Oil your Joints!

navin74

navin74

Joined
Mar 27, 2012
Messages
362
Hello, I picked up this nice little Wharncliffe knife at a flea market some time ago. It is stamped Schmachtenberg Bros. I really like the shape of these little wharncliffe knives. This knife has a broken secondary blade and zero snap so I decided to take it apart to use as a pattern. Here it is on the chopping block. Poor spring....
Nathan

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Wow!! I think that's the worst example I've ever seen! Perfectly carved out, thanks for posting, it's a perfect example of how important oil and cleaning the joint are in a knife.

Eric
 
I'm sure lack of oil was the main culprit, but I suspect poor heat treatment exacerbated the situation!

That blade would look good in an Ettrick!;)
 
Wow a great example of wear. As Charlie said I would also suspect the quality of the spring's steel might be an issue here - resulting in worse-than-otherwise wear, but oil sure would have helped!

Thanks for sharing. I oil my joints maybe 4 times a year. Just a drop is all it takes. And also a tiny bit of oil along the sides of the spring to let it soak in between the spring and liners (at the joint end of the spring).
 
Oil surely would have helped, and much.
But if the spring is way softer than the tang it will eventually wear more.
I try to minimize this by drawing the flex portion of the spring more than its "walk" area, leaving the latter closer to the tang hardness...such thing could and should be done with carbon steel, also to avoid mushrooming of the spring's front.
 
I was thinking about this very issue just yesterday. I come across a lot of old knives with worn springs, but it's not something we hear much about with modern knives. I'm guessing that the steel used for the springs was softer then because spring-wear was identified as a real problem in the past, and an influence on cutlery design. Pistol handles would contain the point of the knife as the worn spring caused it to rise, and a top-hat kick would also allow it to be lowered somewhat. It appears to have been accepted that a knife would eventually become unusable because of spring-wear, and would need to be replaced. French cutlers designed the rounded-tang (previously they were all square) specifically to reduce the issue of spring wear, but the design was slow to catch on in Sheffield, perhaps (argues cutlery historian Simon Moore) because Sheffield cutlers forsaw that it would lead to them selling less knives.
 
I may be wrong but It looks like that knife was stored with an off gassing celluloid knife.The toning on the bolsters and the rust on the blade looks exactly like the affects of extreme gassing. In addition to the soft spring of course.:D


Best regards

Robin
 
Last edited:
waynorth said:
I'm sure lack of oil was the main culprit, but I suspect poor heat treatment exacerbated the situation!

That blade would look good in an Ettrick!;)
Click to expand...


Charlie knows ! :thumbup: A lot of vintage knives had this problem.
 
Yeah... that worn out spring is a bad looking brute. I think it is a combination of a soft spring and the lack of oil used in the past on this knife.

I haven´t seen something like this before. Thanks for taking that thing apart and showing here. Much appreciated.
I think I know why a bottle of oil is always near my knives ... ;) :o
 
If I had to guess it would have been a small pen blade. I have never seen a complete knife by this maker.
Nathan
 
Thank you for bringing that up Robin. The rust on the blade is not like any other rusty parts knife have.
Nathan
 
Dang... that thing is worn...

Regardless of the causes and circumstances of the wear, at least the knife had a pretty long life being used and loved in a pocket every day :thumbup:
 
Not the worst thing in the world. If I wore a spring out like that I'd merely take it as a good reason to buy a new knife, not that I ever needed one...lol.
 
Wow - that is some serious usage that pocketknife seen over its life. Nice rescue.

Showing that wear got me all paranoid so I'm running around oiling everything now. My pocketknives, door hinges, the truck doors and tailgate. I was even oiling my fixed blade knives. I oiled my oil can. Lol.

Thanks for sharing that! I'll be curious to see your end result.
 
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