Let's start with the E-bay "Heiser employee" unfinished sheaths that had Randall stamps. It is very difficult to imagine a Heiser employee who lived his whole life in Colorado and left as part of his estate, a box of Randall stamped sheaths. To accept the above would require that at some point in his life, he went to Florida and acquired those unfinished sheaths from Mr. Johnson. He would then have had to put them into a box of unfinished Heiser sheaths. That is bit of a stretch in my book.

It is even harder to imagine that in 1959, Mr. Johnson started making Randall sheaths absolutely identical in every way to Heisers except for the logo stamp ... and that he made a thousands of them from 1959-1963. Then in about early 1963, he decided to change the entire leather layout and construction characteristics of his sheaths.

To my knowledge, Heiser did not "maintain their logo." The "Heiser" logo we are most familiar with was dropped for most other Heiser products in the early '50s when Heiser ceased to be ony "Heiser." Thereafter, the Heiser stamp was mainly used on Randall knife sheaths. After 1959, the Heiser logo again changed to a cheap looking cartoon-ish stamp used on other Heiser products.

More info ... the sheath stamp is most likely applied to the leather early in the process of construction. It would be difficult to reliably apply a stamp to a completed sheath, I've tried to simulate it in my shop.

The conclusion of the above, which by no means constitutes the entire case, is that Heiser stamped those sheaths. So what about the statements of Mr. GTR? Perhaps he was mistaken.. it was very early in his time in the shop when Heiser quit making sheaths. Or perhaps someone misunderstood what he said or meant, or missed a qualifying word or two.

It requires a pretty unusual set of circumstances to imagine anyone other than Heiser making those brown-button sheaths with the Randall stamp from 1959 to 1963. The case is pretty solid. I think the folks holding out against accepting this are becoming a pretty isolated minority now. But this is still America and all are entitled to an opinion. I just wish they would publish the case for Johnson-made, or whomever-made, so that it can be examined along-side the perponderance of evidence posted in favor of Heiser-made.