Tommi, precisely. That was the "Wee Pen Knife", but James had a "Chai" figure embedded into one of the scales, at least on some of them. I had always intended to buy one from him, along with one of the Telemark Norwegian Knives* that he sold, but kept procrastinating until it was too late. Damn, damn, damn! But that tends to be life; if you delay too long, you lose.
Cougar, you are right! I had forgotten that bit! What a delight to remember it.
Biogon, there you have it. Pretty much the whole of the "Wee Pen Knife" story. Now, perhaps, you can see why I chuckle at the thought of the Maxx 5.5 as a "Wee Pen Knife", and, yes, James had a considerable sense of humor.
* The story there was that the Nordsk Hydroelectric Plant was in Telemark and that the NAZIs were making heavy water there for use in their nuclear program. The RAF tried to bomb it with the little Mosquito attack bombers, but could not get into it as it was heavily protected. They tried withheavy Lancaster bomberrs using the 4000 lb. "Dambuster" bomb, but the overhanging cliff was just too damned heavy and resisted it. They tried landing Commandos on the glacier nearby, but elite German alpine troops tracked them all down and killed them all. Finally, they exfiltrated some local members of the underground and trained them in destruction and sent them back in. They succeeded where all others had failed and put the plant out of operation for the duration of the War. But the Germans had put a shipment of heavy water on a train south to Oslo for trans-shipment to Germany. When it got to the Trondheim Fjord, the Norwegian Underground saw how heavy the escort, about one SS Division, it had, ad decided that the cargo was so important that it deserved destruction at ALL costs. They mined the ferry boat, placing all of the mines at one end, even though the NAZIs had loaded the ship with Norwegian civilians to try to preven just that. When the ferry reached mid-fjord, the mines went off and the ship upended, dropping the railcars off of it into the depths. They were never recovered, and the German nuclear program was set back permanently, as they had concluded that they needed a huge supply of heavy water to serve as insulation for their reactor, and their only other souce was a small plant in Austria. We, on the other hand, used a closed circuit heavy water system on the Manhattan Project, and so we did not need nearly as much. The importance of this comes clearer when you realize just how close the NAZIs were to developing multi-stage missiles that could have reached New York City, let alone the V-2 rockets that had caused so much of a psychological problem to the British in the last year of the War. Think of a nuke over London in, say, January of 1945. When I had told James of this story, he verified it and included it with the knife company pitch on the Telemark knife, and I had always intended to buy one as a sort of memorial to the heroism and sacrifice of the Norwegians in the effort to keep nukes out of the hands of the NAZIs. BTW, I did finally locate one of these knives at
http://www.ragweedforge.com/ should any of you be interested in buying one.
(James had all variations but I think that carbonsteel bladed non locking knife was what he would call wee pen knife)
As I recall, his Vaquero Grande was put to that use.
