So you are saying that you never got an XT4 either? Seems I may still owe one to another of my Mates down there. Perhaps I will finally ship him one... make it a two-fer and let him toss the second to you. Like yourself and the SQ111, it was a knife from the 2004 catalog that I thought I would never see. As I picked up one or more of the 2004 offerings from '04 auction, the XT4 was the only X-Timer that never appeared in the flood of post liquidation knives. But eventually a precious few unground blanks appeared and I nabbed most of the ones I saw - less than a baker's dozen. So there evidently was an attempt to produce them.
But I never found even one finished example. ISC had spread their wings so far in '03-'04 that even by July of that year they hadn't gotten them into production. We tend to forget what was going on behind the scenes there leading up to the forced bankruptcy. Much of the planning and even day-to-day decision making had been taken from ISC's official management. Decisions were being made for them by outside people who didn't know beans about the industry. So it is really a wonder that as many of the newer design knives got produced as did. Alas there was no Baer at the helm to call the shots. One of his first actions when he bought Ulster was to examine every knife pattern being made by the Devines. And to chop the build list significantly. The same was done when Schrade Cut Co and Imperial were acquired. Albert Baer knew manufacturing and he knew marketing. And he knew the rule of holes. That is - when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. The outside "turn around specialists" thought only to dig faster and deeper. The "Space Debris Knives", as I call them, are a prime example. The grand multitude of 100th anniversary issues is another. As if that weren't enough look at the case of getting so deep with one particular customer that this tail began wagging the dog. IMHO, no customer would ever have gotten by with setting such unfavorable terms with Albert Baer.
Ramble on I did. One last note... for an interesting exercise, add up the number of knife patterns offered in the catalogs for each year from 1997-2004. It is an eye opener.
Michael
