This is an interesting thread...

People routinely ask RMK whether certain knives were their work. When they were made. Etc. Having to deal with those requests must be bothersome, distracting. After all, they are in the business of making knives, not verifying history.

Yet RMK has been patient about it, and asked others like Pete, Perry, Grady, if they would do authentications to help the owners/collectors who had knives that maybe did not look like knives in the current catalogues.

Knives that were genuinely made by RMK as “one offs” or transitional or set up in ways not considered to be standard are at times questioned by knowledgeable people who did not have the benefit of knowing for sure and did not have the personal experience of being involved in making them.

Even folks at RMK might not know for sure…Institutional memory fades with time, and not everybody remembers everything even if they are still there when a question is raised.

This Forum has had a lot of conversations along these lines…sometimes heated, almost always informative. (How many stiches to the inch or what about the color of thread on this sheath? Why this sheath stamp in this orientation? What about this spacer setup? How about this Model X with a blade that does not look like a Model X?)

Most people who like knives have ideas about design, parts and pieces, etc. If we must have knives that satisfy these urges, and we want a Randall, we can work with RMK within the bounds of their production and get a perfectly suitable knife.

Otherwise, we can have another maker put their own brand on a knife that matches our wishes.

I guess I fall on the side of keeping the real thing real. If a Randall knife needs work, have RMK do whatever is needed to keep it functional but avoid having outsiders modify it to an extent that it could be confused as a rare example that never went into the catalogues.

Otherwise…those suspected “rare examples” might be brought to RMK for authentication at some time in the future.

It is likely that said rare examples will have been bought at a premium because somebody told the buyer a “story” that turns out to be just too good to be true.

(By the way, it is not just RMKs that fall into this situation. Consider efforts to authenticate Jim Bowie’s actual knife. A number of said knives have been laboriously “authenticated” over the years! And owners of those “authenticated” knives have strained to justify their purchases, motivated by zeal, by the urge to protect their investment, and/or the anticipation of profit when they sell them.)

Larry