Dale,
LT and others can give you more background than I probably can, but the open stock knives were for years "the" knives of schrade. They worked in many patterns and handle materials. ( A look through the 2 old school threads will show you some of the many that were offered) I collect these open stock knives because of the variety. I know that I will never finish my collection, cause there are so many different ones out there, but that's half the fun.
As far as quality, IMHO I think that quality was as good or better. In the SCC days, when much of the operations were done by hand. I believe I read somewhere that schrade invented a few machines to automate the manufacturing process. Was it the shield carving machine or something? With much of this work being done by hand, and many other knife companies competing for business, the quality of the knives had to be excellent.
The open stock in the later years were more recognizable as the jigged delrin handled knives. They still offered a variety but had scaled back greatly. As you can see from your catalog, there were very few knives offered in the open stock category by then. Compare that to the early SCC catalogs, with some 100 pages of different knives offered. Over 16 different blade types were used, with handle varieties such as cocobola, ebony, stag, celluloid, mother of pearl, and buffalo horn. They also offered handles of solid brass, gold, gun metal, and sterling silver. You could get nickel silver tips, bolsters, add a chain, shackle, or have an easy opener. The choices went on and on.
My feeling is that it was just too hard and costly to maintain that variety of choices initially offered, so they scaled down the choices to the most popular or lease costly to produce.
If I am correct, the Old Timer line did not really come to being until the 40's. I could be wrong on that though. If true, that means from 1904 till maybe the 50's, the open stock knives were the bread and butter of the Schrade company.
Weren't the first Old Timers Ulsters? Probably not right on that one, but the very early ones that I have seen that look like today's OT were Ulsters. Again, OT is definitely not my bag, baby.
That's all I can offer. Believe half of it if you wish, I'm still learning myself.
Glenn
