S7309gsil

[thawk]

What did a lumberman use these for, marking the thickness of wood to be cut into boards? This is from the 1926 catalog. Anyone know what the GSIL stands for?

 

[tongueriver]

GermanSILver? Wikipedia: "Nickel silver, German silver, Argentan, new silver, nickel brass, albata, alpacca, or electrum is a copper alloy with nickel and often zinc. The usual formulation is 60% copper, 20% nickel and 20% zinc. Nickel silver is named for its silvery appearance, but it contains no elemental silver unless plated. The name "German silver" refers to its development by 19th-century German metalworkers in imitation of the Chinese alloy known as paktong (cupronickel) All modern, commercially important nickel silvers (such as those standardized under ASTM B122) contain significant amounts of zinc, and are sometimes considered a subset of brass."

 

[Codger_64]

Carpenter or wheelwright or cabinetmaker. Page 8 of the catalog E for numbering system and handle materials codes.
http://collectors-of-schrades-r.us/Catalogs/images/1926_Schrade_Catalogs.pdf

 

[thawk]

S (prefix)= Special finish or combination, GSIL = Nickel Silver

 

[howieareyu]

Whenever I look up a model number for a Schrade Cut Co, I think what a tough time it must have been for the salesmen to keep track of all the prefixes/suffixes

-- Howie

 

[Codger_64]

Whenever I look up a model number for a Schrade Cut Co, I think what a tough time it must have been for the salesmen to keep track of all the prefixes/suffixes

-- Howie

They had the codes listed in the front of the catalogs and likely had them comitted to memory. Just consider all of the numbers we have to memorize today that have no order or relationship. This code had an order and relationship. And most salesmen did not visit individual mom and pop stores crisscrossing streets and covering a town from end to end. At this time in the industry, salesmen traveled by train, sold in quantity to jobbers who in turn sold to retailers. And they traveled with rolls if not trunks of samples, some actually marked with etches of stock numbers on the blades. I think we have all seen a few of these surviving etched samples. Of course each cutlery had it's own numbering system. But most traveling salesmen worked for only one cutlery at a time.