Knives offered by long time dealers aren’t beyond reproach – seems like that ought to be a no brainer. Even when the seller has a massive following on ebay and friends in the forums that have their back no matter what the scenario is - none of that changes the fact that there are seriously questionable knives on the table that are flying more red flags than a Chinese parade.
Today we study a 787 wonda blade knife.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/OLD-SCHRADE-WA ... Sw8lpeUvau
Everything on that knife is Schrade but it’s two knives put together from two different eras. The 787 wonda edge was made in 1957 & 1958. It’s a single spring knife with rounded, threaded bolsters and bone handles. They are rare as hens teeth. Here is what the knife looks like:
The knife being sold here is a double spring Delrin knife made sometime between ’62-’73. That knife was made with the Swinden key system but when it was doctored it was put back together with pin through bolsters as seen here:
Schrade made three multi-blade folders (225, 293 & 787) with wonda edge blades as secondaries and they never tang stamped the wonda blade on any of those knives. The reason this 787 has a tang stamped wonda blade is because the blade was welded onto that tang, but I’ll circle back to that in a moment. Also notable is that the wonda blade is on the right when looking at the mark side of this knife. The wonda edge blade on a correct knife is on the left side.
There are already enough red flags to label it a bad knife but there’s more. When you look closely at the base of the blade right above the tang you can see a horizontal line of perfectly round circles, the most prominent being the center one. There’s only one reasonable explanation for them given the context – they’re marks left by the electrode when it was welded. It also appears to have hammer marks on the back of the tang.
It’s also curious how the patina ends abruptly just below the stamp on both sides of the tang. If you stuck the blade into a piece of fruit to force a patina but left the lower portion of the tang exposed, seems like you’d have a patina line like that.
It’s a little harder to see on the front, but on both sides of the blade the patina is lighter at the edge. Maybe it was sharpened after the patina was added?
*Pro-tip: you’re only supposed to sharpen the back edge of a wonda blade. Whoever monkeyed with this knife didn’t know that.
It’s doubtful many (if any) ebay followers would catch these flags and there will always be those who will choose to believe it’s a legit knife despite all signs pointing in the other direction. All good, to each their own – I’m not trying to change hearts and minds here, just documenting the situation.
A common reaction to knives that don’t look right is ‘why would someone fake this knife’ but right here we’ve got a 787 that would get around $25 if it wasn’t turned into a wannabe wonda knife. How much do you figure it will go for now – ten times that amount? Twenty times that amount? Stay tuned to find out.
Maybe the seller unknowingly bought a group of knives from a bad guy. Maybe it’s from the estate of a collector who made frankeknives for fun. Maybe the seller is out in his garage right now practicing his technique to hide the circles better. No way of knowing but now that the knife is revealed as an ‘aftermarket creation’ (I’m being polite – it’s a forgery) I’m curious if that info will trickle down to the folks on that auction who are bidding right now on what they think is a legit – and extremely rare knife.
At the time I'm posting this the auction has 16 watchers and six active bidders.
I found it very interesting, for I would have never considered the 'red flags' you indicated.
