Codger_64
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I posted about this knife on an earlier thread, and it just arrived.
http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=566558&highlight=165OT
Like Bridgeman’s knife (serial #00737 made in 1966), my knife which arrived today (serial #002739 made in 1967) surprised me in that it was in better than hoped for condition.
I still don’t have a camera capable of taking good closeup photographs, so the best I can do at the moment is to post the eBay pictures which, fortunately, are more numerous and of better quality than we usually find in that venue.
When I opened the package, I noticed first the white shipping sleeve, a packaging item seldom seen on 165’s of this vintage. White cardboard (well, I am sure it was white when new, but now cream colored from age), unmarked except for the black hand ink-stamped pattern number “165OT” in the top middle of the sleeve. The only other noticeable marking is a name written in fine blue ink on the upper right front corner, Steve Wilson”. A customer for whom it had been ordered?
The rather worn ends of the woodgrained hinged lid box are visible with the sleeve in place, but there is no gold foil printing of pattern or company name like we are used to seeing on slightly later boxes, just the plain woodgrain paper covering the box.
The 14”x 5” box is, by the way, made from real wood about 3/16“ thick and covered with medium dark woodgrain printed “contact paper“, actually paper rather than the thin vinyl most common nowdays.
The lid top has gold foil printed text, simply “THE OLD TIMER”. The lid folds open on two thin brass hinges which are mounted to the backs of the box lid and base with two co-formed triangular prongs (top and bottom), piercing and bent over, partially visible from the interior. The lightweight hinges on this example are amazingly tight and sound after all these years. Somewhere in my memory I recall having seen an issued patent for these hinges.
The interior features a gold foil printed artwork, nearly the same as I am used to seeing on the slightly later box lids. Artwork consists of the Schrade Walden “shop sign” logo with text “The World’s Finest Knives” with “Schrade Walden Cutlery Corp.” beneath in small text, “A KNIFE LIKE GRANDAD’S” in large text right center, and in small text below “MADE IN U.S.A.”. This particular “shop sign” logo design appeared in catalogs and advertisements circa 1954-69.
The interior of the box bottom has a thin blue fitted vacuum formed plastic tray. There are three recessed compartments to contain the main product components, the knife, the sheath and the logo-printed sharpening stone. Remembering the limitations of vacuum molding during the mid to late 1960’s, the tray is quite thin and all of the interior and exterior edges are smoothly radiused. There is no provision made for the final component, the leaflet brochure which is itself missing. The tray has no printing or flocking as seen on later trays.
IF the correct leaflet insert were present, it would be the rectangular quad-fold one showing the paddlewheeler steamboat with four slogans on the cover fold, “AMERICAN CLASSICS”, ORIGINAL OLD TIMER KNIVES”, Hand-Made in the U.S.A. by SCHRADE WALDEN”, “one of America’s oldest makers of fine cutlery”.
The back fold would have the same “shop sign” logo as seen inside the box lid with “The World’s Finest Knives” slogan with the text to the right “SCHRADE WALDEN CUTLERY CORPORATION” over “Ellenville, N.Y. 12428” over “EST. 1909”, a scroll edged warranty statement box below and “Made in U.S.A. Printed in U.S.A. below that.
The first inside fold would have header text “HAND-MADE THE WAY WE MADE THEM FOR YOUR GRAND-DAD” and a short paragraph general descriptive text for the Old Timer line. Of note is that the handle material is referred to at this time as “Unique unbreakable Saw Cut Staglon”. At this time, Schrade had not assigned this trade name, Staglon, exclusively to the Uncle Henry line of knives.
The second inside fold would illustrate and describe two then-current production Old Timer knives, the 108OY Junior and the 34OT Middleman. Both were pictured in the early woodgrain slip-top boxes with inserts and the same inside lid text as seen on this 165OT box.
The third inside fold would illustrate and describe two more Old Timer knives, the 8OT Senior and 25OT Folding Hunter, ditto the boxes shown. Of interest is that the 25OT is shown with the early waffle impressed and laced sheath.
The fourth and final inside fold would show the 165OT in it’s box exactly as presented in my example.
The 3 1/8” x 1 ¾” x 5/16” thick sharpening stone is a blue-grey manmade composite material, not a natural stone such as noviculite. The top of the stone has the same “shop sign” logo and text “THE OLD TIMER” as seen on the box, printed in medium blue. Unused, this particular stone does have a few edge chips, apparently from contact with the knife tip during shipping at some point in it’s life. It did not come to me in a polybag as I have seen on other examples.
The sheath is of the earliest style I have personally observed in person, in catalog illustrations and advertisements. Total overall length is 8 ½” with 2 ¾” of that comprising the belt hanger as measured from the sheath throat to the top of the belt hanger which is still bent in a radius as new from the factory. If compressed flat as from wear and use, or pressed in storage, the belt hanger would measure an even 3” +/-.
As this is the earliest known sheath, it has the retainer strap which crosses the lower knife guard on a diagonal and fastens with a 5/8” snap on the center of the sheath face. The strap’s terminal end is inserted through a die-cut oblong slot in the belt hanger face and riveted through both the hanger face and the hanger back with a small flat headed nickel silver “splatter rivet”. The female portion of the nickel silver snap is marked inside “*ROME*NEWHAVEN” (With a quick search, I find Rome Fastener Corporation listed as being now in Milford, Connecticut.) This style of snap has a split brass wire ring inside which expands, allowing the female half of the snap to engage the head of the male portion more tightly than the style which depends upon an interference fit and wears out quickly. The male portion of the snap is riveted to the center of the sheath face one inch down from the throat opening and is itself unmarked.
The sheath body is composed of three layers, the face and back which folds over at the top to form the belt hanger, and a welt layer 5/16” wide which protects the stitching from the sharpened knife blade. This welt, used from the beginning on the 165OT sheaths, was obviously a feature derived from lessons learned with the slightly earlier 15OT sheaths, the earliest of which had the sheath halves merely laced with cowhide lacing. The three layers are sewn through with white nylon thread at a spacing of five stitches per inch. The ends of the stitching on either side of the throat are finished with a pair of ¼” nickel silver dome topped splatter rivets. The terminal end of the belt hanger is sewn through the back of the sheath body in a rather large 1’ x 1 3/16” triangle pattern, pretty much assuring that it would never detach, even in the event that the small retaining strap rivet above pulled through the back of the belt hanger.
The sheath material itself is made from genuine leather with a few light “range marks“, fairly heavy gauge. I am not familiar enough with leather terminology to state the thickness in proper terms, ounce weight I believe, but the body leather and retainer strap appear to roughly measure 1/8” thick. The welt is of thinner leather, approximately 1/16” thick. There are no markings on the sheath anywhere. The face surfaces are finely finished in medium russet brown with natural grain showing. The only visible defect on this example is a light (oil?) stain on the lower face about the size of a dime. While the knife will definitely go into the sheath, it is very obvious that no previous owner has ever inserted it. It is very tight and the sheath face is still entirely flat with no impression of the blade, and there is no familiar telltale horizontal mark above the throat made by the rubbing or verdigris corrosion of the brass guard. Likewise, the radius looped top of the belt hanger is still fully rounded, suggesting that this sheath was never carried on a belt.
The knife, as stated at the beginning, is in as pristine of condition as I have seen from this era. The blade steel is unmarred by peppering, stone scratches or rust. The exposed tang is also pepper-free, rare in that nearly every person examining these knives (coon-fingering) over the years leaves a bit of acidic skin oil on the steel. There are a few very light, insignificant scratches on the last two inches of the tip on blade right, possibly from the stone shifting and becoming dislodged from it’s recess in the tray during shipping over the years. A polybag on the stone might have prevented this. The blade, measuring 5 3/16” from guard to tip (not the advertised 5 ¼”
, still has it’s factory finish with light vertical striations and the factory sharpened edge, veri-veri sharp! Swedges on this pattern of blades tend to vary in length, suggesting that they were hand ground. On this example, the swedge begins 3/8” back from the tip and continues toward the guard for a total length of 3 ½”. It is even in depth and length on both sides of the spine. Blade markings are all on the ricasso of blade left, aligned with the blade, “SCHRADE” over “WALDEN” over “165”. This knife is serialized on the same side of the ricasso, aligned vertical with the guard and read from the handle “02739”, indicating manufacture in 1967, the second year and first full year of manufacture for this pattern.
The two piece brass guard (split into halves vertically) has it’s mounting pins finished smoothly to the guard so that they are virtually undetectable. On some examples the pins are short on one side or the other and a slight indent of the pin hole is visible. Why was it split and not one piece? A one piece guard must be slipped (or driven) up the tang from the butt end to the stop on the ricasso. Due to the exposed tang design of this pattern, the tang is too wide (same width as the ricasso) for this to be done. Depending on just how much trouble they went to in final buffing of the guard after assembly, the joint of the two halves is usually only apparent on the front and back of the lower guard. Such is the case on this example. The top of the guard is slightly beveled front to rear, though not nearly reduced as to be flush with the adjoining handle scales. The lower projection of the guard is slightly curved to the rear on the side facing the blade and radius relieved on the handle side, resulting in a thinning of the lower guard typical of the early production Schrade Walden 165OT’s. Later knives of this pattern used a guard which had an almost entirely flat face and remained unleveled on their top surface. The guard on this example is untarnished. Probably cleaned for presentation and sale by the former owner. Happily, he restrained himself and the slight scuff marks on each side surface made by the knife’s shifting in the box over the years remain.
The handle scales fit very well and were not reduced to a smaller tang by buffing except slightly around the radius of the butt where the underlying tan Delrin color is visible. I often see examples of this pattern where the handles have been reduced most of the way around their perimeter, or the exposed tang is left below the level of the Delrin on the top and/or bottom of the handle. This example retains almost all of it’s dark brown top dye.
I make it sound as if some handle scales were molded oversized or tangs made undersized, don’t I? Well, they were. While Delrin is, once cooled and removed from the mold, very dimensionally stable, it does shrink in cooling as do all materials and compounds to greater and lesser degrees. Just how much the Delrin (or any plastic) shrinks from the mold size depends to a large extent on mold and material temperature, control of mold cooling, and the timing between the shot and ejection from the mold. In plastics molding, this is a balancing act between making a quality, properly dimensioned part and speed of production (number of shots per hour within the control parameters of the molding machine). Of course, speed and production volume are important, but so are reduced reject rates. An error in any of the factors (material temperature, mold temperature, pressure, cooling) can result in rejects for blows (hollows and bubbles), splay (swirls), or incomplete shots called “short shots”. Both molding machines and molding process technology have advanced exponentially over the years. Later scales can be seen to have been purposely molded oversized and then reduced by glazing all around the perimeter after mounting, resulting in a more “bone-like” appearance than on these earlier examples.
The three nickel silver compression rivets attaching these scales to the tang and the oblong nickel silver shield all sit slightly below the surface of the handle scales. I haven’t a clue whether this was on purpose to reduce scuffing and/or allow for variance in the component thickness, or simply an artifact of a lack of mold refinement. Later examples do have these components mounted flush and do show the increased susceptibility to scuffing. The sides of the scales, having the “sawcut” texture and dark top dye, do not lend themselves to reduction by glazing which would remove both accent color and texture.
I have a slightly later one NIB and I will go over it in this fashion next if there is interest.
Michael
http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=566558&highlight=165OT
Like Bridgeman’s knife (serial #00737 made in 1966), my knife which arrived today (serial #002739 made in 1967) surprised me in that it was in better than hoped for condition.
I still don’t have a camera capable of taking good closeup photographs, so the best I can do at the moment is to post the eBay pictures which, fortunately, are more numerous and of better quality than we usually find in that venue.
When I opened the package, I noticed first the white shipping sleeve, a packaging item seldom seen on 165’s of this vintage. White cardboard (well, I am sure it was white when new, but now cream colored from age), unmarked except for the black hand ink-stamped pattern number “165OT” in the top middle of the sleeve. The only other noticeable marking is a name written in fine blue ink on the upper right front corner, Steve Wilson”. A customer for whom it had been ordered?
The rather worn ends of the woodgrained hinged lid box are visible with the sleeve in place, but there is no gold foil printing of pattern or company name like we are used to seeing on slightly later boxes, just the plain woodgrain paper covering the box.
The 14”x 5” box is, by the way, made from real wood about 3/16“ thick and covered with medium dark woodgrain printed “contact paper“, actually paper rather than the thin vinyl most common nowdays.
The lid top has gold foil printed text, simply “THE OLD TIMER”. The lid folds open on two thin brass hinges which are mounted to the backs of the box lid and base with two co-formed triangular prongs (top and bottom), piercing and bent over, partially visible from the interior. The lightweight hinges on this example are amazingly tight and sound after all these years. Somewhere in my memory I recall having seen an issued patent for these hinges.
The interior features a gold foil printed artwork, nearly the same as I am used to seeing on the slightly later box lids. Artwork consists of the Schrade Walden “shop sign” logo with text “The World’s Finest Knives” with “Schrade Walden Cutlery Corp.” beneath in small text, “A KNIFE LIKE GRANDAD’S” in large text right center, and in small text below “MADE IN U.S.A.”. This particular “shop sign” logo design appeared in catalogs and advertisements circa 1954-69.
The interior of the box bottom has a thin blue fitted vacuum formed plastic tray. There are three recessed compartments to contain the main product components, the knife, the sheath and the logo-printed sharpening stone. Remembering the limitations of vacuum molding during the mid to late 1960’s, the tray is quite thin and all of the interior and exterior edges are smoothly radiused. There is no provision made for the final component, the leaflet brochure which is itself missing. The tray has no printing or flocking as seen on later trays.
IF the correct leaflet insert were present, it would be the rectangular quad-fold one showing the paddlewheeler steamboat with four slogans on the cover fold, “AMERICAN CLASSICS”, ORIGINAL OLD TIMER KNIVES”, Hand-Made in the U.S.A. by SCHRADE WALDEN”, “one of America’s oldest makers of fine cutlery”.
The back fold would have the same “shop sign” logo as seen inside the box lid with “The World’s Finest Knives” slogan with the text to the right “SCHRADE WALDEN CUTLERY CORPORATION” over “Ellenville, N.Y. 12428” over “EST. 1909”, a scroll edged warranty statement box below and “Made in U.S.A. Printed in U.S.A. below that.
The first inside fold would have header text “HAND-MADE THE WAY WE MADE THEM FOR YOUR GRAND-DAD” and a short paragraph general descriptive text for the Old Timer line. Of note is that the handle material is referred to at this time as “Unique unbreakable Saw Cut Staglon”. At this time, Schrade had not assigned this trade name, Staglon, exclusively to the Uncle Henry line of knives.
The second inside fold would illustrate and describe two then-current production Old Timer knives, the 108OY Junior and the 34OT Middleman. Both were pictured in the early woodgrain slip-top boxes with inserts and the same inside lid text as seen on this 165OT box.
The third inside fold would illustrate and describe two more Old Timer knives, the 8OT Senior and 25OT Folding Hunter, ditto the boxes shown. Of interest is that the 25OT is shown with the early waffle impressed and laced sheath.
The fourth and final inside fold would show the 165OT in it’s box exactly as presented in my example.
The 3 1/8” x 1 ¾” x 5/16” thick sharpening stone is a blue-grey manmade composite material, not a natural stone such as noviculite. The top of the stone has the same “shop sign” logo and text “THE OLD TIMER” as seen on the box, printed in medium blue. Unused, this particular stone does have a few edge chips, apparently from contact with the knife tip during shipping at some point in it’s life. It did not come to me in a polybag as I have seen on other examples.
The sheath is of the earliest style I have personally observed in person, in catalog illustrations and advertisements. Total overall length is 8 ½” with 2 ¾” of that comprising the belt hanger as measured from the sheath throat to the top of the belt hanger which is still bent in a radius as new from the factory. If compressed flat as from wear and use, or pressed in storage, the belt hanger would measure an even 3” +/-.
As this is the earliest known sheath, it has the retainer strap which crosses the lower knife guard on a diagonal and fastens with a 5/8” snap on the center of the sheath face. The strap’s terminal end is inserted through a die-cut oblong slot in the belt hanger face and riveted through both the hanger face and the hanger back with a small flat headed nickel silver “splatter rivet”. The female portion of the nickel silver snap is marked inside “*ROME*NEWHAVEN” (With a quick search, I find Rome Fastener Corporation listed as being now in Milford, Connecticut.) This style of snap has a split brass wire ring inside which expands, allowing the female half of the snap to engage the head of the male portion more tightly than the style which depends upon an interference fit and wears out quickly. The male portion of the snap is riveted to the center of the sheath face one inch down from the throat opening and is itself unmarked.
The sheath body is composed of three layers, the face and back which folds over at the top to form the belt hanger, and a welt layer 5/16” wide which protects the stitching from the sharpened knife blade. This welt, used from the beginning on the 165OT sheaths, was obviously a feature derived from lessons learned with the slightly earlier 15OT sheaths, the earliest of which had the sheath halves merely laced with cowhide lacing. The three layers are sewn through with white nylon thread at a spacing of five stitches per inch. The ends of the stitching on either side of the throat are finished with a pair of ¼” nickel silver dome topped splatter rivets. The terminal end of the belt hanger is sewn through the back of the sheath body in a rather large 1’ x 1 3/16” triangle pattern, pretty much assuring that it would never detach, even in the event that the small retaining strap rivet above pulled through the back of the belt hanger.
The sheath material itself is made from genuine leather with a few light “range marks“, fairly heavy gauge. I am not familiar enough with leather terminology to state the thickness in proper terms, ounce weight I believe, but the body leather and retainer strap appear to roughly measure 1/8” thick. The welt is of thinner leather, approximately 1/16” thick. There are no markings on the sheath anywhere. The face surfaces are finely finished in medium russet brown with natural grain showing. The only visible defect on this example is a light (oil?) stain on the lower face about the size of a dime. While the knife will definitely go into the sheath, it is very obvious that no previous owner has ever inserted it. It is very tight and the sheath face is still entirely flat with no impression of the blade, and there is no familiar telltale horizontal mark above the throat made by the rubbing or verdigris corrosion of the brass guard. Likewise, the radius looped top of the belt hanger is still fully rounded, suggesting that this sheath was never carried on a belt.
The knife, as stated at the beginning, is in as pristine of condition as I have seen from this era. The blade steel is unmarred by peppering, stone scratches or rust. The exposed tang is also pepper-free, rare in that nearly every person examining these knives (coon-fingering) over the years leaves a bit of acidic skin oil on the steel. There are a few very light, insignificant scratches on the last two inches of the tip on blade right, possibly from the stone shifting and becoming dislodged from it’s recess in the tray during shipping over the years. A polybag on the stone might have prevented this. The blade, measuring 5 3/16” from guard to tip (not the advertised 5 ¼”
, still has it’s factory finish with light vertical striations and the factory sharpened edge, veri-veri sharp! Swedges on this pattern of blades tend to vary in length, suggesting that they were hand ground. On this example, the swedge begins 3/8” back from the tip and continues toward the guard for a total length of 3 ½”. It is even in depth and length on both sides of the spine. Blade markings are all on the ricasso of blade left, aligned with the blade, “SCHRADE” over “WALDEN” over “165”. This knife is serialized on the same side of the ricasso, aligned vertical with the guard and read from the handle “02739”, indicating manufacture in 1967, the second year and first full year of manufacture for this pattern.
The two piece brass guard (split into halves vertically) has it’s mounting pins finished smoothly to the guard so that they are virtually undetectable. On some examples the pins are short on one side or the other and a slight indent of the pin hole is visible. Why was it split and not one piece? A one piece guard must be slipped (or driven) up the tang from the butt end to the stop on the ricasso. Due to the exposed tang design of this pattern, the tang is too wide (same width as the ricasso) for this to be done. Depending on just how much trouble they went to in final buffing of the guard after assembly, the joint of the two halves is usually only apparent on the front and back of the lower guard. Such is the case on this example. The top of the guard is slightly beveled front to rear, though not nearly reduced as to be flush with the adjoining handle scales. The lower projection of the guard is slightly curved to the rear on the side facing the blade and radius relieved on the handle side, resulting in a thinning of the lower guard typical of the early production Schrade Walden 165OT’s. Later knives of this pattern used a guard which had an almost entirely flat face and remained unleveled on their top surface. The guard on this example is untarnished. Probably cleaned for presentation and sale by the former owner. Happily, he restrained himself and the slight scuff marks on each side surface made by the knife’s shifting in the box over the years remain.
The handle scales fit very well and were not reduced to a smaller tang by buffing except slightly around the radius of the butt where the underlying tan Delrin color is visible. I often see examples of this pattern where the handles have been reduced most of the way around their perimeter, or the exposed tang is left below the level of the Delrin on the top and/or bottom of the handle. This example retains almost all of it’s dark brown top dye.
I make it sound as if some handle scales were molded oversized or tangs made undersized, don’t I? Well, they were. While Delrin is, once cooled and removed from the mold, very dimensionally stable, it does shrink in cooling as do all materials and compounds to greater and lesser degrees. Just how much the Delrin (or any plastic) shrinks from the mold size depends to a large extent on mold and material temperature, control of mold cooling, and the timing between the shot and ejection from the mold. In plastics molding, this is a balancing act between making a quality, properly dimensioned part and speed of production (number of shots per hour within the control parameters of the molding machine). Of course, speed and production volume are important, but so are reduced reject rates. An error in any of the factors (material temperature, mold temperature, pressure, cooling) can result in rejects for blows (hollows and bubbles), splay (swirls), or incomplete shots called “short shots”. Both molding machines and molding process technology have advanced exponentially over the years. Later scales can be seen to have been purposely molded oversized and then reduced by glazing all around the perimeter after mounting, resulting in a more “bone-like” appearance than on these earlier examples.
The three nickel silver compression rivets attaching these scales to the tang and the oblong nickel silver shield all sit slightly below the surface of the handle scales. I haven’t a clue whether this was on purpose to reduce scuffing and/or allow for variance in the component thickness, or simply an artifact of a lack of mold refinement. Later examples do have these components mounted flush and do show the increased susceptibility to scuffing. The sides of the scales, having the “sawcut” texture and dark top dye, do not lend themselves to reduction by glazing which would remove both accent color and texture.
I have a slightly later one NIB and I will go over it in this fashion next if there is interest.
Michael
Last edited:
). I do have several other models that have the stone in a poly bag. On rare occassions that I do aquire the boxed models sans bag, I now request that the stone be shipped alongside the box rather than in it.
