What Makes a Good, Traditional Barlow?

Can someone please explain to me what a Barlow offers over knives like my GEC 15? Size? Weight? I really don't know anything about the Barlow pattern and appreciate any info before I drop the $ on one.

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Some people argue that the extended bolster offers greater pivot strength, but I imagine that for 99% of people buying them it's purely aesthetics.
 
pmew said:
Some people argue that the extended bolster offers greater pivot strength, but I imagine that for 99% of people buying them it's purely aesthetics.
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Good answer :thumbup:
 
To expand on what Paul said, I understand that back in the day, when Barlows were at the lower end of the price scale in a galaxy of different pocket knife patterns, and were intended to be a durable, simple, workingman's tool, the lifetime of the average knife in use could be as low as three years.

Softer steels in some cases, coarser stones and more frequent use and sharpening, perhaps corrosion damage, or just losing a knife, would all have played a part in this surprisingly short lifetime to our modern expectations. But, I think light (and not so light) prying and general torquing of the blade would have been applied in day to day tasks without the hesitation we would have today, often loosening up the pivot rivet in short order. Witness the number of old blades you see with snapped tips. A Barlows long, sturdy bolster was a neat way to design an inexpensive pocketknife that was truly more resistant to these stresses.

I've sometimes wondered if those of you with extensive collections of old jacks have noticed that the Barlows have less side to side play than short bolstered jacks of similar age. There's no way to know empirically of course, without knowing what work they were put to, but it's a curious question nonetheless.

Of course, if some of the Barlow using old timers from back then could see the prices commanded by the TCs and other SFO Barlows today, they'd probably be pretty bemused...:p
 
Found this nice on the bay....
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the only problem is the back spring really protruding...
yQac7b4.jpg


anyone can tell me if I can grind the back square to solve this?? Thanks
 
pmew said:
Some people argue that the extended bolster offers greater pivot strength, but I imagine that for 99% of people buying them it's purely aesthetics.
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Ah, but those aesthetics...
The brand names/logos stamped on the bolsters make them such fun to collect. :)

 
I kind of always just assumed that, given the low price point of the traditional Barlow, the larger bolster was a cost cutting technique, the knife requiring a smaller portion of natural cover material. Maybe I'm wrong, but I just figured that the steel was cheaper to produce than bone or wood. If so, the bolster was designed with no functional advantage in mind.


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Perhaps I'm misreading but, I think no and yes. If there were 2 pins it'd be fixed, not a slip joint. However the bolsters are pinned onto the scales and soldered I beleive and one pin at the joint. I think the larger bolsters give strength of mass and reduced flexibility to the joint.
 
BearBug said:
Perhaps I'm misreading but, I think no and yes. If there were 2 pins it'd be fixed, not a slip joint. However the bolsters are pinned onto the scales and soldered I beleive and one pin at the joint. I think the larger bolsters give strength of mass and reduced flexibility to the joint.
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I believe both large and small bolsters will have a "Tommy Pin" on knives from GEC. On early barlows, the bolsters were often iron (not steel). The switch to steel may have made the added mass less important.
 
Some handles were entirely iron. I think I posted a half dozen or so catalog cuts in this topic... somewhere in these 731 pages... but here's one example...



iron lining and bolster
 
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You can see them attaching bolsters with "tommy pins" around the 8:40 mark in this video . There's no solder.

[youtube]ZeHWa5jyO74[/youtube]
 
Buzzbait said:
I kind of always just assumed that, given the low price point of the traditional Barlow, the larger bolster was a cost cutting technique, the knife requiring a smaller portion of natural cover material. Maybe I'm wrong, but I just figured that the steel was cheaper to produce than bone or wood. If so, the bolster was designed with no functional advantage in mind.
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I think you are quite right Buzz. The earliest Barlow knives (as shown as a background to Charlie's Ancient below) had two bolsters, and were designed as 'inlay scale' knives. They are clearly not designed as 'hard use' knives, but like most early spring knives, were primarily intended to carry for eating, as a replacement for the fixed blade eating knives, which were carried out of necessity, since inns and private homes did not provide them. Even the Barlow knives of the early 19th century (examples shown in the second image below) are clearly not designed for 'hard use'. I'm not a cutler, but assuming the pivot pin is of the same width, I fail to see why a larger non-integral bolster gives any additional strength to a Barlow over a similar shorter-bolstered Jack knife. Because later Barlows were very inexpensive, they were certainly put to rough use, but even Tom Sawyer at his daftest realised that he and Huck could not use their Barlow knives to free Jim from the wooden shack in which he had been imprisoned, and would need to get case (sheath) knives instead ;)



 
We're looking at different time periods and I don't have much information that old. But in the late 1800s and early 1900s some of the old advertising emphasized the weight of the bolster.



The popularity of barlow was due to its low cost according to this 1910 dictionary.

 
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Cambertree said:
To expand on what Paul said, I understand that back in the day, when Barlows were at the lower end of the price scale in a galaxy of different pocket knife patterns, and were intended to be a durable, simple, workingman's tool, the lifetime of the average knife in use could be as low as three years.

Softer steels in some cases, coarser stones and more frequent use and sharpening, perhaps corrosion damage, or just losing a knife, would all have played a part in this surprisingly short lifetime to our modern expectations. But, I think light (and not so light) prying and general torquing of the blade would have been applied in day to day tasks without the hesitation we would have today, often loosening up the pivot rivet in short order. Witness the number of old blades you see with snapped tips. A Barlows long, sturdy bolster was a neat way to design an inexpensive pocketknife that was truly more resistant to these stresses.

I've sometimes wondered if those of you with extensive collections of old jacks have noticed that the Barlows have less side to side play than short bolstered jacks of similar age. There's no way to know empirically of course, without knowing what work they were put to, but it's a curious question nonetheless.

Of course, if some of the Barlow using old timers from back then could see the prices commanded by the TCs and other SFO Barlows today, they'd probably be pretty bemused...:p
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Those seem like some pretty accurate observations.

Growing up in rural Pennsylvania in the 1950's, we all had Barlows. (Except for the rich kids, who had REAL Boy Scout knives.) We used them for everything from whittling to opening up paint cans & everything in between. You could get them at the general store, hardware & they even gave them away as carnival game prizes. I don't recall what they cost, but it must have been somewhere around 25-50 cents, otherwise we would've never been able to break, lose & replace so many.
 
supratentorial said:
We're looking at different time periods
Click to expand...


Yes, it's very important to distinguish between the Barlows of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries :thumbup:

Arguably, clever marketing goes back considerably further ;) I used to know a guy who was the footwear buyer for a large chain of British 'Army Stores'. He told me how, back in the 1960's, they would get an extra pound of steel put in the shank of their hiking boots. People picked them up, felt the weight, and said, 'Now there's a good solid boot'! :D
 
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