Eric, and others--

I bought one like this just before Pete died. Stainless, brass hilt, bowie clip.

Pete dug through records and found that they made some number (my records are on a hard drive that went bad a week ago--the techies may be able to pull out the data--I'm hoping).

It was fewer than the 25 number, I am remembering maybe a dozen more or less, and the ones he found were made for Jack Crider. I think Pete said in about 1987.

He and Bob Gaddis examined mine at the last Blade Show the the two of them attended.

Pete never mentioned anything about a "broken tang" as a reason to make such knives.

We also know that some were made with stainless hilts. I don't know how many (but I wouldn't speculate that this was because of a shortage of brass hilts).

I suspect that these fall into the general category of what some might call oddities, these being non-catalogue items that the shop had to time make whenever they wanted to experiement or a customer asked for something and RMK agreed to do it.

For things like this that were small in number, a devoted collector might think about "cornering the market," but would probably never chase all of them down.

Nice knife. I think the sheath looks fresher than mine.

Larry