What year this might be?

[Monzi]

I picked up this nice lineman's knife and fell in love with it. As you can see by the main blade, someone probably carried this bad boy a long time. Besides being sharpened and wore down, that blade and the driver blade very good stops and absolutely zero side to side movement. Scales are tight, bail is snug and stays wear you place it. A really fortunate find I believe. Don't know how good the tang stamp shows, it looks like Cattaraugus
Little Valley NY ? And the number on the flip side of the blade is 21087. Could that be correct? Id like to know the approx. date it was crafted. If anyone has any info on it, id love to hear it.
Thanks for your help fellas!

[Mumbleypeg]

Looks good to me. Honest old knife. Cattaraugus are hard to date - they didn’t change the stamps often. They did not make pocket cutlery after WWII but a lot of old parts were sold by the pound when the company went out of business in 1963, and knives were assembled from those parts by third parties.

You can find more about the pattern numbers and how to decipher them here in the Research section. 21087 is probably correct. Click on Research in the header at the top of this page, then scroll down to the section on a Cattaraugus.

Ken

[Reverand]

While there have been a few pattern made by other companies that had the Cattaraugus name on them, any knife from the Cattaraugus factory (like yours is) was made prior to 1963. I believe that was the year that they went out of business.
Sometimes you can research old catalogs & advertisements, but other than that it is difficult to find a date for these.

[Ridgegrass]

21087 "Electrician's and Radio Knife> . Man! Somebody wore that out or snapped the blade and made a toothpick from it! Kinda like that re-numbered tape measure in the pic. . No way to tell the age, but there's a pic of that knife in the 1930 catalog, without the bail. The ad says, "shielded" but shows no shield. (I don't think they meant electrically shielded.) Nice old relic. J.O'.