All About Pocket Knives

Thanks for the bump Paul! Looks like a nice old Camco you've got there.

Some great memories revived. I was a kid growing up in the 1950s and remember all of those items discussed previously in this thread. We played mumbly peg and other knife games and contests on the playground at school.

I had a good laugh at that Camco advertising copy with instructions for knife games. Imagine the reactions that would set off in today's overprotective, over-litigious world full of pampered snowflakes! The lawyers would ge lined up by the hundreds.

Ken

I know Ken ,sadly most of us was brought up with carrying a pocket knife being a normal thing

WOW great stuff thanks for reviving this .

2-3 nights ago I almost bid on a Dick Tracy knife. I think it sold for 4 dollars...

Had I seen this thread first??? It might have sold for 5 bucks... Great thread. I copied all the pages you posted Dale.
Thanks!

I did carry a lucky rabbits foot and seen them in the dime store. I may have bought it myself. We also had a coon skin hat but I have no idea where it came from. My brother tied a tail to his 49 Chevy radio antenna and we drove thru Gills Drive Inn. Yes the had car hops as did A & W and Dog n Suds. Spent lots of summer nights at the drive in theaters. Back in high school on Buck Night one kids dad had a dump truck. filled the dump bed with kids a couple of times. Remember the candy bead containers like a lantern or cap gun or dogs? Those are collectible now. I have three books about them. We also had a Aladdin lamp which was a cap gun in a holster on our bedroom wall. mom probably gave it away.

Hello- can anyone help me “date” my Camco pocket knife? I found this as about a 10 year old on my paper route around 1974. A couple years ago I sent it to Leroy Remer (TripleRknives) for a cleanup, since I use it routinely. It seems to have a harder than average blade, very sharp and holds an edge like few knives I’ve seen! Thanks.

Camco was an economy line from Camillus. It was started shortly after WW II (circa 1948 IIRC). According to Tom Williams, they.never change the tang stamp from the time Camco was introduced until Camillus closed in 2007.
You really have to look at the handle material in the construction of the knife to dated it any closer than that.
I will have to wait until I can see it on my large monitor, maybe I can find details that will date it more closely, but I think it was probably made after 1960 when Delrin handle material was introduced.

I want one of those "Glo Knives" !

Very nice serpentine jack. I wouldn't kick it out of my pile. What's the closed length?

Enhanced a couple of the pictures some. I feel reasonably certain the handles are Delrin® which would make it post late 1960s.

Hockeydad77 wrote:Hello- can anyone help me “date” my Camco pocket knife?

First let me say, welcome to AAPK!
My previous post was made from my cell phone and I can't see all the things I can see from my computer.

I was able to find your knife listed in the 1973 Camillus catalog, so we know that it is from that era, which is what I suspected. I don't know when that knife was made, certainly not before 1960 with the Delrin handles, and I don't know when the pattern was discontinued.
I do see that your handles are held on by brass pins which tells me it is an earlier Delrin handled knife because later on, probably sometime in the 70s, although I am not sure as to the timing, and Camillus stopped using brass pins at the ends to attach the handles and instead went to "post" which was molded into the back of the handle and fit through holes in the liner. The excess ends of the posts were then melted off on the inside of a liner so it did not interfere with the operation of the blades. This process held the handles on more securely than the pins did. It was a very effective method of attaching handles.

Unless someone can find listings in the catalogs to say when the pattern was first introduced and when it was discontinued we won't know much more than what we do now. I find it unlikely that we would find enough listings of Camco patterns in the Camillus catalogs that we would be able to dated to precise period of a few years. Most Camillus knives are dated in a date range because they don't make changes in the knife every year that would make it distinct from other years.

Based on the information available at this point I would say your knife was probably made between about 1960 and about 1975. I hope this is helpful, understand this is a semi-educated guess to measure and based on very limited facts and research.


Doc B – I have a Camp Glo knife if you want it. It would not be expensive because the material the handles are made of was not dimensionally stable, it tended to shrink and warp. Not as bad as some handle materials but it is still far from a pristine knife. If you're interested let me know and I will dig it up and send you some pictures.

They were still listing the knives in the 1965 catalog as having Brownstag® (which was not Delrin®) handles. The next catalog I have available to me is from 1972 where the handles are listed as "Cabone" (Delrin®) and they introduced "Indian Stag".

As you can see, the last year (at least for the 72) they pined handles was 1976.

Given all that AND BY THE WAY THOSE SPECULATIONS ARE FOR CAMILLUS BRAND, NOT CAMCO, maybe we could say between 1966 and 1976????? That's pretty darn close for a Camillus product.

First to address the gap between the 1965 in the 1972 catalogs, I think everybody is in the same boat. Tom Williams sent me raw scans of Camillus catalogs he had and I formatted them and sent them on to Larry who has them posted on the Collectors of Schrade/Collectors of Camillus website. Tom did tell me that there was not a catalog published every year, just due to the sheer expense of publishing a paper catalog. It's very labor-intensive and very expensive so if they didn't have a lot of new items they didn't publish a catalog.
I noticed even Kershaw put out two year catalogs in 1999-2000, 2001-2002, 2003-2004. Prior to that during the 1980s at one point in the cutlery store we had a binder in which we kept our Kershaw "catalog pages" that we would add or remove pages as we got new Catalog Pages in the mail.
So, I don't know of anyone who has a Camillus catalog between 1965 in 1972. If someone does, please let me know I would like a copy for myself and to share with Larry post on the Collectors of Camillus website.

I see no problem with your reasoning Jerry, based on the limited information we have. Camco was the economy line for Camillus, they were generally made with the same material but usually with thinner blades and less finish work to the knife overall. I think it is logical to assume that any improvement of technique that saves money on the Camillus brand would also be applied to the Camco brand. I think it's reasonable to believe that if they last pinned Delrin handles to Camillus liners in 1976, it is logical to believe that same cost saving technique would have been applied across all product lines.

Your reasoning may not be totally perfect but it's far closer than anything I have, or anything I have heard from anyone else on the subject.
Great thinking!

Now if you'll excuse me, watching you think so hard has made me sleepy. I need a nap.


PS – Happy Birthday a couple days early!

Thank you all for taking a look and providing information! Fun to learn the history of what is probably my oldest knife! Did anyone see in the limited catalogs the model #751? My next project is to make a couple of of custom leather sheaths for my Ka-Bars, will be a learning curve, but fun.

[quote="jerryd6818"]Very nice serpentine jack. I wouldn't kick it out of my pile. What's the closed length?

The closed length is approx. 3 3/8 inches, and thank you for the compliment to the knife!

Just wanted to show y'all the Camco I picked up a few months ago while thrifting...

Nice example!

I recently found this knife any idea how old it is

Mrjp2999 wrote: ↑Fri Oct 27, 2023 1:18 am I.....

Your answer may be here:
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