Steel quality of USA made Schrade?

H

Hjalmar69

Joined
Aug 3, 2019
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172
Hi
I got my favorite Edc in 2005, a 34ot, made in the US. It is stainless. However, my large Old Timer stockman bought in 1990 was carbon steel. When did they change steels on Old Timers?

Regards Erik
 
"Schrade +" was 440A stainless. Everything else was 1095.
I forget what year Schrade USA came out with the Schrade Plus option.
As far as I know, Schrade USA continued to make carbon steel bladed knives right up to their last day of production.
 
afishhunter said:
"Schrade +" was 440A stainless. Everything else was 1095.
I forget what year Schrade USA came out with the Schrade Plus option.
As far as I know, Schrade USA continued to make carbon steel bladed knives right up to their last day of production.
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Oh, I thought all the early Old Timers were made with carbon steel and that they changed the production material at the end on all Old Timers to Schrade+
 
Hjalmar69 said:
Oh, I thought all the early Old Timers were made with carbon steel and that they changed the production material at the end on all Old Timers to Schrade+
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At the end there they were kind of just using whatever.
Normally Schrade+ was for the stainless models but it's my understanding that at this time right before they shut down you never knew what you might get with an Old Timer from Walmart.
I have heard people mention getting one knife with stainless and Carbon steel blades, but I'm not sure if theres any evidence of it.
 
In the last years of schrade they started to sneak stainless blades in models that were traditionally carbon, but they didn’t mark them with the + that was usually there to denote stainless.

You will not run into the late model unmarked stainless old timers nearly as often as the carbon steel models that are flooded all over the place and will (thankfully) be for years to come.
 
TheChunk91 said:
In the last years of schrade they started to sneak stainless blades in models that were traditionally carbon, but they didn’t mark them with the + that was usually there to denote stainless.
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That is my understanding as well. Going farther, I think that I have heard that there was no non-stainless steel used at all in any of their patterns after a certain point, but often unmarked with the 'plus' sign. Two examples might be the 858OT and the 51OT.
 
The problem in the last few years was the big box stores such as Walmart. A lot of their customers didn't have experience with carbon steel, only stainless, so they started returning knives that they deemed "defective" because they were rusting. This became such a big problem that Schrade was pretty much forced to start a switch-over to Schrade+ steel on most of the knives sold by those stores. I think eventually they would have phased out 1095 if they hadn't closed down before all that could take place.

Eric
 
tongueriver said:
So, apparently, they were still using a little 1095 at the bitter end?
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Cal I'm really not sure on that. If I recall 'ol Codger had some info on that but I don't know how in depth it was.

Eric
 
TheChunk91 said:
In the last years of schrade they started to sneak stainless blades in models that were traditionally carbon, but they didn’t mark them with the + that was usually there to denote stainless.

You will not run into the late model unmarked stainless old timers nearly as often as the carbon steel models that are flooded all over the place and will (thankfully) be for years to come.
Click to expand...

Out of the four Schrade USA 104OT "Minutemen" knives that I've bought from the big auction site, two are non-stainless and two are stainless with no + to indicate it. The most recent one I ordered and received only a few weeks ago, and boy was I disappointed when I cut into an apple and discovered that the otherwise-new-condition knife was stainless!
 
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