Buck 112 Dates

JK Knives

JK Knives

Moderator
Joined
Mar 6, 2001
Messages
28,074
I have two 112`s and was wondering the manufacture dates of them. I have the book "The Story of Buck Knives", and on page 77 it shows the date marks from 1986 to 2007. Neither of the knives have marks like these. One my wife bought me in 1986 has rounded bolsters and the most beautiful wood I have ever seen on a factory knife.It`s marks are ..112.. The other I just picked up at a gun show yesterday for $15. It has no nail nick and the bolsters are not rounded at all. It has dark very plain wood, and is in very good condition except for some small nicks in the bolsters. It`s mark is .112. Any help would be appreciated.

John
 
The four-dot version was made in the mid-80s (I think about 1983-1986). The wood is probably macassar ebony. If you get a good piece of macassar it is very nice looking. I got an older 112 with fantastic macassar scales on ebay, and sent it to Buck to be refitted with a BG-42 blade.
The two-dot version was made 1974-1980, the wood is likely macassar, although in the earlier years they used something different. A lot of the macassar that Buck used did not show the striping, but was of uniform color.

The 2-dot 112 has a 440C blade, the 4-dot is 425M.
Macassar is very hard, one time I was cutting scales from cocobolo on a bandsaw and switched to macassar. I thought cocobolo was hard, but the macassar was significantly harder.
 
The first 112s made actually had inlays of black micarta. We stopped using that before the 2 dot stamping was used though so I am sure yours is macasar ebony as the previous poster said. There was such a broad range of color on that wood that i have seen pieces that were totally tan. One of the jobs in the production line used to be to match the inlays for color. We did not want a knife to have a big variation in color from side to side so we sorted through them and matched them up.
For a very short time we used a heavy grained wood called Segua, very hard to find one of these today!
A funny story the old timers like to retell is about the origin of the nail nick on the 112. The 110 had a nail nick and it out sold the 112 by quite a bit. One day our sales VP decided the reason was because the 112 did not have the nick so he decided we should start adding one. We spent all the time and money on tooling and such to add this operation and guess what? The sales stayed the same on the 112. :rolleyes:
Hope this helps,
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top