Another flea market find with a story to tell

 Okay, the recent post was a very good example of a knife that tells a story, and here comes another: This knife I found only but recently on a local flea market. It is a variant of a Solingen classic, but also a knife that has seen use all over the world. It has a carbon steel "Säbelskniep" (clip point) main blade, a stainless steel pen blade, and a corkscrew. The knife obviously has seen some vast reworking. It has one nickel silver and one brass bolster, the pivot is a substitute, and the scales also had seen some reworking.

 The spring bear the engraving "Gerd Sarwatzky", apparently the name of the owner. Of course, the knife is a slipjoint. Note the minimal tolerances between bolster and blade; the gap towards the iron liner came to be because of aging. The owner certainly knew a thing or two about metal working.

 The reverse side of the knife.

And another detail of the engraving.

As I already said in the previous post, this is another example of a lovingly repaired tool, and it is obvious this knife has served the owner long and well, and he was proud of it. He also knew how to repair it. What I want to show is, that doing repairs like these was a commonplace in those times not so long ago.

While it somewhat compromised the clean look of the tool, I daresay the owner loved it even more for it, for by doing so, it became "his" tool even more, which becomes evident in the fact that he engraved it. It was a very personal item. A knife was, and is, in general, a very personal item, and thusly I indicate once more, that it is a very essential part of our culture. It certainly was used for all the little challenges of everyday life, and it was used long and caringly, as evident in the negative, somewhat "recurve" line of the main blade, which hints of a long period of sharpening intervals. Since there are no coarse grinding marks or even heat colour signs on the blade, the negative line cannot be due to unskilled sharpening, but is rather due to avery long time of servicing. So, it became a part of everyday life of the owner, constituting, if not a huge part of his life and interactions with his surroundings, so still an intelligible one.

Get the gist?;-)