Stag lockback set

Larry303 said:
.Thank you so much for that information...So Larry Vickery thinks ""I just gost to know"". weeelll.. if I'm asking too many questions just tell me......do you still sport a beard?....do you excel in working with Stag?....is your file work second to none?.....
Did you attend your first knife show in 1978 and were you subsequently interviewed by our "Uncle Henry" Baer?............no Larry I have no idea!!
You would have an amazing number of Schrade story's to tell and trust you may be able to share even a little with us??
May I ask if you have any insights into the Imperial Mexican venture?
Do you have a favourite Schrade style or particular knife?
You were in Schrade 'Uniform' when most of us were still in 'Liquidform!'
Aussies are an inquisitive lot as no doubt you saw from our late,great Steve Irwin.
Hoo Roo
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Have had a beard for so long can"t remember when I started it. I would guess about 1968. Hides the my ugly mug. Stag is my favorite handle material. I occasionally use other materials, but stag is the best. It is becoming a very expensive material to use. I don't know if my work is, "second to none". I just try to put out the best I can. Haven't had any complaints over the years. It was around 1978 when I went to my first collectors knife show. The production manager for Schrade saw some of my work and talked to me at this show. I believe it was in Louisville, KY. In about a week I was asked to come to Ellenville. I went and was introduced to managment at the factory, which at that time was on Canal Street, and toured the factory. In a couple of days I went to the city and was introduced Uncle Henry and Albert Baer amoung othe people who worked in the 1776 Broadway office. Uncle Henry became a close friend. I was invited to his home many times. He was familiar with the area in North Carolina where I lived. He liked to reminise of times spent there. Anyway, I spent about a week in Ellenville and reuurned to North Carolina to my primary job which was in management at a textile manufacturing plant. In about a week I received a call from Ellenville asking me to return there for a few days. I took vacation time and went back up there. At this visit I was asked to become part of the Schrade team, doing PR work at the collector knife shows. I presented the Schrade Collectors award, which I made mostly from the 75th anniv. knife, some was the $1000.00 edition, and showed my collection at these shows up untill the early 1990's. I became an Authorized Customizer and Repairman of Schrade product shortly after my second visit to Ellenville I really don't have a favorite knife, but I prefer older standard patterns. Stockman, trappers. serpentine, equal end, etc. Getting carried away, so much for this story. Someday I will tell the story about the room in the basement of the old Schrade factory on Canal Street where all the knife errors was dumped.
 
Codger_64 said:
Mr. Williams, we really do appreciate your posting and giving us information. I am sure that you have much more knowledge about obscure details than you realize. Many of these details are not available to collectors here because little was written down at the time, and not all that was written survives.

Primary sources of information outside of the surviving archives is very hard to find. It is amazing how one little clue from someone who was at some point affiliated with the company can pull together fragmented research.

Case in point is the insight we gained by the postings of Frank Giorgianni's son, Tom. He was able to directly answer some questions and even took a few directly to his father for us. As collectors, we consider such information priceless. It is the story behind the knives, as much as the quality and variety of the knives themselves which make them interesting.


Since others are asking questions, I would like to ask something that has puzzled me for some time. DIssatisfied with the sparse information available in existing reference books, I am doing some rather extensive research into the Schrade Scrimshaw knives. Having worked with Schrade doing embellishments, do you know anything about the progression of Schrade artists beyond Mr. Giorgianni and his successor Tom Duffey? In my research, I have found designs by other artists and mentions in product development records of other inhouse artists (Kelly). Some names found are traceable to artists of note (Linda Karst Stone, Glenn Chambers), but some works are either unattributed, or the artist is obscure outside of a few examples. Major sets like the Whalers and Presidential series we have some information on the artists. Mr. Feeney was one of those. Can you discuss this subject?

Michael
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I know very little of the artist associated with Imperial Schrade after Frankie Giorgianni. I had met Tom Duffey on one of my trip to Ellenville. I was involved more with the manufacturing process than I was with anything else. If you could someway get in touch with Debbie Chase she could fill you in on a lot of history. She was working on this subject at one time in the late 90's.
I have no idea where she is now.
 
Thankyou for the answer anyway! On the manufacturing end, I have a knife made for the Canadian Ducks Unlimited organization, a 15OT, which has a simplified "fileback". It is one of the very few production/sfo knives I can recall which had such an adornment. I understand that it was most likely mechanically produced on a maching like a serrator and not by hand. I believe it was produced within the last decade of the company's existance. Are you aware of this knife's design history, or of the more intricate and heavily customized "Custom Made" knives (SCM7 and SCM5) from circa 1984? Were these designs entirely inhouse (i.e the Buley brothers or Mr. Swinden), or did you have any input as a collaborator or consultant?
 
I had no part in the production and/or development of the Canadian Ducks Unlimited 15OT or the SCM editions. If there was a sizeable issue of the 15OT CDUL I would have been machine worked. You can tell by how uniform the filework is. I am sure the SCM knives were done as a production knife. I beleive these knives was in the regular line in 1983. This was under the managment of Dave Swinden who was always involved in anything that went through that factory.
 
Camper17 - I''m sure you are going to get bombarded with Schrade trivia questions so I'm getting mine in early. We've had several threads over the last couple years regarding the rare Uncle Henry staglon versions of the 3rd Generation knives, which are commonly referred to as "The Missing Uncle Henry's".

These would be the LB-4, 892UH, and 707UH. Like a few others they were never found in any of the catalogs, although there have been some production numbers listed. I've managed to find an example of each one, but they don't come cheap.

Any ideas as to who these knives were made for and how they were distributed? There have been several theories presented, but from unknown sources.

Thanks very much for your contributions.
 
G'Day Herman,No time like the present mate to tell us all about that room in the basement where the knife errors were dumped.I trust you're not going to tell us they were retrieved and all ended up on Ebay!!....and then into my collection!
Richard Lanigan whom I believe you may know has been regailing me with early story's of Walden and Ellenville and of when he was a lad and would go to the quarry at Walden where similar knives were dumped ,and with the other kids throw them around!!Not politically correct by todays standards however isn't it strange how we all did things like that as kids and rarely got hurt.
Did Uncle Henry have a personal knife collection he ever showed you?
Thawk raised interesting question as well....perhaps we should all take a number and ask questions in sequence.!
Thank you so much for sharing all the above. Hoo Roo
 
Arnold, believe it or not they're two different people, both quite the rabid collectors and historians ( Of course we can all relate to the rabid collector part:D). I believe this is one of the award knives camper17 was refering to:
1581d78.jpg
[/IMG]
Or perhaps it'sfrom a different event?

Eric
 
Dang! Too bad Canal Street Cutlery is in that old building now, any chance I might have had to do some scrounging probably also occured to everyone presently working there. of course the same thought probably crossed the minds of all past employees and Rich Langston as well. I'd be lucky to find a bone chip at this point:D:D

Eric
 
ea42 said:
Arnold, believe it or not they're two different people, both quite the rabid collectors and historians ( Of course we can all relate to the rabid collector part:D). I believe this is one of the award knives camper17 was refering to:
1581d78.jpg
[/IMG]
Or perhaps it'sfrom a different event?

Eric
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This is one of my workbacks. Most of the presentation knives I gave out on this pattern was boxed and had bone handles. Some I had put stag on. The 75th and the 80th Anniversary knives were mostly used. Some of the 75th $1000.00 editions was on a pedestal with a plexiglass cover. Ken K. who played Cliff Barnes on Dallas was presented with one of these knives .Some was the $100.00 edition with stag handles I had put on. The 80th anniversary knives was in a wooden box. All were workbacks. I am not sure the one pictured was a presentation knive. Could have been one I had to have on short notice. Was It packaged? If so it should have had a brass identification plate inside the box giving the Show and the date it was presented at.
 
Thanks for the info Camper, I never knew about the presentation knives until this one popped up. It has an Imperial-Schrade etch that you can barely make out in the photo, but no packaging. Geez that $1000 knife must have been a beaut! I've got a couple of the bone 80th anniv. barlows, one's a salesman's sample-SS30. I believe he was out of Rock Hill, NY, but I don't recall his name. Those were the first file worked kives I had ever seen, impressed the heck out of me to say the least.

Eric
 
thawk said:
Camper17 - I''m sure you are going to get bombarded with Schrade trivia questions so I'm getting mine in early. We've had several threads over the last couple years regarding the rare Uncle Henry staglon versions of the 3rd Generation knives, which are commonly referred to as "The Missing Uncle Henry's".

These would be the LB-4, 892UH, and 707UH. Like a few others they were never found in any of the catalogs, although there have been some production numbers listed. I've managed to find an example of each one, but they don't come cheap.

Any ideas as to who these knives were made for and how they were distributed? There have been several theories presented, but from unknown sources.

Thanks very much for your contributions.
Click to expand...


Thawk,
I can"t help you on the knives in question. I have had the Lb-4. if fact I handled one in genuine stag horn and sold it on ebay. This was about 2 or 3 years ago. Don't even know now who bought it. I never really got in to the current production knives when I was with Schrade. I was more in to customizing, repairing collecting the older ones and working the collector shows. Sorry.
 
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