Schrade 863 Re-Handle

[jerryd6818]

Please correct me if I'm wrong but to my knowledge, Schrade never made an 863 handled in Sambar Stag. It's a beautiful knife, but...........

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Schrade-Walden- ... Swux5YRvdu

[CheckSix]

Jerry,
As you know I'm pretty new at this but I've been looking at a lot of Schrades. My opinion is that it has to be a re-scale job. Looks nice but I'm not sure it is $225.00 nice.

[jerryd6818]

I doubt that even a Herman Williams re-handle would go for that much.

[gsmith7158]

Jerryd this seller has had these listed before and it stated custom rehandle. I see they have removed that.
They also have sambar stag Camillus 72 listed for only $175. You better get it while it's hot!

Edit : I also notice they have bumped the price up $30 over the original listing.

[KnifeSlinger#81]

You may notice this seller has a lot of stag handled knives that never had stag originally, the rehandle looks like a nice job but none of the stag on any of their knives is particularly spectacular enough to be so expensive IMO.

[orvet]

You notice at the bottom of the seller’s description it says; “Swinden key replaced with pinned bolsters.”
Why would the Schrade factory go to all the trouble of drilling out the Swinden bolsters and converting it to through pin construction? That does not make sense for a factory knife.
As a matter of fact for someone who knew what they were doing and if it was a brand-new knife, it doesn’t make sense to drill out the Swinden bolsters and convert it to through pin. It’s very easy to rehandle a Swinden knife and reassemble it with the Swinden key in place. All you have to do is remove the rocker pin, typically I grind the head off and drive the pin out the other side.
At this point you have four pieces of the knife in your hand:
the mark side handle/bolster assembly, the pile side handle/bolster assembly, the spring for the two secondary blades and the blades/center liner & master spring assembly.
At this point it’s very easy to remove the handle pins, install and pin the new stag handles, then reassemble the knife using the Swinden key and the key ways in the bolsters. And then the only thing remaining to do is to compress the springs and installing new rocker pin.

If someone went to all the trouble of removing the Swinden pins, drilling out the bolsters and converting the knife to through pin construction tells me they either didn’t know what they were doing, the knife was worn or they replaced some of the blades or springs.
There was no way that Schrade would do this at the factory. They wouldn’t even do that for Buck when they were making the Buck 301 at the Schrade factory. Buck said, “We love the quality, but can you make them without the Swinden system?” Schrade said, “No, go see Camillus they could do that for you.”

My ramble may not make sense to folks who do not work on Swinden knives, but those of you who do know that if the Swinden system is functioning properly it is much easier to replace the handles and then reassemble the knife using the Swinden system than converting it to a through pin.
There is no absolutely no doubt in my mind based on the fact that it was converted to a through pin that this knife did not come from the Schrade factory with the stag handles on it. They were installed after the knife left the factory.

Now there are a couple other things about this knife that tells me it’s not come from the factory the way the stag was installed does not look typical of the kind of work Schrade did. If you look at the stag it has been ground down on the ends and the most of the remaining bark is primarily in the center of the handle. If Schrade were going to do this they would probably have used a higher quality piece of stag and they would have thinned the stag from the back so that the bark would come much closer to the bolsters.

The other thing that makes me think this was done after it left the factory is the finish on the blades. The blades to me appear to be heavily cleaned on a ScotchBrite wheel. The striations from the ScotchBrite wheel are similar to the finish found on the backside of the blades but the mark side of the blade usually had a much finer finish than is seen on this knife. Notice especially the striations on the mark side of the master blade. I get this same result when I have to clean old blades using a ScotchBrite wheel. This does not look to me like the factory finish on the blades.

Okay, enough of my rambling, however I think you get my point;
I do not believe this knife left the Schrade factory with stag handles and through pen construction!

[CheckSix]

Dale,
That is a LOT of insight you provided! Thank you for the time it took to type that all out!