not2sharp
Platinum Member
- Joined
- Jun 29, 1999
- Messages
- 20,449
As a knife enthusiast who went through the 1980s, there was no way to avoid developing an interest in Lyle's First Blood Rambo knife, the Crain Life Support series of Knives. Just about everyone produced these things after they were popularized by the films with knives like the Buck 184, the Chris Reeves one piece line, and a long list of custom makers doing very well. For a while these knives were almost a right of passage, and finding information on these is just a google search away.
What I wanted to discuss here are the precursors to all of this. There is very little mention of any knives preceding the 1980s craze, yet we all know that in cutlery very little turns out to be actually novel. The Randall model 18 is still around and certainly dates back to early 1960s, and it was inspired by the match safe knives produced by both Case and Schrade during the 1930s. And well before that, hollow handled knives and swords were often encountered in the middle east and elsewhere. The notion of stuffing a knife handle with something has been with us for a long time.
As with most collectors my interests in these knives waned in the late 1990s. By that point there was little that was new or interesting about hollow handles, the market was flooded with low end junk knives and I had already had the pleasure of owning many of the knives that popularized the trend. For anyone interested, there was a great collector book published by Bee Tree Productions in 1986 (ISBN 0-937083-09-7), Survival Knife Reference Guide, by Douglas C. Berner, that actually tried to catalog the many of the original knives. Unfortunately, as with most authors, his discussion starts around the 1960s with the Randall 18.
I wanted to open this up to see if anyone had examples of pre-1960s hollow handled knives. It would be interesting to discuss the history of knives with hidden compartments. They may never have been as popular as Rambo's knife, but they certainly pre-dated it.
n2s
What I wanted to discuss here are the precursors to all of this. There is very little mention of any knives preceding the 1980s craze, yet we all know that in cutlery very little turns out to be actually novel. The Randall model 18 is still around and certainly dates back to early 1960s, and it was inspired by the match safe knives produced by both Case and Schrade during the 1930s. And well before that, hollow handled knives and swords were often encountered in the middle east and elsewhere. The notion of stuffing a knife handle with something has been with us for a long time.
As with most collectors my interests in these knives waned in the late 1990s. By that point there was little that was new or interesting about hollow handles, the market was flooded with low end junk knives and I had already had the pleasure of owning many of the knives that popularized the trend. For anyone interested, there was a great collector book published by Bee Tree Productions in 1986 (ISBN 0-937083-09-7), Survival Knife Reference Guide, by Douglas C. Berner, that actually tried to catalog the many of the original knives. Unfortunately, as with most authors, his discussion starts around the 1960s with the Randall 18.
I wanted to open this up to see if anyone had examples of pre-1960s hollow handled knives. It would be interesting to discuss the history of knives with hidden compartments. They may never have been as popular as Rambo's knife, but they certainly pre-dated it.
n2s
