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Need a little help from the experts.
I recently picked up a very nice Ka-Bar 1173, swing guard.
While I was going over it, I noticed that the badge was upside down, compared with other 1173s I've seen.
I thought this was odd, so I got online and did some image searches.
All of the 1173s I found have the badge positioned so that it's readable, or "right-side-up," when the knife is open, and on it's spine.
Mine is the opposite. Upside down.
> Here's pics of my knife, you can see here: You can see that if you laid the knife down on its spine, the badge is upside down.
>Here's another shot:
Everything about the knife is in good order. It doesn't seems to have be repaired, or re-scaled. Looks completely stock.
I contacted the seller, not to complain, because I'm very happy with the knife and seller, but to find out additional info about the badge. They say it's an original knife. They said they didn't notice it, but yes, it is upside down compared to their other Ka-Bar stock. They then offered to take it back and give me another.
So I'm throwing a question out to the Ka-Bar experts out there.
Is this knife a "factory, one-off," mistake, with an upside down badge? I bought it to carry, but should I keep it in a box instead? Is it rare? And if so, is that rarity meaningful to collectors?
What say you?
Tags: Cheetah, Ka-Bar, Swing, guard
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by d. freeman on
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Testing this post... Still getting used to your interface.
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Permalink Reply by Jim Johnson on
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I'm not familiar with this particular knife, but from all I can see it's just an error piece.
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Permalink Reply by Jan Carter on
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Honestly, I assume we are talking about the shield, it could be as simple as it fell off and someone re-glued it. This is an extremely common occurrence with shields and super glue is a wonderful fix
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My first thought, exactly.
If it were a more valuable knife, I might get prickly about being sold a repaired piece. But I really bought this to carry--so I'm not stressed about it.
How prevalent is the repair and "re-handling/re-scaling" of older knives, and then selling them as original?
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FeaturedPermalink Reply by dead_left_knife_guy on -
That looks like a fun little piece to carry. I'm not a collector of more traditional patterns, for the most part anyway, but I'd say it's actually pretty common for repaired / rehandled knives to be sold as if in the original state. And really there's not a lot that can be done about it, from what I can tell, since so many repaired knives are sold by someone that didn't make the repair -- in the case of estate sales, for example, or just people who acquired and resold a knife, maybe among a bunch of other items (eBay and flea markets, for example).
My very off-the-cuff response is that it's probably pretty common, but probably also mostly unintentional - if for no reason other than most people just aren't knife people.
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I figured as much. And I don't have much of a problem with any of that... There's even a couple of guys online who do a very nice job of "saving" old, U.S. made knives by expertly re handling them--cleaning them up a bit... But they are up front about it.
For me, knives are a new thing. Well, not really "new," per se, but I'm new to buying and selling them. Mostly, my knives are tools for my shop, and interesting pieces, that I daily carry, for shitz and gigs.
I'm a former musician though, with 35 years experience with guitars of all types. With guitars, especially, "original and correct," make the guitar more valuable--even if it's non-functional! And sadly, there is no shortage of scammers, who doctor a well-made counterfeit, to stack some coin...
Caveat emptor, I guess!
Anyway, thanks for the kind assistance!
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an interesting discussion on counterfeits https://iknifecollector.com/profiles/blog/show?id=3181080%3ABlogPos...
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