Hey neffarious,
I believe the "Z" designation is for clampacked models. I vaguely remember a post a while back about the different model numbers relating to knives sold at big box/retail stores being different and that the clampack packaging was the reason. If you go to Cold Steel's website you will see certain knives like the Finn Bear, Bird and Trout, Pendleton Lite Hunter, just to name a few, that have two listings, one with a "(clampack)" in the description and those models have a Z at the end. Some like the Canadian Belt Knife and Finn Hawk have two listing but no "(clampack)" but I think it is just an oversight on the websites description. I could be wrong and it could mean that the knife has the more updated Secure-Ex sheath as opposed to the older nylon ones or something else, but I pretty sure it is the packaging.
