When we’re taught about great innovations in the history of manufacturing and design, we’re often told that prior to 1900, the only way that men had to shave themselves was to use a cutthroat razor – three inches of hollow-ground steel sharpened to a lethal edge, and which could be fatal if you didn’t know how to use one correctly. We’re then taught that all this changed in 1901, when King Camp Gillette came along with his swanky new double-edged safety razor and revolutionised the shaving industry forever!

Right?

Not really.

The Origins of Single-Edge Safety Razors

Yes, Gillette’s safety razor was an innovation, yes, it made shaving cheaper, faster and safer…but it isn’t the game-changer that everybody seems to think that it is – mainly because Gillette was not the first person to invent a safety razor!

Safety razors date all the way back to the last quarter of the 19th century when inventors and manufacturers, spurred on by the Industrial Revolution, attempted to improve on the effectiveness and the ease-of-use of the razors then in use – that is to say – straight razors!

To this end, there were actually loads of companies in the late 1800s and early 1900s all trying to find a system whereby a safer razor could be sold to the public, which was easier to use than the traditional straight-edge, which took skill, time and patience to both use, master, and maintain. Companies like GEM, EverReady, Valet-Autostrop, STAR, and Wilkinson Sword, were all on the bandwagon!

In fact, the very notion of marketing a new device as a “safety” razor wasn’t even Gillette’s idea! Nope – the Kampfe Brothers beat him to it by twenty years! When they launched their new “STAR” Lather-Catcher in 1880, it was the first safety razor! No, it wasn’t the first to be invented, but it was literally the first safety razor in the sense that Kampfe Bros. was the first company to use the term “Safety Razor” in their very aggressive advertising. The idea caught on, and soon, loads of other manufacturers were all trying to jump on this new bandwagon of selling “safety” razors.

These early versions of safety razors were about as different from modern double-edged razors, and modern cartridge-razors as it’s possible to be. For one thing – the blades were not disposable! Nope – the whole idea was that once the blades were dull, you’d sharpen them up again like any other razor or knife or pair of scissors – and then you’d give them a thorough stropping with a piece of leather, and put the same blades back into service. In an era when money could be tight and people wanted as much value out of their products as possible, this was an attractive, and cost-saving feature.

These razors were what’s known today as “single-edge” or “S.E.” razors, because only one side of the blade was sharpened. They were basically modified straight razors, with the blade cut into chunks, fitted inside a protective steel cage or guard, and then affixed to a handle or grip – the same as just about any other safety razor today, except for the shape, fit and finish.

Wilkinson Sword Single-Edge Safety Razors

Wilkinson Sword is one of the most famous cutlery companies in the world, founded by famed London gunsmith Henry Nock in 1772. As the name suggests, the company originally made…swords! When the demand for swords started to fall away however, after the American Revolution, French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars of the 1770s, 80s, 90s, and early 1800s, the company had to find something else to make, and they turned from edged weapons to edged tools.

While the Wilkinson company made loads of things – rifles, guns, bayonets, swords, and even motorcycles during WWI – they became famous for razors in the late 1800s and early 1900s, shortly after the company was officially named “Wilkinson Sword”, in 1891. Along with companies like Kampfe Bros., GEM, and Valet-Autostrop, Wilkinson Sword became one of the most famous manufacturers of razors in the world, and they started cranking them out in earnest in the 1910s and 20s.

Wilkinson Sword safety razors made in the early 1900s were all of the single-edged variety, with removable hollow-ground blades designed to be reused and re-sharpened over and over again. Sets came in handsome stained wood, or leather-covered boxes, with a little rack to hold the blades, and a cradle to hold the razor and strop. The company gave the sets attractive, classy-sounding names like “Empire” and “Pall Mall” to appeal to customers aspiring to be seen owning and using the very latest in personal grooming devices.
In the 1930s, these sets started becoming more simplified. The wooden boxes with their metal fittings or leather exteriors were replaced with simpler steel boxes, nickel-plated, and adorned with more hip, Art Deco-style designs.

In our increasingly waste-conscious world, people have started rejecting throwaway cartridge razors, and some are even rejecting the less-wasteful, but still disposable double-edged razors – the kind introduced by King C. Gillette at the turn of the last century. There’s a growing interest, in the 21st century, in using vintage razors such as the classical cutthroat straight-edge, and in single-edged safety razors with reusable blades.

So, how exactly do you use them? Where do you get them? What kinds are there?

One of the most easily accessible manufacturers of these types of vintage, single-edge razors are those made by Wilkinson Sword! I purchased a set on eBay, and spent the last few days restoring it to as close to its original condition as I could reasonably manage. So, what exactly needed doing?

Restoring the Razor Set

The good thing about these sets is that they’re very over-engineered. The metalware is typically brass, heavily plated in nickel for extra protection, and the blades are carefully protected in their own little racks inside the storage case.

So what’s the biggest issue with these sets?

Perhaps unsurprisingly – water damage. They’re razors, they’re used in wet, damp environments, after all, and water-damage (specifically rust) is their greatest enemy.

The set I bought was a bit battered, but in usable condition, barring rust, to greater or lesser degrees, on almost every single one of the seven blades which made up the kit’s seven-day set. The first thing to do was to take everything out of the metal case, blow it out, dust it and clean it.

Once that was done, I was able to more closely examine the blades, which had obviously been used rough and put away wet – literally. To de-rust the blades meant having to slide them out of their protective brackets, the little metal sleeves which allow the blades to be mounted inside the razor head. In some cases, this was pretty easy. In others, the blades had to be tapped loose with a hammer! In some instances this wasn’t too difficult, in others, the blades required real persuasion.

When metal rusts, it expands, and that causes the friction which jammed the blades into their mounting brackets. Liberal use of WD-40 and a lot of firm but determined hammer-tapping loosened the really stiff blades, however, and meant that I could get on with the main job:

Cleaning the mounting brackets, and de-rusting the blades. Fortunately, the brackets are, like the razor, heavily plated in nickel, so there’s no rust or corrosion to be found there – just a lot of dust and gunk, easily removed with cotton-buds.

De-rusting the blades required treatment with an acidic de-rusting solution, and then polishing with 0000-grade steel wool to remove the final encrustations back down to bare steel. Removing the water-marks on the blades would be nigh impossible (and even if I did remove them, they’d only come back after more contact with water), so I left them as they were. I did however, remove all the rust and smooth off the steel, and then sharpened and stropped the blades (again, with them removed from their mounting brackets) before putting them all back together and back into the razor case.

The next thing to do was to attend to the razor itself. It has a number of moving parts, such as the comb, the bar that holds the razor-blades, the spring-loaded teeth which hold the blades in place when the razor is in use, and the swivel-knob at the base of the handle for releasing or tightening up the razor-head for when you want to insert or remove a blade. Obviously, when you’re dealing with something that’s literally razor sharp, you don’t want any sort of stiffness and jerky components!

Replacing the old Strop

One feature of these old single-edged razor kits which is pretty nifty is that they almost all came with some type of automatic stropping device, to smooth off the blades and realign the edges between shaves. You can see this in the STAR razors, the Wilkinson Sword razors, the Rolls Razors, and – pretty obviously – in the Valet Autostrop razors. The basic premise was that you fed the strop through the razor (or put the blade into a specially-made stropping handle) and ran the blade back and forth across the strop.

The strops were made of leather. This means that they don’t always last. They dry, they crack, they break, or they wear out from overuse – so replacing them, if they can’t be revived, is rather important.

This is easily done with a piece of leather of the right thickness, length, and finish. The leather must be smooth, soft, and thin. In the case of the Wilkinson Sword razors, the leather must be thin enough to fit into the gap in the razor-head through which the strop is designed to run. Then it’s simply a matter of finding a way to mount one end of the strop to the wall, and being able to feed the other end through the razor. The leather has to be long enough to strop the razor effectively – at least 12 inches long.

How Does this Set Work?

It’s pretty simple, really.

You sharpen the blades on sharpening stones of appropriate grits, until they’re literally razor sharp. Then, you strop them on a strop.

Make sure that you remove the blades from their brackets before sharpening, to prevent damage, and to put them back into their brackets when stropping, so that they’re easier to hold. You can either use the automatic-stropping system that comes with the razor, or if one doesn’t exist, because the original strop is unusable or missing (or you haven’t had the opportunity to make a new strop, which is easily done with enough of the right leather), then you can use an ordinary straight razor strop. It’s not ideal, because these small blades can be fiddly to hold, but it does work.

If you do have a compatible strop for the razor, then you mount one end of the strop to the wall, and feed the other side through the razor where it says “INSERT STROP THIS SIDE”. With a firm grip on the razor, and keeping the strop straight and level, slide the razor back and forth across the stop – the faster, the better.

The faster you do it, the faster the gears on the razor engage with the strop, causing the blade to flop over to the correct side for each pass along the strop. Thorough stropping typically involves a couple of dozen passes to ensure complete coverage of the blade. It’s important to keep the strop level so that the blade connects with the leather, and it’s equally important to keep the strop tight, so that the blade doesn’t slice up the leather due to improper angle between the blade and strop.

When you’re done, you simply slide the razor off the strop, and now you’re ready to lock the blade into the razor, and commence shaving.

If you’ve used the razor method of stropping, then you can ignore most of what comes next. If you had to strop the blade by hand, then you will need to read what comes next, because that’s how to put the blade into the razor, ready for shaving…

This is done by unscrewing the knob at the base of the razor, so that you loosen up the razor head. You swivel the mounting bar that holds the blade upwards, and slot the blade (in its mounting bracket) onto the bar at right-angles to it, so that the knob on the bar fits into the hole in the bracket. Then you twist sideways, and this locks the blade into place.

Flip the blade down the correct way (pointing towards the adjustable comb feature at the front of the razor) and hold it in place by pressing the adjustment-knob at the back of the razor head. This slides out the comb, which locks the blade in place with two little teeth, stopping it from flopping around everywhere. Finally, adjust the razor head and tighten up the knob in the handle to hold everything in place.

You’re now ready to shave!

To remove the blade, you simply release the knob in the handle, press the adjustment-knob at the back of the razor head to unlock the blade, and twist it off the mounting bar. Easy! Just make sure that in all these operations, you don’t cut yourself on the blade.

In this last image here, you can see the razor with the blade correctly inserted, with the two prongs or teeth holding the blade down, ready to shave. As you shave, the stubble and soap builds up under the blade, between the edge, and the teeth or ridges on the comb. You can remove it all easily when the time comes to remove the blade after use.

Looking After the Razor Set

Looking after a Wilkinson Sword or similarly-styled single-edged safety-razor set is much like looking after a set of straight razors, and the same rules apply.

The blades should be sharpened thoroughly, stropped generously, and kept DRY when they’re not in use. These old blades are made of carbon steel, and as such, they can rust extremely easily. If you expect your set to last, the blades must be kept dry between uses, and any blades used must be cleaned and dried after shaving, before they’re put away. Any damp at all will cause the blades to start growing rust. In fact this was such a problem with early razors that Wilkinson Sword was one of the first companies in the world to start selling stainless steel razor blades in the 1960s!

Closing Remarks…

So – what are my thoughts on this? Are these old SE razors effective? Do they shave?

Yes they do. They take a bit of getting used to, but having used my Wilkinson Sword set, I can assure you, they most definitely do shave, and they do it passably well. Their bulk may make them tricky to handle in the beginning, but I’m sure with practice, you could get quite good at it.

Are they worth buying and using as everyday shavers?

Yes, if you don’t mind the extra maintenance, and the potentially high costs of purchase and possible need for restorations.

What should I check for when buying such a set?

Quite a lot, actually. Make sure that the set is complete, that the blades are in usable (or at least, restorable) condition, that the razor is functional and free from cracks or other damage, and that they can be cleaned thoroughly before use. As for yourself, make sure that you know how to properly sharpen a razor blade before using it. Shaving with a blunt razor is a recipe for disaster, so it’s better to over-sharpen a razor than it is to try and cut corners with it, and make sure you strop the blades thoroughly before use.

Most people who know anything about pocketwatches and how they’re used or worn, will be familiar with the wide variety of attachments you can clip onto the bow (the ring at the top of a pocketwatch) for decorative, or security purposes.

Double-Alberts, Single-Alberts, ring-clip chains, belt-hook chains, grosgrain fobs, and drop-fobs are the most common types of pocketwatch adornments, but one type of pocketwatch accessory is almost forgotten in the 21st century – the pocketwatch chatelaine fob.

I’ve wanted a chatelaine fob for years, I just didn’t know it. Or rather…I did know it…I just didn’t know what they were called! I found out what their proper title was when I was browsing an antiques website a few years ago, and ever since, I’d been chasing after one, trawling eBay, trying to find one that I liked enough (and could afford!) to buy. Man, these things are expensive! I finally got lucky and found one which I could afford without breaking the bank, and made a dive for it.

What Is a Chatelaine?

When most people think of chatelaines, they think of those things that women used to wear back in the Victorian and Edwardian eras – large, elaborate clasps or brooches which hung from a woman’s belt or waistband, with chains hanging off the bottom, which were used to carry all kinds of little accessories: Scissors, keys, sewing equipment, pocketwatches, change-purses, pillboxes…the list of things you could clip to a chatelaine was almost endless. Chatelaines for women died out in the 1920s, when changing fashions and an increase in the use of handbags meant that was no longer fashionable (or necessary) to carry all your necessities on a set of chains hanging off your belt!

A man’s chatelaine is little different from a lady’s chatelaine, except that male ones aren’t quite as complicated! They’re comprised of a hook-clasp, which fastens to the user’s garments, a watch-chain, to hold the watch, and a metallic drop-fob, usually with a plaque or cartouche at the bottom for engraving the owner’s name or initials into.

The construction or style of the fob is completely open to interpretation. Some have braided wire, some have chains of different sizes and lengths, some have panels held together with rings or rivets…it’s really up to you, what you’re after, what you can find, and what your personal style is.

How do you Wear a Chatelaine Fob?

Since chatelaine fobs are so obscure these days, it’s probably not surprising that most people don’t know how to wear them.

The watch is clipped to the chain, and stored in the watch-pocket of your jeans, slacks or shorts. And yes, that “fifth pocket” on your jeans IS a WATCH-POCKET. It’s not for your keys, or coins, or condoms, or your cyanide pill if your mission goes pear-shaped…it is for your pocketwatch!

The clasp-hook is slid over your belt, or the waistband of your jeans, or shorts, and then clipped into place. The drop-fob just…drops down the side! It’s function is largely decorative. And there you have it! All done.

That’s neat! I wanna buy one!

Sure you do!…um…good luck finding one, but, sure!

Search eBay, using terms like “pocketwatch fob” or “chatelaine fob”, or “antique watch-fob” or word-combinations in that general direction, and you might find what you’re looking for. But be sure to pay really close attention to what you’re buying. In particular, make sure of the following:

Make sure that the drop-fob has the seal-fob at the bottom. Sometimes, they’re missing.

Make sure that the watch-chain is included. And make sure that if it is, the lobster-claw clasp at the end (that goes around the watch) is also included! Make sure that the hook-clasp (that goes around the watch) is also there.

How much do they cost, you ask? Well, it really depends. They run the whole gamut of prices, from under $100, to over $300! How much you wanna spend on the style you like is entirely up to you. But keep in mind that the vast, vast majority of chatelaine fobs are gold-filled. They’re not solid gold, hell they’re not even silver vermeil. They’ll be gilt brass in most instances. Think about that before you potentially drop hundreds and hundreds of dollars on a watch chatelaine.

Last year, I wrote an article on this blog about the time I discovered pair of sterling silver cufflinks with the Scotch College school crest on them. Discovered online, it was the biggest shock of my life that such a pair of cufflinks might even exist! I absolutely had to have them, and come hell-or-high-water, I added them to my collection.

This posting is all about the unlikely, and frankly – unexpected – sequel to the discovery of nine months previous.

Suffice to say that I was contacted by a retired antiques dealer up in Brisbane, who said that he’d stumbled across my blog while researching a discovery that he’d made in a pile of scrap gold and jewelry. His researches had led him to my blog, and after reading the first article I’d written about the sterling silver Scotch College cufflinks that I’d found, he was very eager to get in touch with me.

We made contact via text-message, and that was when he dropped the bombshell information on me that while digging around in some of his antique jewelry, he’d found a pair of the same cufflinks in 9ct solid gold!

I’ll admit it took me a couple of minutes to register this information. Silver cufflinks belonging to a high school are rare enough, but solid gold ones!? And antiques!? What the hell’s the chances of that?? He told me that he’d found my silver pair while researching the school motto, and asked me if I would like to buy the matching gold ones as well!

Uh, no. Thanks. It’s fine, no really…

OF COURSE I SAID YES!!

After exchanging a couple of photographs and confirming what they were, and that they were real, we tossed a few numbers back and forth, finally settling on a price, with free express postage thrown in! They arrived within 24 hours, and were everything that I’d hoped them to be!

As you can see, these cufflinks are the exact same size, and design as the sterling silver pair in my previous posting. For this reason, I figured that they were made during the same era – the late 1920s through the 1930s, and manufactured by the Melbourne-based firm of G. Damman’s, which held a large jeweler’s and tobacconists’s premises on the corners of Swanston & Collins Streets in the Melbourne CBD.

I do not know for what reason, nor under what circumstances cufflinks of such quality were manufactured for, and sold by, the school, and we may never know, but the fact that they exist at all is tantalising and fascinating! I absolutely love having both sets in my collection, and I think I can safely say that I would never, ever sell them!

Where the hell would I ever find another set!?

One of the most unusual elements about this whole story is where the cufflinks came from – not Melbourne, not even Victoria. No! They came all the way from Queensland, up near Brisbane!

How on earth a pair of antique gold high school cufflinks from Melbourne ended up in a suburb just outside Brisbane on the other end of the country is anyone’s guess, but now they’re back home in Melbourne where they belong, and safe in the company of their silver brethren!

Other Scotch College Memorabilia

Along with gold and silver cufflinks, the school also commissioned everything from chinaware and cups, glasses, tie-bars, tie-pins, badges, cigarette lighters (also commissioned from Damman’s Jewelers) and stationery. You can still buy a lot of this stuff (OK, maybe not the lighters) from the school, brand-new, or if you’re after something vintage, then online.

I’m very pleased to be given the chance to add these, possibly quite rare, cufflinks to my collection, where they can rest alongside their sterling silver brethren!

So, here’s something that I picked up at my local flea-market on the weekend. It was dusty, grimy, battered, and very, very faded. Despite that, a cursory examination told me that it was actually in excellent condition, despite being, what I judged, to be upwards of 100+ years old! It took me all of five minutes to decide that I really wanted this, and haggled a discounted price with the stallholder, and trotted away a very, very happy young man.

Once I got the folio home, I started examining it in more detail.

The more I looked at it, the more it appeared to me that this beautiful leather-good was significantly older than I initially believed. The styling of the pockets, as well as their general orientation and size, as well as the tri-opening panels, were all reminiscent of men’s wallets from the Edwardian era of the early 1900s – only – larger. Much larger!

Added to these observations was the fact that the folio was devoid of any modern features. No zippers, no snap-buttons, no elastic strap to hold it shut, no plastic of any kind, and – surprisingly – no indication at all – of where it was made! There wasn’t a thing on it, or in it, to tell me anything about it! No maker’s marks, no company logos, trademarks, company names, retailers’ addresses…nothing!

Once I got it home, I started the restoration process. This mostly consisted of double-checking, and reinforcing any loose or missing stitching – and going through the original needle-holes, where possible, to hold the folio together (fortunately, there wasn’t much of this which had to be done!). The next step was to clean the leather, and then came the labourous task of polishing it.

For this, I used ordinary dark tan boot-polish…and my right hand. Honestly, I just find it so much easier to apply shoe polish with your fingers, than fiddling around with a cloth or polishing rag of some kind. I just scooped it up, smeared it onto the leather, and started rubbing it in with my fingers. Once it was on, I just used a regular buffing brush to distribute and work the polish into the grain, spreading it out, and in, as I went. This was the real calorie-burner! I started on the outside and worked my way in, removing the belt entirely because it’d just get in the way (I polished that separately, later on).

The next thing to do was to do the interior. This was much more fiddly because of all the pockets and sleeves, but I got there in the end. Here, you can see what the folio looked like originally, vs. what it looked like when I was done…

Originally, the entire folio was this sort of…paper-bag brown. You can still see hints of the original colour showing through, where it had faded over the years (this also accounts for the uneven colour-distribution on the left and right). The interior received the same hand-applied polish and brushing, and then the entire thing was rubbed all over with a generous amount of dubbin.

Here you can see the final product, with the folio closed-up and belted…

…and the other side…

One element which I really loved was the decorative tooling around the belt-loop:

And finally, the interior…

If you look on the right, you might be able to see a light discolouration – a horizontal line running across the middle of the panel – that’s the result of the strap or belt being fastened across it for years and years, and the leather fading as a result.

Here it is fully opened…

On the left are three pockets (two small ones on top, one big one underneath). Next to them is the loop or sleeve to hold a writing instrument. The loop is VERY small. It will hold a pencil, or a dip pen, but that’s about it! Part of the restoration will have to involve enlarging (or replacing) this loop so that the folio can actually store at least one, decent sized fountain pen for the future!

The central panel holds one large pocket for storing documents, and three smaller ones for storing stamps and cards. Finally, on the right is one more large pocket, again for storing papers and documents. If you look very close, you can see the remains of an elastic strap sewn into the leather bordering, which would’ve been used to hold a notebook in place. Replacing that will be another part of the restoration.

Restoring the Folio

Apart from cleaning, polishing and rubbing in beeswax, the folio needed a few minor repairs and alterations. I hand-sewed some of the corners and edges where the stitching had come undone, to hold the folio together and to stop the pockets from tearing. Where possible I used the original stitch-holes to keep things neat, and also to preserve the integrity of the leather.

The next step was replacing the pen-loop. The original loop was extremely small and a pencil barely fit inside. To remove it, I cut away the original stitching using a pocketknife, removed the old leather forming the loop, used it as a pattern to cut a new piece of very thin leather, folded it over, stuck it inside, and using my sewing machine, I sewed the new loop back into place where the old one had been – again, using the original stitching-holes to try and keep things neat. The change is barely perceptible, but now, the new loop can actually hold a pen! I deliberately sewed the new loop out from the seam by about half a centimeter or thereabouts, so that it could fit a decent-sized modern fountain pen (and most vintage ones, too).

The final step in the restoration was sewing in a new, black elastic book strap (see above). To do this, I cut the stitches around the old book strap, removed the worn out remains of the old elastic, fed the new elastic through the same hole and sewed it back in. Then I stretched the elastic across, repeated the same thing on the other side, and sewed that in as well. To get the tension right (if it’s too loose, the book will just flop around everywhere), I measured the length, and then cut off two inches so that the elastic would have to stretch the last two inches, giving the right tension.

And here’s the final result:

As you can see, there have been a few changes. The enlarged pen-loop will now hold a modern cartridge-converter sized fountain pen (the pen in question is a Montblanc No. 145), and it has been made out of leather of a very similar shade to the original. In time, it will age to look more or less exactly the same.

The black elastic strap now holds the book in place, allowing me to flip it over either side, and access the two large pockets without having to remove the book entirely.

All in all, a great result!

Not bad for a $15.00 purchase at the flea-market.

Pocketknives are fascinating little gadgets. Whether it’s a tiny 2.1/2-inch quill-knife, or a larger 5 or 6-inch stiletto, pocketknives have been part of our lives for centuries. Carried and used for everything from survival situations to cutting open boxes that come through the mail from eBay, opening mail, eating food, carving, cutting, slicing, opening cans, or even something as mundane as sharpening a pencil – pocketknives have been the go-to mainstay tool for all these tasks for generations.

Collecting pocketknives is a highly popular hobby. Most knives are relatively cheap, portable, robust, and don’t take up a great deal of space. The wide variety of knife-patterns, blade-types, decorative elements, manufacturers and sizes in pocketknives is what makes them so collectible, and knives from famous manufacturers, made of rare or precious materials, or which were limited editions, can command high prices on the secondhand market.

In this posting, I’ll be talking about the general restoration process behind breathing new life into the type of pocketknife that most people will be familiar with: The standard slip-joint pocketknife, as typified by those made by W.R. Case, Victorinox, J. Rodgers & Sons, Southern & Richardson, and countless other manufacturers during the 1800s, and the majority of the 20th century.

Basic Knife Anatomy

In this posting, I’ll be talking about slip-joint knives: the kind of knife with a blade that folds back into the handle, so everything going forward, will relate to this style of knife.

To begin at the beginning, we need to know what the various parts of the knife are.

The body of the knife is made up of various components, which are stacked, one on top of the other, and held together with metallic rods.

On the outsides, working our way in, we have the bolsters. Not all knives have these. Some do, some don’t. Some have them on both sides of the knife, some only have them on one side. Bolsters are the flat, metallic panels at either end of a pocketknife. They’re usually brass, nickel-silver, stainless steel or some other corrosion-resistant metal. Their purpose is to strengthen the knife, and to protect the covers or scales on the sides of the handle, from damage.

Covers, also called scales, are the large, decorative panels which make up the majority of the bulk on the handle of a folding knife. Covers can be simply utilitarian, and be made of plastic, or steel or brass, but usually, they’re decorative. Pocketknives have had scales or covers made of anything from sterling silver to mother of pearl, ivory, bone, horn, any number of a variety of different woods, and various types of plastics in any number of finishes. Depending on the knife, scales may be smooth, or corrugated/textured. Textured scales are typically added to a knife to make it easier to grip.

Inlaid into the scales are (although, not always) small, metal panels, which can be almost any shape – rectangular, shield, circular…the list goes on. These are sometimes included for the purposes of embellishment (and to give the customer a place to engrave something like a name, date, or initials), or else, will contain details such as the company’s name, logo, or other trademark. These small panels are known as shields, badges or plates, depending on which name-convention you take to heart. Not all knives have these, but most will. They’re usually made of either brass, or nickel-silver.

The bolsters and the scales fit onto flat strips of metal, known as liners. Usually, they’re made of brass, so as not to rust and jam the knife.

Between the scales, bolsters and liners is the spring. The spring is the flat strip of metal at the bottom of the knife (or the top of the handle, if holding the knife with the blade-edge facing down). The spring is made of spring steel, which is nice and flexible. The spring is what holds the blades of the knife open, or closed.

Finally, you have the blades of the knife. Anything that comes out of a knife is known as a ‘blade’, regardless of whether it actually is a blade, or not. Knives can have anywhere from one, to two, three, four, or more blades, and extra features, depending on the knife’s size, and complexity. I won’t cover all this here, because otherwise we’ll be here all day.

Finally, the knife is held together with pins and rivets. The pins are driven through the bolsters, liners, and blades, and are then hammered and peened over, and smoothed off, to hold the knife together. Smaller rivets or pins are used to hold the scales or covers onto the liners, to stop them from coming loose.

A standard slip-joint folding pocketknife will have two pins for holding in the blades and bolsters (one pin on each end of the knife), a third pin in the middle, to hold the spring in place along with the liners and covers/scales, and usually (but not always) extra pins or rivets to hold the scales in place. As with the liners, the pins or rivets are usually brass, nickel-silver, or stainless steel.

Some pocketknives have additional features, such as the very popular lockback mechanism. The lockback mechanism is a toggle or button located at the back of the knife. When the knife is opened, the ‘lock’ prevents the back-spring from shifting, keeping the blade steady while you’re using it. Pressing the toggle depresses the back-spring, which allows the exposed blade to be unlocked and swung back into the closed position. Lockback mechanisms are popular because they prevent the knife from closing unexpectedly if the blade is being used for particularly aggressive tasks (carving, splitting firewood, cutting particularly difficult materials, etc). Because of this, it’s usually seen as a safety mechanism, to prevent user injury.

Blade Anatomy

Now that we’ve covered basic pocketknife anatomy, let’s cover blade-anatomy. At one end you have the point, at the other end, you have the heel. Behind the heel you have the tang. The tang is the part of the blade through which the rivets and pins are passed to hold the blade to the handle. The tang is also where information such as the knife model, or manufacturer-details, are stamped.

At the bottom of the blade you have the edge, at the top, you have the spine. In between is the belly, or main body of the blade. Just below the spine you will have a slit or groove, commonly called a nail-nick or nail-pull. This is the indent which you put your fingernail into, to pull the blade open from the handle.

Buying Antique and Vintage Pocketknives

Pocketknives range from the mundane to the magnificent, from the pedestrian to the precious. Part of the thrill of owning them – of owning any collection – is the thrill of the hunt!

Antique and vintage pocketknives are highly collectible, and they can often be found in antiques shops or flea-markets for a handful of dollars, or online, for significantly more. In buying vintage folding pocketknives, you want to check a number of aspects before coughing up the money.

First and foremost – make sure that the knife is complete. Are all the scales there? Are there any missing pins? Dropped-off bolsters? Broken blades? I know that a lot of knives look very solidly made, but bolsters, pins and scales can all drop off over time, and you want to make sure that all aspects of the knife are firm and tight before you go any further. I bought a pocketknife once which was so badly constructed, it literally fell apart in my hands one day, and I had to throw it out.

Does your knife do that?

No? Good.

Next: Make sure (and this is very important) that the knife is as free from rust as it’s possible for it to be. Unless they’ve been very well cared for, almost all vintage pocketknives will have some sort of rusting on them. Age-spots or pitting may also present themselves, but rust is the real enemy here.

Rust can spread, rust can compromise the integrity of the blade, rust can even cause the knife to snap in half! Any knives with a LOT of rust should be avoided entirely.

After that, make sure that the knife actually functions! Do the blades open? Are they easy to open? Are they stiff? Can you yank them out without snapping your fingernails off? Once opened, do the blades stay open? Do they flop around? Is there any side-to-side wobble? When closed, do they stay closed? Do the blades strike each other (or the liners) when closing next to each other?

I’ve seen some beautiful pocketknives which looked flawless…until you tried to use them. Knives should have nice, strong springs that will cause the blades to ‘snap’ – meaning that the spring will have enough tension on it that the blades will click open or shut, with an audible ‘snap!’ each time. You do not want a knife with weak, floppy springs, that can’t hold the blades open or shut – it’s a safety risk! Put the knife down, and keep searching.

Similarly (on multi-blade knives), make sure that the blades close properly. You don’t want a knife where one blade constantly strikes another blade when closing – it damages the blade, wastes time, means you have to sharpen it more, indicates that the knife is falling apart (or was poorly made), and it’s a safety issue!

Restoring your Pocketknives

Once you’ve purchased your knife, the next thing to do is to breathe new life into it. A lot of vintage knives spend years, decades, in drawers and shoe-boxes, down the back of the couch, and god knows where else! And they are hardly ever looked after. If you expect that beautiful horn-scaled pen-knife that you bought for $30.00 to work like new – it’s now your job to try and give that knife a new lease on life – to ensure that it does work like new!…Or as near to new as it’s possible for it to do so.

This next section of the posting is all about tips and tricks to restore your pocketknives to working condition. All this advice and guidance is assuming that you’re an everyday collector with no prior experience in fixing stuff. No fancy tools or equipment are involved in this, and everything mentioned should be stuff that you can find around the house (or which is easily purchased). These instructions will assume that the knife will remain whole and intact during the entire process. No disassembly will be required.

You will need…

• A box of tissues.
• Cotton-buds/Q-tips.
• Extra-fine-grit sandpaper (as fine as you can get).
• 0000-grade steel wool (designed for polishing).
• A thin, highly fluid, lubricating oil (for sewing machines, or similar).
• Polishing paste or fluid (eg: Brasso).
• Sharpening stones.
• Water.
• Optional: Ultrasonic Cleaner.

The first thing to do is to remove all the surface grime. This can easily be done with some oil, and tissue-paper. Drip some oil over the body of the knife and blades, and fill the cavity in the handle with oil, then wipe and sponge it away with some tissues. This will remove any surface grime, grit, and other easily removed detritus. It is important to use oil as much as possible, and not water, as water will encourage rusting, and the spread of any existing rust, which is the last thing you want to happen.

Once the initial cleaning has been completed and you’ve removed as much crud as possible, the next step is the much more fiddly process of removing grime from between the springs and pivot-points inside the knife. This could take a few hours, a few days, or even a week or more, depending on the condition of the knife.

One of the biggest nightmares with vintage pocketknives are all the problems associated with stiff, jerky, jammed blades. Blades which are difficult to pull open, difficult to push shut, which don’t snap into place, and which jam and stick when they’re being used. Not only is this annoying, painful on your fingernails because you can’t get the damn blades open, and wastes time, it’s also a big safety-risk, since all the extra effort required to manipulate the knife can leave you prone to injuries. Nobody wants to fight with a stuck blade only for it to spring open unexpectedly and cut them.

Cleaning the Springs and Pivots

It’s for these reasons that the next step is so important: Flushing out the back-springs and pivots on your knife. It’s a fiddly, messy, time-consuming job – something best done while watching YouTube videos or listening to music, or enjoying a good movie – but it is nonetheless a necessary evil.

Get some tissue-paper and fold it until you have a soft pad. Place it on a hard surface like a tabletop. Flood the pivot-points and back-spring of your knife where-ever there is movement. Open and close the blades several times – dozens of times, hundreds of times. If necessary, you can wrap the blades in tissue-paper so that you can grip the blades safely while you open and close them – this will minimise the chance of cutting yourself, and will help you maintain a firm grip on the blades.

Every few dozen manipulations, close the knife and, pressing the spring-side of the handle against the pad of tissue-paper, rub it vigorously back and forth several times.

Now, watch in horror as black, grey, brown, gunky slime comes oozing out of the knife and all over your pad of tissues.

Ever wondered why your knives keep jamming? Ever wondered why they’re so damn stiff, and difficult to open? Ever wondered why your fingernails keep breaking every time you try and yank out a blade?

This is why.

The black sludge you see coming out of the knife is years, decades’-worth of grime, dust and other things caught up inside the knife-mechanism, which causes friction, abrasion and jamming. Since pocketknives are usually very close-fitting, it takes a minuscule amount of this grime to cause a lot of problems. Now imagine what a large amount of this grime causes!

Continue to flush, manipulate, and rub the back of the knife with tissue-paper as rigorously as you can. Filling the knife with oil washes out the grime. Manipulating the blades and springs shifts and loosens the dirt while also working the oil through the knife mechanism. Wiping the knife across the tissue-paper draws the grime-clogged oil out of the knife via capillary action, removing the grit that’s causing all the friction and jamming.

This process can be quite involved. It could take hours, days, even weeks to accomplish. You have to keep going until the oil that comes out of the knife is as clear as when it went in. The more of the grime you remove, the better the end-result will be.

Simply oiling the knife will not improve it. All you’ll do is shift the grime around, and attract even more dust into the knife. When the oil dries up (and it will), the knife will simply jam all over again. Flushing the grime out with oil and wicking it away with tissue-paper is the only way to really get the knife clean and functional, short of drilling out the pins and tearing the knife apart to its component pieces in order to clean them individually.

While you’re cleaning the springs, make sure you remove as much grime from around the pivots as well, by using a similar method. Flood the knife with oil, work the blades to shift the oil, and then stuff a folded wad of tissue-paper into the knife and into the gaps around the pivots to draw out the oil and grime trapped inside.

The more you do this, the less crud there will be inside the knife and the smoother the knife will operate when you’re finally done. When done properly, the knife should (in most cases, anyway) have blades which will open and close with a nice sharp ‘snap!’ as it should do, when new. If the blades still jam or stick, then continue the process, until they don’t. If you use your knife often, then you should repeat this process every few years to prevent even more build-up of grime that will be harder to remove later.

Rust Removal

When the knife has reached this stage (or as close to that stage as you can), then the next step is to remove as much rust (if any) as you can from the knife.

Rust builds up where there’s steel – specifically the back-spring, the blades, and their tangs. In the old days, blades were protected from rusting by polishing them to a shine, and either plating them (usually with nickel), or else by keeping them oiled. In instances where the nickel-plating is intact, minor polishing with a liquid polish such as Brasso will be enough to restore the shine and remove the surface-rust, if any.

Heavier rusting will require the use of either a chemical rust-remover, or else, a gentle abrasive such as extra-fine steel wool, or a combination of 0000-grade steel wool and some oil, or polishing liquid to act as lubricant. It will remove the rust, polish the blade, and so long as the blades are kept dry – will prevent the return of any extra rust. Removing rust from either side of the back-spring can be done with fine sandpaper and oil, or with clumps of 0000-grade steel wool, and finished off with a suitable metal polish.

Removing Chips and Cracks

When buying antiques, one of the most common things one has to think about is what one can comfortably afford, what one is willing to pay for an item, and what kinds of compromises one is willing to accept in order to get the object that they truly desire.

As I’ve mentioned in other postings about buying antiques: The more things you’re willing to compromise on, the wider the range (and the cheaper the prices), of things you’re able to buy.

If you do buy a knife with a chipped or cracked blade, however, you still need to try and buy the best that you can. Typically speaking, any chips that you might find should be as small as possible (ideally, no more than 1-2mm), and any cracks should be near the tip of the blade. This makes them easier to deal with.

If you do find a knife that you really like, that you would love to buy, but which does have a tiny little niggling chip that might be dissuading you from forking out the money – don’t worry! There are ways of fixing this!

Sharpening Your Knife

For reasons of safety, sharpening your pocketknives should always be the last thing that you do, once all other restorative processes have been completed. Trying to clean, polish, lubricate, or otherwise restore a knife with freshly sharpened blades in the way invites unnecessary danger, and should be avoided if possible.

To sharpen your knife, you’ll need 2-3 different sharpening stones. A coarse-grit one, a medium-grit and a fine-grit one. Depending on how blunt your knife is, you’ll want to start on the medium and then progress to fine, or coarse then medium, and maybe after that (if necessary) progress to fine.

Before you start on this, though – we need to deal with any of those tiny chips that I mentioned earlier.

If your blade does have chips – provided that they’re small and don’t bite into the belly of the blade too far – then this is when we get rid of them!

First – identify any chips. Then – get your coarsest sharpening stone. Lubricate it with water, and start running your blade – edge down – across the stone, like you’re trying to cut the stone in half with your knife. Make sure that the blade-edge is level on the stone as you do this, and that the blade isn’t angled to the left or right while doing this.

By ‘cutting’ across the stone like this, what you’re doing is scraping off excess metal from the blade-edge. This will wear down the edge until it meets up with the top of the chip that you’re trying to grind out. It’s for this reason that this trick really only works with SMALL chips – anything larger than 1-2mm (unless it’s a REALLY big knife!) will grind off too much metal for this little blade-hack to work on.

It’s worth noting that if you do have to do this – you should do it BEFORE you sharpen the blade, since obviously, grinding the blade like this will affect the edge.

Keep grinding down the edge until just before the nick disappears. Once you reach this spot, sharpen the knife as per-usual, starting on the coarse stone, and then moving to medium and then fine. The usual sharpening process will remove the last vestiges of the chip, leaving you with a clean, sharp, straight blade!

The Correct Sharpening Procedure

I’ve been sharpening knives for years – when you collect pocketknives and straight razors, it’s something you absolutely have to learn. It’s too damn expensive to ask somebody else to do it every single time!

Lubricate your chosen sharpening stones with plenty of water (I usually use a spray-bottle for this), and start from the coarsest grit and work your way up to finest. Exactly how coarse you start depends on how blunt the knife is. In most cases, a medium-to-fine sharpening will do, but for really terrible blades, coarse-medium-fine may have to be used.

Once the stones have been selected and lubricated (you may need to keep lubricating them as you sharpen), it’s time to sharpen the blades.

To stop your stones sliding all over the place – either put them into their bases (if bases they have), or else, put them on top of a small towel or flannel to hold them in place.

Place the knife-blade flat down on the surface, and raise the blade to about 10-15 degrees (or 45 degrees, then half of that, then half of that again), to get the right angle. Start drawing the knife, edge-first, back and forth across the stone at least two dozen times. Repeat for the other side of the blade. Then move up to the next least-coarse stone, and then up to the finest, repeating the two-dozen strokes per-side for each stone as you go along.

Once fully sharpened, cleaned and dried, you should be able to see (and feel) the blade’s sharpness. Hold it up to the light. A freshly sharpened blade will have a very thin, white line along the very edge of the blade (the burr). The burr is the excess metal that’s been ground off the blade during the sharpening process. If you run your finger across the blade, you might even be able to feel the soft prickliness of the tiny flakes of metal scraped off in the sharpening process.

Closing Remarks

Now that your knife has been flushed out, de-grimed, de-rusted, sharpened, and nursed back to health, it should be ready to give you many decades of excellent service.