All About Pocket Knives

Trying to determine date for this Case fixed blade knife

additional photo, close-up of tang stamp

Here are the generally accepted stamps for fixed blades.

Thank you for the info. It seems close to the 1932-40 stamp but not exact. Any thoughts?

jhoward6696 wrote:Thank you for the info. It seems close to the 1932-40 stamp but not exact. Any thoughts?

Yes that would be my thought. Probably a bit of disfigurement at the bottom of the C.

Where did that chart come from?? It is another fairly useless chart in regards to older knives. Some bad info there. The first mark, second row was used during the era where Kinfolks made all the hunting knives for Case and that was 1926-1932. Chart doesn't show the CASE with serifs mark at all, dates for the Bradford mark are incorrect. I think the square pommel makes the knife post WW2.

Looking at a lot of my early Case hunters, I think the mark on the OP knife is the third row, second stamp. The chart doesn't show the serifs which it really should to be accurate. (serifs are the little "feet" at the bottom of the letters). This stamp would be correct for a square pommel Case knife from the late 1940s-early 1950s. There are no Case hunting knife stamps that have been proven to begin or end in 1940 and I doubt any did. It is known that early military Case 337Q fixed blades had the CASE serif mark and then went to the CASE XX mark, but since the 337Q didn't arrive until WW2 the CASE XX marked ones (which are more common) likely didn't begin production until 1942 or 1943. After WW2 Case used several different marks on their hunting knives, none of which correspond to any Case folding knives up until the 1960s.

Gunsil wrote:Where did that chart come from?? It is another fairly useless chart in regards to older knives. Some bad info there. The first mark, second row was used during the era where Kinfolks made all the hunting knives for Case and that was 1926-1932. Chart doesn't show the CASE with serifs mark at all, dates for the Bradford mark are incorrect. I think the square pommel makes the knife post WW2.

Hi Gene

The first three lines of the chart were in the "Romance of Collecting Case knives", 4th Ed, by Mrs. Ferguson. In that book she doesn't say where the dates came from that I could find. So is she or her husband the source of the dates?

Thanks Steve. Yes those then were made before any real info was available. Back then a lot of people thought the hunting knife and the pocket knife markings were the same in the same time period which they are not. A lot of folks seem to think Case was making fixed blades early on but Brad Wood thinks they didn't make any before 1920 or maybe even 1923. The fact that the Fergusons didn't include serifs is a little disconcerting, but then again perhaps they didn't see serifs on stamps as an important feature.

This is an interesting discussion on a topic that I know nothing about. However, even I can see that in addition to not having sheriffs all of the pre-1990s stamps in gsmith7158's table are dissimilar from the original poster's knife in that none of them have the A contained inside the C. If the lower line TESTEDXX was obliterated by the visible damage then the defaced stamp would match the middle of the three stamps shown for the time period "1920 -1940 (some say 1919 - 1945)" here https://www.allaboutpocketknives.com/co ... ification/ My questions for gunsil are did Case some times omit TESTEDXX for lack of room and do you have a post-WWII to ~1955 knife with the A inside the C? None of the post-WWII - 1960 stamps on the linked page do. I'm not questioning your expertise, just trying to learn.

This kind of stuff makes me reluctant to try sorting original old knives out of the counterfeits on eBay. My only pre-WW II Case is a late tested era stag single blade Folding Hunter that I bought else where. Matching its tang stamp and shield was easy.

MSJ

You can find a more current chart for fixed blade tang stamps in the last Sargent's edition, the 7th Ed. It's available as an e file but I can't say where. Not much money, I think I paid 15 or 16 bucks, use it all the time. The author of the Case fixed blade chapter, Brad Wood, who gunsil made reference to, didn't provide any dates on the early stamps. His opinion is no one knows for sure when they were used and when they stopped being used. Get the file, you won't be disappointed if you're interested in Case knives.

Gunsil wrote:Thanks Steve. Yes those then were made before any real info was available. Back then a lot of people thought the hunting knife and the pocket knife markings were the same in the same time period which they are not. A lot of folks seem to think Case was making fixed blades early on but Brad Wood thinks they didn't make any before 1920 or maybe even 1923. The fact that the Fergusons didn't include serifs is a little disconcerting, but then again perhaps they didn't see serifs on stamps as an important feature.

An interesting observation you make on the serif stamp regarding the Fergusons Gene. Do you know if she is still alive? According the www she would be 84 yo now.

I have no idea if she is still with us. Brad Wood has done a lot more research and has discovered a lot of facts since that Sargent's book was published. I'll have to bug him to make a new chart.

Gunsil wrote:I have no idea if she is still with us. Brad Wood has done a lot more research and has discovered a lot of facts since that Sargent's book was published. I'll have to bug him to make a new chart.

Hopefully it will be easier to use. The one published in Sargent’s is very hard to use. The stamps are numbered, and the numbers imbedded throughout the article text. So if you’re looking for a date when the stamp was used you have to read through the article, looking for a reference to the particular letter of the pertinent stamp, and hope that the reference you find has a date associated with it. Can be very frustrating.

His information in the article is very useful. The tang stamps chart would be more useful with addition of dates.

Ken