I'm afflicted, how'd you start your collection? An introduction/the slippery slope!

S

Slip joint fan

Joined
Feb 19, 2014
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A long over due howdy to the genteel folk here in the traditional forum. I'm a long time lurker, 2nd time poster now, and overall afflicted traditional junkie who loves the good look of slippies, organic bone and patina.

My road back towards the knives our dad and grandad used started in earnest in 2008. Before that, since junior high I carried some sort of pocket knife, typically a single blade Lock-back buck or USA Schrade. Not bigs ones, just a 2.5 or 3 inch lock back. In high school my dad gave me a Case peanut, a 1991 delrin SS model, and I figured out two blades are better than one. My downward spiral could have begun then, but no...I lived in ignorant bliss and carried my two kinds of knives, plus a Kabar 1187 folding lock-back, or Buck 102 fixed blade for hunting, much into my adult life. In 2008, I discovered *online knife sales*, and the affliction hit hard...the knife that got me into this wonderful hobby/insanity/sickness. I brought home a 4 bladed 52 pattern Case, better known as the medium Congress. It was stainless, hoewever it was four (4) blades! Man, if two is good four is better! So was my thinking. You might guess what happened next. Indeed I've discovered many blades is not always better, but it sure does open up the possibility of buying many more knives. since then...I've got with mainly bone, some delrin and mainly carbon steel. My meager collection is older than me, collectively, As I've been going towards knives older than my 38 years on earth. Yep, they're built better back then.

So now that you read a little about me, to bring it back to the knives...what was the knife that really made you folks get into the knifing hobby? Attached is a picture of a well loved 2008 Congress. Its gone many miles, been sharpened a few times, got a little electrical shock to it, and overall just a great knife.

Regards,

Slip joint fan
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Welcome to the forum. Lots of great folks here and lots of beautiful knives.

To your question, there really isn't one knife that started my interest in traditional knives, so much as a collection of knives that my Dad, Grandfather and Uncles carried over the years. My Dad gave me my first slip joint (a small Uncle Henry) when I was in the 2nd grade, and I've been hooked since. I own a few modern folders, but traditionals have always been my primary interest.
 
Started with a scout knife when I was 12 years old, and just never changed when the knife companies went to the so called modern. For me, the traditional knives were all there was way back then.
 
It all started when I was looking for a particular knife that I had lost on a deployment years ago. Then it really went downhill when I joined BFC and started reading this forum. :) As jackknife said in another thread, it's the best on the net. I've been a member of many different forums through the years... none top this one. Welcome Aboard!
 
My dad gave me a Buck 305 Lancer when I was about 10 or 11 (circa 1979). I couldn't stand to have only one of these magnificent items, so I saved my pennies and bought another for myself. I still have them both, and it's been all down hill since then... many hundreds and hundreds of knives later....
 
Sometime in the late 50's, Dad let me adopt an old knife out of the tool drawer. Been carrying pocket knives on a daily basis ever since.
 
My grandpa had a sharpening business/hobby. Everyone in our town brought him knives, scissors, and saw blades for sharpening. I spent a lot of time in his shop watching him sharpen stuff and reload ammo. I have great memories of my grandpa. I guess he started my passion for knives. He passed away in 1999.

My first real knives were a Schrade 340 and a Sharpfinger. I received both of them from my parents when I was 9 or 10. I broke the tip off of the Sharpfinger and the clip blade on the 340. I still have both of them.
 
Started my collection or started using a penknife?
I was 8 when I started using a one inch blade pen knife for sharpening my pencils at school

Collecting?
I made the mistake of asking here which delrin stockman I should get, a Queen #26, a yellow Moore Maker by Camilus, or a yellow CV Case
I got all three...................
 
I'm 58, got my first pocketknife (a blue Cub Scout model) when I was 8 - been carrying (and accumulating) knives for 50 years. For years I have given pocketknives as gifts for Christmas, Birthdays, HS & College graduations, Eagle Scout Awards, ARNG promotion and retirement gifts, etc. I had also accumulated a decent number of knives for myself when, about 2-1/2 years ago, I saw a yellow handled, NIB, USA made Schrade 881Y in a hardware store. I wanted it so I bought it, and I bought a couple of knife books and began "collecting" in earnest - boy, they add up fast! OH

Ps, Welcome Slip Joint Fan - nice Case Congress too!
 
I read your post and started thinking about what set the spark off in my brain to start collecting knives but for the life of me I can't remember! :eek:
I'm only collecting (OK....accumulating) for about a year now but can't remember which knife started it off.
It's somewhere in the back of my brain and like most guys over 50, I'll probably remember in about an hour. :D
 
It is hard to remember when I didn't carry a knife every day.

Starting a collection.... I would look at the Northwoods line made by GEC for KSF. If you can get one, I would start with the Northwoods Madison Barlow. An elephant ivory would be one heck of a start (considering the govenment just enacted a ban on new ivory imports beginning in June), IF you can find one now. I believe they're all gone.

My favorite pattern is the Trapper and I really like GEC's knives. It took a bit of encourgagement for me to get past the price differential between Case and GEC, but the GEC knives are better built in my opinion. My first was a #73 which was followed eventually with another #73; a #23, and a #42. I carry the two blade #42 as an EDC often (in a KSF pocket sleeve). I like the 4.25" closed length. The others pretty much stay home, although the #23 gets some woods time.

Like the Queen, Case and Canal Street Cutlery trappers also.
 
I guess it was the first three Case knives I bought, after reading about them on this forum not quite a year and a half ago. Small Texas Jack, Sway Back Jack, and Peanut. Though I don't know if it was the knives, or the forum, that created the "affliction" as you call it.

I am currently in remission, and done adding to the collection for now.
 
I saw a Japanese style straight blade on Uncrate. It was being sold by Best Made. I then did research which led me to BF. Case SBJ in cv/chestnut was my first purchase. I got into modern folders but as soon as I graduated law school and began to practice, I've been on a traditional kick. They are just made for office edc :-)
 
Welcome to the forum!

I inherited my granddad's 34ot when he passed and that really kicked it off. Working in kitchens I had always babied my kitchen knives but that is where the pocket knife thing started. Really can't say how much I have learned from hanging out on this forum but it has been illuminating.
 
Gents,

Appreciate the warm welcome. Visited other forums in the past, this is by far the friendliest group of folks I've run into. Time to step back and read some more.

Regards,
SJF
 
I have had a knife in my pocket or on my belt since I was seven years old, but only as loved tools for the first ...er...um... "few" decades. In 2007 I received a very special knife as a very special gift from a very special person and that is when I got sick.
 
When I was a boy, my Dad was a "gun trader". We traveled to many gun shows around the SouthEast to set-up and sell pistols and long guns.

While Dad and I were doing the gun show circuit I was only ten to about seventeen years of age. While we were trading guns, I bought one or two pocketknives at each gun show or trade day we attended. That was during the late fifties to mid-sixties. I eventually accumulated a wooden cigar box filled with mint knives.

I finished high school in 1965, attended college for two years and in 1967, enlisted in the United States Army. I volunteered for and successfully completed the qualification course for Army Special Forces. I became an Army Special Forces Soldier in October,1968, serving firstly in the 6th Special Forces Group (Abn) at Fort Bragg, NC on a special weapons and munitions team, and then in the 5th Special Forces Group (Abn) in the Republic of Viet Nam in nineteen-sixty-nine and nineteen-seventy.


When I came home, I went back to college and graduated as a Surgeons Assistant in September, 1972. I've worked in adult and congenital cardiovascular, cardiac transplantation, thoracic and peripheral vascular surgery since that time. I retired after forty-one years, four months at the end of 2013.

Sometime back around 1988, when my whole world seemed to be work alone and I was averaging seventy work hours per week, my wife Sarah told me I needed a hobby. At about the same time I was advised my old cigar box of knives had value. Two of them were strawberry bone handled Robesons with book values of one-hundred-fifty and two-hundred dollars. I had paid three dollars fifty cents each for them at a gun and tackle shop outside Decatur, AL in the late fifties. I will never forget that shop. There were separate wooden bins along the wall filled with different patterns of strawberry bone Robesons and other brands, as well. I just bought the two, a daddy barlow and a two blade 088 congress pattern. I wish I'd been blessed at the time with more foresight and had less acute hindsight now. I also had a Queen WinterBottom bone swell center folding hunter, and a Case XX 6250 toenail with the greatest bone I've ever seen. My Dad got that one for me and paid seven dollars for it. I still have it.

As I already had two nice examples of the brand, I started collecting Robeson knives, and also Case 1970 ten dot knives, as they were eighteen years old at that time and seemed a wise investment, and John Primble knives, as Belknap Hardware had just gone out of business and there would be no more.

After a bit, I had a significant accumulation of Robesons, thirty-six Case ten dots, and eighteen Primbles. I decided to narrow the focus of my collecting, so I sold all the ten dots and Primbles to Jim Sargent and put that money into Robesons. I've been collecting Robeson pocketknives now since 1988, along with some interesting Robeson memorabilia and knives made by Robeson, but marked otherwise, like Terrier, Continental, Globe, OVB, and Fulton.
 
I'm new here, so I'll let this post stand as an introduction.

I'm almost 38, and I got my first pocketknife when I started Cub Scouts. It was a Brown derlin, Ulster Boy Scout knife. I still have it, but I let it get too rusty, after I got my second knife. When I was 11, I was given a Victorinox Boy Scout Huntsman. It has a Phillips screwdriver, instead of the corkscrew. I still have both knives, and they are trusty companions.

Later on, in High School, I got an original Leatherman PST for Christmas. After that, I rarely carried the Victorinox, but I had this clunky Leatherman on my belt. Later on, in High School, a friend of mine had built a forge in his back yard. He made me a nice, 4" damascus steel fixed blade knife, and he helped me make a sheath for it. At one point, right after graduating from High School, I lost my Victorinox (for a month), and I bought a Schrade large Stockman (885UH I think). It came with a guaranty against loss, which was park of the reason I went with the Uncle Henry, and not the Old Timer version. This is what I consider my first traditional knife. That Schrade became a most excellent Whitler for me.

Over the years, it got to the point, where I wold carry the Leatherman (later a Leatherman Wave) when I was at home, or out camping and hiking. At work, or at church I would carry the Victorinox. Lately, I have been getting frustrated with all the implements hanging off my keychain, and the bulk, and weight of a Leatherman, that I really don't use a ton. At one point, i had a Leatherman Squirt, a 10X loup, P38, Ferro-rod fire starter, a Fenix AAA flashlight, as well as a lot of keys, all on a single ring.

So, I have been de-junking, and paring things down to the minimum. I found someone who sells a pocket sheath, that will easily carry, a small knife, an AAA flashlight, and a small pen, or backup knife, in a pocket. I have de-cluttered the key ring, and belt, by shifting less needed tools into a backpack I take everywhere. I've also downsized, my EDC gun. I'm much happier now, but am still actively hinting down ways to make things simpler. When I get a few things in the mail, I'll post a pick of my EDC kit, including Knives!!!

Oh yeah. knife-wise, I've lately tended towards a medium stockman, or my Vic Huntsman. But, especially after reading Carl's stories, I'm thinking about a peanut......
 
I thought about it a lot and it was these stupid cheap Colonial trick knives that started it, I had a couple and I started looking for them as a kid, I would pick one up when I saw one and turn it over in my hands looking at the knife like I didn't know what it was, usually the guy selling it would look at me and say if you could figure out how to get it open you could have it or sell it to me cheap.

Those were the first traditional knives I looked for particularly, below was the last of that collection to go, I kept 1 plain ss one with no advertising.

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After that it was funny folders which pushed when I found this miniature Camillus funny folder advertising piece.

camillusfunnyfolder.jpg


Now it's more of a hunt for hidden treasures, knives that are old and in need of a little TLC or knives that were neglected for a good price and restoring them.

Over the years I've become an accumulator of user knives... :)
 
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