All About Pocket Knives

Below are 2 of my Kabars. I've had the 5-1/4" for a while and I recently aquired the 4-1/4" one. I've always thought the 5-1/4" was a 206 but now I'm not sure. Is one of these a 206? And then, what is the other? The one with block capital letters is older, correct? Any help would be appreciated.

Edit: after much googling, I think maybe the 4-1/4 blade is a Kabar 1200? Do I have a 206 and a 1200?

The longer knife is a 1236, which had (roughly) a 5-1/4 inch blade.

The shorter knife is probably a 1232, which had a (nominally) 4 inch blade.

The all caps stamp is pre-1953. The italicized Kabar is post-name (from Union Cutlery to Kabar) change 1953.

Model numbers were not added until 1969, 3 years after Cole-National purchased the company.

The 1969 date for model numbers comes from observing paperwork with NIB knives where the paperwork in both boxes had a 1969 date, but one knife had a model number and the other one didn't.

Wayne is "sorta" right. The one marked KA-BAR was made by Union Cut Co and they used different model numbers than he refers to so it wouldn't have been a model 1236 when it was made. The 70s-80s model number may have been 1236 but it wasn't the model number when it was made. Same with the smaller knife, which was made by KA-BAR Inc using the Kabar mark. to get the actual model numbers when these knives were made you'd have to get the catalogs from the years they were made. Union Cut used different model numbers than KA-BAR Inc and KA-BAR Inc changed their model numbers at least once during their run. The numbers given here are Cole National numbers which are still different from Union Cut and KA-BAR Inc numbers and do not really apply to earlier knives. I have a lot of catalogs from the Union Cut era but not the later catalogs of the era and I have very few 1950s literature so I cannot give you the actual numbers of the time they were made.

Thank you both. The more I dig into some of these brands, the murkier it seems to get. Buyouts, making knives for other brands under contract, bankruptcies, etc. Simply the word Kabar becoming the Kleenex of the tissue world or the Q-Tip of the cotton swab industry leads to a lot of confusion. Kind of lends credence to my old philosophy in school: the more I study, the more I know. The more I know, the more I forget. The more I forget, the less I know. So why study?

or... the more I study, the more I understand how little I know.