Please help identify

Hang on to it. Family only comes once in this dream. Not a huge value outside the family but irreplaceable.
 
TinyDog said:
Hang on to it. Family only comes once in this dream. Not a huge value outside the family but irreplaceable.
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I don't really care about how valuable it is as much as dating it. I have used this thing so hard for the past few decades. I really love a knife that can chop down trees and clean fish. Especially one made well before I was born. I lost the sheave when I moved from PA in 02, and it still bums me out.
 
Does the ricasso (the flat part of the blade right in front of the guard) on the other side of the knife have "USN" (for US Navy) stamped on it? Because it looks like a WW2 Camillus USN MK1 Deck/Utility knife. They were made with aluminum, wood and plastic/Bakelite pommels.
 
The other side has no stamps at all. There are also no other marking at all. The sheave had nothing stamped from what I remember. None of my family served in any war after ww2 for what I know and this came from the store room with all of our flags and such.

My grandpa who passed in 2000 could have told me the story...
 
With no USN stamp, that would imply that it was probably produced for either PX sales or for sale on the civilian market. It might even have been produced after WW2 was over out of surplus parts. The War Department cancelled almost every existing knife contract shortly after VJ day and the knife companies were suddenly left holding the bag with thousands of parts left over.
 
The markings are also correct for a late war example of a knife provided to the services under the "Knife Hunting" designation. The changes were authorized in an attempt to keep down costs. It's not an accident that except for the missing branch of service markings it's in all other ways a Camillus MK1. However the only ones I've seen have all been finished bright. It's possible that the dark coating on your knife is from sometime after it left the factory. A lot of times the best we can do is speculate. The knife is correct for some wartime produced products, at the same time when the war ended and the contracts were cancelled a lot of knife companies sold what they had left.
 
zzyzzogeton said:
With no USN stamp, that would imply that it was probably produced for either PX sales or for sale on the civilian market. It might even have been produced after WW2 was over out of surplus parts. The War Department cancelled almost every existing knife contract shortly after VJ day and the knife companies were suddenly left holding the bag with thousands of parts left over.
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This is the probable scenario That looks as if its a post WWII commercial USN Mark 1 Deck Knife; a civilian model, cobbled together from surplus parts. There was a ready market for surplus knives after VJ day, many soldiers/sailors/civilians were ready to go hunting after hostilites had ceased.
 
Ok, uploading a photo to this site is beyond annoying.

So I took apart apart my Kabar and there were spacers that read "Everedy heavy D" as a spacer which I thought was funny. I still love this knife to death, but I really would like to be able to upload pics easier. Maybe someone can guide me...
 
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I use Photobucket. Just upload the picture directly from your computer, copy/paste the URL, and click insert image.
 
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