn't also trade or buy handle stock and other parts from each other when thier supplies ran short.

This is a great point; Catt, Case, Kinfolks & Western were all related. In addition many of the cutlers were also related and some worked for different companies. I would actually be surprised if some trading between companies did NOT take place, especially the further back in history you go.

In more recent times with Albert Baer owning Schrade, Imperial, Ulster and Camillus, we know there was a lot of borrowing and contracting out of parts.
Using the Imperial Frontier series as an example, the knives were made in Imperial's Providence factory as well as the Schrade factory (some patterns have the Swinden Key), and some were made at the Camillus factory, (as documented by internal records at Camillus).

The history of cutlery is not as neat and tidy we might like to believe. Even tang stamps are suspect; Tom Williams, from Camillus, said the tang stamps were kept on a certain shelf in the factory. When a new stamp was introduced the old stamp was retired to the shelf. Now if the guy who was supposed stamp a new batch of blades for an order of a stockman pattern was a wee bit hungover on Monday morning and grabbed an old stamp from 10 years ago and stamped 10,000 clip blades before the error was discovered, does anyone really think they threw those blades away? They used the blades and hopefully he got the correct stamp for the next batch!

Dale you are spot on. With all the families and friends intertwined in the cutlery companies and most of the early makets located faorly close proximity to each other, I bet that happened much more than a few times.

orvet wrote:

gsmith7158 wrote:After all we already know about these companies proclivity to contract knives with each other. Whose to say that they didn't also trade or buy handle stock and other parts from each other when thier supplies ran short.

This is a great point; Catt, Case, Kinfolks & Western were all related. In addition many of the cutlers were also related and some worked for different companies. I would actually be surprised if some trading between companies did NOT take place, especially the further back in history you go.

In more recent times with Albert Baer owning Schrade, Imperial, Ulster and Camillus, we know there was a lot of borrowing and contracting out of parts.
Using the Imperial Frontier series as an example, the knives were made in Imperial's Providence factory as well as the Schrade factory (some patterns have the Swinden Key), and some were made at the Camillus factory, (as documented by internal records at Camillus).

The history of cutlery is not as neat and tidy we might like to believe. Even tang stamps are suspect; Tom Williams, from Camillus, said the tang stamps were kept on a certain shelf in the factory. When a new stamp was introduced the old stamp was retired to the shelf. Now if the guy who was supposed stamp a new batch of blades for an order of a stockman pattern was a wee bit hungover on Monday morning and grabbed an old stamp from 10 years ago and stamped 10,000 clip blades before the error was discovered, does anyone really think they threw those blades away? They used the blades and hopefully he got the correct stamp for the next batch!

I think you're spot on. I was talking to Mr. Pete Cohen (sp) once and he was saying the same thing about the old wild and wooly days of the cutlery industry. He said they made parts for each other, made knives for each other etc...

Now I know nothing about Cat knives, but you mentioned Weatern and I know for a fact that pattern numbers (or no pattern numbers) are mere suggestions and not set in stone for Western. For one thing look at the colored spacers on the handles of western fixed blades. You'll see all kinds of patterns. Basically from what I gather it all depended on what the guy putting that particular knife together thought looked good on that particular day.