Haven't been here for a while and stumbled across this thread. Thought the following info could be of some interest to some.
Sometime after Pete retired from the Randall shop I spent about a week with him and Betty as their guest at their home in Havana FL. Pete was going to teach me how to make knives. That did not go well at all, more on that later. I really liked Pete, though he was a bit of a curmudgeon; however, he was a much better friend than a teacher at that point in his life.
Anyway, among some of the very cool things he showed me were a stack of blades that he had made. The blades all had a logo he had designed and etched or stamped into the blades. His logo was a stylized chair on rockers but it did not look like one of those granny rocking chairs with which we are all familiar. It was more like a straight back dining room type chair on rockers. I asked Pete if I could take pictures of the blades but he declined. I did not ask him when he made them and if he told me I do not recall.
The blades were about 7 inches long, kind of shaped like an RMK Model 14 but definitely not a duplicate of them, and had a full tang. If he had completed any of the knives I did not see them when I was visiting. I asked if he had completed any. I am not positive but I think he said he had not.
I had brought with me a Randall Kit blade for a model 12 Heavy that Tom Clinton had given me years earlier. I had soldered one of my pure silver lugged hilt blanks on it and had brought along a huge chunk of pure silver for the butt cap, some pure silver sheet for spacers, and a honking big center section piece of elephant ivory for the handle. The idea was that after Pete taught me how to make knives, I was going to complete the Smithsonian under his watchful eye.
As I mentioned, the lessons did not go well at all and my career as an apprentice knife maker came to a screeching halt while practicing on some scrap steel and chunks of 2 x 4. Not wanting to send me home to butcher the Smithsonian, Pete put the parts together and let me watch as he turned a collection of carbon steel, precious metal, and one humungous piece of ivory into the prettiest Smithsonian on the planet (in my humble and unbiased opinion).
So...did Pete Hamilton make any knives? If you run across a knife with a blade that could be a distant cousin to a Model 14 with a stylized rocking chair logo on it, it just might be one of Pete Hamilton's, and I have a Smithsonian Kit knife that he might have made over the course of many years, blade first and then the handle, if he ever worked in the forge at the Randall shop. I never asked him if he did, but I think I know who might know. DW ??
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