Well, Guardians, seeing as these will be showing up for several of you today (and, in fact, made it to a few of you yesterday), I suppose it’s time for me to post about this here in the thread. Of course, those of you with whom I’ve exchanged PMs this past week will already know about this, but I want to post about it here so that you all can feel free to share your knives as they arrive.
Since the beginning of the year — and with Jack’s blessing, of course — I’ve been working with Eric Albers to make a 2024 Guardians of the Lambsfoot SFO for us. This is the first Guardians knife we’ve had in 5 years; the last one prior to this was done in 2019.
The knife is the same swayback Lambsfoot patterns that Eric has been making for a couple years now: 3 5/8” closed, a satin-finished CPM154 blade, and stainless liners and bolsters. The handle material is a vintage Micarta from the 1950s/60s, which Eric sourced from Poland. It came in a large cylinder measuring 4” in diameter and about 6.5” long. According to Eric’s Polish source, these Micarta cylinders were used in elevators, though we couldn’t really figure out exactly
how they were used. Perhaps just as an electrical insulator, maybe something more interesting, but who knows. If we have any Guardians here who are experts in mid-century Polish elevators, feel free to chime in!
Eric cross-cut the cylinder into disks that were the proper thickness he needed for scales. Of course, cutting into a big hunk of Micarta like that, we didn’t really know what the finished product would look like, but I have to say I’m quite happy with the end result. It has a somewhat more rustic look than, say, vintage Westinghouse Micarta, but I think that gives the knives an extra bit of character. The color is a warm butterscotch tan, with a bit of grey here and there, and (on some of the knives) sporadic dark brown spots. The texture/grain of the Micarta varies from knife to knife.
For previous Guardians SFOs, Jack would always take a big group shot of all the knives laid out on his table, so I figured I should probably do the same.
Now, as we all know, discussion of purchasing knives is against the rules of both the subforum and this thread, but I will briefly address how the distribution of these knives was handled to hopefully answer any questions those of you seeing this for the first time might have and hopefully help avoid any discussion about buying. I believe these knives belong in the hands of the folks who have helped this thread what it is today, and the fairest way I could think of to do that was to offer them to Guardians based on participation in the thread. I pulled quite a bit of data from over the past year, and came up with a list of the people who had contributed the most in that time period, with some allowances made for longtime Guardians members (even if the frequency of their recent posts didn’t put them up at the top of the list). I reached out to these members starting last weekend, only reaching out to as many people as I had knives available. If someone opted out, I moved to the next person down the list.
Long story short, these knives are all essentially spoken for at this point. There are a few Guardians I’m still waiting to hear from (unfortunately it seems the recent forum upgrades have caused some issues with notifications for PMs), so there is a slight possibility that I might reach out to one or two more people on the list that I haven’t contacted yet, but I will be sticking to the list, so please don’t message me asking if you can buy a knife. I wish I had enough knives to offer to anyone and everyone who wants one, but of course we all know it rarely works out that way, and I’m grateful Eric was able to make as many as he did for us.
One thing that I haven’t mentioned yet is the special liner stamp that I asked Eric to do for these knives. Sheffield cutler (and Jack’s friend) Stan Shaw, along with other cutlers working for Ibberson’s, including Stan’s mentor Ted Osborne, would sometimes stamp their initials and the year inside the liners of knives they made. This was, at least in part, a practice done to keep other cutlers from nicking parts off each others workbenches, but it has also, more recently, served as a means for collectors to identify knives that were made by Stan. So, as a way to identify our Guardians knives, and as a nod to Stan Shaw, I asked Eric if he could do a similar stamp inside the liner of these. Here’s a liner stamp on a Stan Shaw knife (I believe this photo is
waynorth
Charlie’s), which I sent to Eric as an example of what I had in mind.
And here is the Guardians stamp that Eric did on the liner of these knives, GL for
Guardians of the
Lambsfoot, and 24 for 2024.
Eric was kind enough to share some pics with me while he was making the knives, which I’ll share soon in a separate post, but for now I’m just excited for you all to get these in hand, and I can’t wait to see your pics of them. I hope y'all like them! Thanks to
Jack Black
for allowing me to take this project on, and thanks of course to Eric
@ea42 for making these knives for us!
I know what Lambsfoot I’ll have in my pocket today.
CelloDan - 275 WINNER
