Pocketknives are fascinating little gadgets. Whether it’s a tiny 2.1/2-inch quill-knife, or a larger 5 or 6-inch stiletto, pocketknives have been part of our lives for centuries. Carried and used for everything from survival situations to cutting open boxes that come through the mail from eBay, opening mail, eating food, carving, cutting, slicing, opening cans, or even something as mundane as sharpening a pencil – pocketknives have been the go-to mainstay tool for all these tasks for generations.

Collecting pocketknives is a highly popular hobby. Most knives are relatively cheap, portable, robust, and don’t take up a great deal of space. The wide variety of knife-patterns, blade-types, decorative elements, manufacturers and sizes in pocketknives is what makes them so collectible, and knives from famous manufacturers, made of rare or precious materials, or which were limited editions, can command high prices on the secondhand market.

In this posting, I’ll be talking about the general restoration process behind breathing new life into the type of pocketknife that most people will be familiar with: The standard slip-joint pocketknife, as typified by those made by W.R. Case, Victorinox, J. Rodgers & Sons, Southern & Richardson, and countless other manufacturers during the 1800s, and the majority of the 20th century.

Basic Knife Anatomy

In this posting, I’ll be talking about slip-joint knives: the kind of knife with a blade that folds back into the handle, so everything going forward, will relate to this style of knife.

To begin at the beginning, we need to know what the various parts of the knife are.

The body of the knife is made up of various components, which are stacked, one on top of the other, and held together with metallic rods.

On the outsides, working our way in, we have the bolsters. Not all knives have these. Some do, some don’t. Some have them on both sides of the knife, some only have them on one side. Bolsters are the flat, metallic panels at either end of a pocketknife. They’re usually brass, nickel-silver, stainless steel or some other corrosion-resistant metal. Their purpose is to strengthen the knife, and to protect the covers or scales on the sides of the handle, from damage.

Covers, also called scales, are the large, decorative panels which make up the majority of the bulk on the handle of a folding knife. Covers can be simply utilitarian, and be made of plastic, or steel or brass, but usually, they’re decorative. Pocketknives have had scales or covers made of anything from sterling silver to mother of pearl, ivory, bone, horn, any number of a variety of different woods, and various types of plastics in any number of finishes. Depending on the knife, scales may be smooth, or corrugated/textured. Textured scales are typically added to a knife to make it easier to grip.

Inlaid into the scales are (although, not always) small, metal panels, which can be almost any shape – rectangular, shield, circular…the list goes on. These are sometimes included for the purposes of embellishment (and to give the customer a place to engrave something like a name, date, or initials), or else, will contain details such as the company’s name, logo, or other trademark. These small panels are known as shields, badges or plates, depending on which name-convention you take to heart. Not all knives have these, but most will. They’re usually made of either brass, or nickel-silver.

The bolsters and the scales fit onto flat strips of metal, known as liners. Usually, they’re made of brass, so as not to rust and jam the knife.

Between the scales, bolsters and liners is the spring. The spring is the flat strip of metal at the bottom of the knife (or the top of the handle, if holding the knife with the blade-edge facing down). The spring is made of spring steel, which is nice and flexible. The spring is what holds the blades of the knife open, or closed.

Finally, you have the blades of the knife. Anything that comes out of a knife is known as a ‘blade’, regardless of whether it actually is a blade, or not. Knives can have anywhere from one, to two, three, four, or more blades, and extra features, depending on the knife’s size, and complexity. I won’t cover all this here, because otherwise we’ll be here all day.

Finally, the knife is held together with pins and rivets. The pins are driven through the bolsters, liners, and blades, and are then hammered and peened over, and smoothed off, to hold the knife together. Smaller rivets or pins are used to hold the scales or covers onto the liners, to stop them from coming loose.

A standard slip-joint folding pocketknife will have two pins for holding in the blades and bolsters (one pin on each end of the knife), a third pin in the middle, to hold the spring in place along with the liners and covers/scales, and usually (but not always) extra pins or rivets to hold the scales in place. As with the liners, the pins or rivets are usually brass, nickel-silver, or stainless steel.

Some pocketknives have additional features, such as the very popular lockback mechanism. The lockback mechanism is a toggle or button located at the back of the knife. When the knife is opened, the ‘lock’ prevents the back-spring from shifting, keeping the blade steady while you’re using it. Pressing the toggle depresses the back-spring, which allows the exposed blade to be unlocked and swung back into the closed position. Lockback mechanisms are popular because they prevent the knife from closing unexpectedly if the blade is being used for particularly aggressive tasks (carving, splitting firewood, cutting particularly difficult materials, etc). Because of this, it’s usually seen as a safety mechanism, to prevent user injury.

Blade Anatomy

Now that we’ve covered basic pocketknife anatomy, let’s cover blade-anatomy. At one end you have the point, at the other end, you have the heel. Behind the heel you have the tang. The tang is the part of the blade through which the rivets and pins are passed to hold the blade to the handle. The tang is also where information such as the knife model, or manufacturer-details, are stamped.

At the bottom of the blade you have the edge, at the top, you have the spine. In between is the belly, or main body of the blade. Just below the spine you will have a slit or groove, commonly called a nail-nick or nail-pull. This is the indent which you put your fingernail into, to pull the blade open from the handle.

Buying Antique and Vintage Pocketknives

Pocketknives range from the mundane to the magnificent, from the pedestrian to the precious. Part of the thrill of owning them – of owning any collection – is the thrill of the hunt!

Antique and vintage pocketknives are highly collectible, and they can often be found in antiques shops or flea-markets for a handful of dollars, or online, for significantly more. In buying vintage folding pocketknives, you want to check a number of aspects before coughing up the money.

First and foremost – make sure that the knife is complete. Are all the scales there? Are there any missing pins? Dropped-off bolsters? Broken blades? I know that a lot of knives look very solidly made, but bolsters, pins and scales can all drop off over time, and you want to make sure that all aspects of the knife are firm and tight before you go any further. I bought a pocketknife once which was so badly constructed, it literally fell apart in my hands one day, and I had to throw it out.

Does your knife do that?

No? Good.

Next: Make sure (and this is very important) that the knife is as free from rust as it’s possible for it to be. Unless they’ve been very well cared for, almost all vintage pocketknives will have some sort of rusting on them. Age-spots or pitting may also present themselves, but rust is the real enemy here.

Rust can spread, rust can compromise the integrity of the blade, rust can even cause the knife to snap in half! Any knives with a LOT of rust should be avoided entirely.

After that, make sure that the knife actually functions! Do the blades open? Are they easy to open? Are they stiff? Can you yank them out without snapping your fingernails off? Once opened, do the blades stay open? Do they flop around? Is there any side-to-side wobble? When closed, do they stay closed? Do the blades strike each other (or the liners) when closing next to each other?

I’ve seen some beautiful pocketknives which looked flawless…until you tried to use them. Knives should have nice, strong springs that will cause the blades to ‘snap’ – meaning that the spring will have enough tension on it that the blades will click open or shut, with an audible ‘snap!’ each time. You do not want a knife with weak, floppy springs, that can’t hold the blades open or shut – it’s a safety risk! Put the knife down, and keep searching.

Similarly (on multi-blade knives), make sure that the blades close properly. You don’t want a knife where one blade constantly strikes another blade when closing – it damages the blade, wastes time, means you have to sharpen it more, indicates that the knife is falling apart (or was poorly made), and it’s a safety issue!

Restoring your Pocketknives

Once you’ve purchased your knife, the next thing to do is to breathe new life into it. A lot of vintage knives spend years, decades, in drawers and shoe-boxes, down the back of the couch, and god knows where else! And they are hardly ever looked after. If you expect that beautiful horn-scaled pen-knife that you bought for $30.00 to work like new – it’s now your job to try and give that knife a new lease on life – to ensure that it does work like new!…Or as near to new as it’s possible for it to do so.

This next section of the posting is all about tips and tricks to restore your pocketknives to working condition. All this advice and guidance is assuming that you’re an everyday collector with no prior experience in fixing stuff. No fancy tools or equipment are involved in this, and everything mentioned should be stuff that you can find around the house (or which is easily purchased). These instructions will assume that the knife will remain whole and intact during the entire process. No disassembly will be required.

You will need…

• A box of tissues.
• Cotton-buds/Q-tips.
• Extra-fine-grit sandpaper (as fine as you can get).
• 0000-grade steel wool (designed for polishing).
• A thin, highly fluid, lubricating oil (for sewing machines, or similar).
• Polishing paste or fluid (eg: Brasso).
• Sharpening stones.
• Water.
• Optional: Ultrasonic Cleaner.

The first thing to do is to remove all the surface grime. This can easily be done with some oil, and tissue-paper. Drip some oil over the body of the knife and blades, and fill the cavity in the handle with oil, then wipe and sponge it away with some tissues. This will remove any surface grime, grit, and other easily removed detritus. It is important to use oil as much as possible, and not water, as water will encourage rusting, and the spread of any existing rust, which is the last thing you want to happen.

Once the initial cleaning has been completed and you’ve removed as much crud as possible, the next step is the much more fiddly process of removing grime from between the springs and pivot-points inside the knife. This could take a few hours, a few days, or even a week or more, depending on the condition of the knife.

One of the biggest nightmares with vintage pocketknives are all the problems associated with stiff, jerky, jammed blades. Blades which are difficult to pull open, difficult to push shut, which don’t snap into place, and which jam and stick when they’re being used. Not only is this annoying, painful on your fingernails because you can’t get the damn blades open, and wastes time, it’s also a big safety-risk, since all the extra effort required to manipulate the knife can leave you prone to injuries. Nobody wants to fight with a stuck blade only for it to spring open unexpectedly and cut them.

Cleaning the Springs and Pivots

It’s for these reasons that the next step is so important: Flushing out the back-springs and pivots on your knife. It’s a fiddly, messy, time-consuming job – something best done while watching YouTube videos or listening to music, or enjoying a good movie – but it is nonetheless a necessary evil.

Get some tissue-paper and fold it until you have a soft pad. Place it on a hard surface like a tabletop. Flood the pivot-points and back-spring of your knife where-ever there is movement. Open and close the blades several times – dozens of times, hundreds of times. If necessary, you can wrap the blades in tissue-paper so that you can grip the blades safely while you open and close them – this will minimise the chance of cutting yourself, and will help you maintain a firm grip on the blades.

Every few dozen manipulations, close the knife and, pressing the spring-side of the handle against the pad of tissue-paper, rub it vigorously back and forth several times.

Now, watch in horror as black, grey, brown, gunky slime comes oozing out of the knife and all over your pad of tissues.

Ever wondered why your knives keep jamming? Ever wondered why they’re so damn stiff, and difficult to open? Ever wondered why your fingernails keep breaking every time you try and yank out a blade?

This is why.

The black sludge you see coming out of the knife is years, decades’-worth of grime, dust and other things caught up inside the knife-mechanism, which causes friction, abrasion and jamming. Since pocketknives are usually very close-fitting, it takes a minuscule amount of this grime to cause a lot of problems. Now imagine what a large amount of this grime causes!

Continue to flush, manipulate, and rub the back of the knife with tissue-paper as rigorously as you can. Filling the knife with oil washes out the grime. Manipulating the blades and springs shifts and loosens the dirt while also working the oil through the knife mechanism. Wiping the knife across the tissue-paper draws the grime-clogged oil out of the knife via capillary action, removing the grit that’s causing all the friction and jamming.

This process can be quite involved. It could take hours, days, even weeks to accomplish. You have to keep going until the oil that comes out of the knife is as clear as when it went in. The more of the grime you remove, the better the end-result will be.

Simply oiling the knife will not improve it. All you’ll do is shift the grime around, and attract even more dust into the knife. When the oil dries up (and it will), the knife will simply jam all over again. Flushing the grime out with oil and wicking it away with tissue-paper is the only way to really get the knife clean and functional, short of drilling out the pins and tearing the knife apart to its component pieces in order to clean them individually.

While you’re cleaning the springs, make sure you remove as much grime from around the pivots as well, by using a similar method. Flood the knife with oil, work the blades to shift the oil, and then stuff a folded wad of tissue-paper into the knife and into the gaps around the pivots to draw out the oil and grime trapped inside.

The more you do this, the less crud there will be inside the knife and the smoother the knife will operate when you’re finally done. When done properly, the knife should (in most cases, anyway) have blades which will open and close with a nice sharp ‘snap!’ as it should do, when new. If the blades still jam or stick, then continue the process, until they don’t. If you use your knife often, then you should repeat this process every few years to prevent even more build-up of grime that will be harder to remove later.

Rust Removal

When the knife has reached this stage (or as close to that stage as you can), then the next step is to remove as much rust (if any) as you can from the knife.

Rust builds up where there’s steel – specifically the back-spring, the blades, and their tangs. In the old days, blades were protected from rusting by polishing them to a shine, and either plating them (usually with nickel), or else by keeping them oiled. In instances where the nickel-plating is intact, minor polishing with a liquid polish such as Brasso will be enough to restore the shine and remove the surface-rust, if any.

Heavier rusting will require the use of either a chemical rust-remover, or else, a gentle abrasive such as extra-fine steel wool, or a combination of 0000-grade steel wool and some oil, or polishing liquid to act as lubricant. It will remove the rust, polish the blade, and so long as the blades are kept dry – will prevent the return of any extra rust. Removing rust from either side of the back-spring can be done with fine sandpaper and oil, or with clumps of 0000-grade steel wool, and finished off with a suitable metal polish.

Removing Chips and Cracks

When buying antiques, one of the most common things one has to think about is what one can comfortably afford, what one is willing to pay for an item, and what kinds of compromises one is willing to accept in order to get the object that they truly desire.

As I’ve mentioned in other postings about buying antiques: The more things you’re willing to compromise on, the wider the range (and the cheaper the prices), of things you’re able to buy.

If you do buy a knife with a chipped or cracked blade, however, you still need to try and buy the best that you can. Typically speaking, any chips that you might find should be as small as possible (ideally, no more than 1-2mm), and any cracks should be near the tip of the blade. This makes them easier to deal with.

If you do find a knife that you really like, that you would love to buy, but which does have a tiny little niggling chip that might be dissuading you from forking out the money – don’t worry! There are ways of fixing this!

Sharpening Your Knife

For reasons of safety, sharpening your pocketknives should always be the last thing that you do, once all other restorative processes have been completed. Trying to clean, polish, lubricate, or otherwise restore a knife with freshly sharpened blades in the way invites unnecessary danger, and should be avoided if possible.

To sharpen your knife, you’ll need 2-3 different sharpening stones. A coarse-grit one, a medium-grit and a fine-grit one. Depending on how blunt your knife is, you’ll want to start on the medium and then progress to fine, or coarse then medium, and maybe after that (if necessary) progress to fine.

Before you start on this, though – we need to deal with any of those tiny chips that I mentioned earlier.

If your blade does have chips – provided that they’re small and don’t bite into the belly of the blade too far – then this is when we get rid of them!

First – identify any chips. Then – get your coarsest sharpening stone. Lubricate it with water, and start running your blade – edge down – across the stone, like you’re trying to cut the stone in half with your knife. Make sure that the blade-edge is level on the stone as you do this, and that the blade isn’t angled to the left or right while doing this.

By ‘cutting’ across the stone like this, what you’re doing is scraping off excess metal from the blade-edge. This will wear down the edge until it meets up with the top of the chip that you’re trying to grind out. It’s for this reason that this trick really only works with SMALL chips – anything larger than 1-2mm (unless it’s a REALLY big knife!) will grind off too much metal for this little blade-hack to work on.

It’s worth noting that if you do have to do this – you should do it BEFORE you sharpen the blade, since obviously, grinding the blade like this will affect the edge.

Keep grinding down the edge until just before the nick disappears. Once you reach this spot, sharpen the knife as per-usual, starting on the coarse stone, and then moving to medium and then fine. The usual sharpening process will remove the last vestiges of the chip, leaving you with a clean, sharp, straight blade!

The Correct Sharpening Procedure

I’ve been sharpening knives for years – when you collect pocketknives and straight razors, it’s something you absolutely have to learn. It’s too damn expensive to ask somebody else to do it every single time!

Lubricate your chosen sharpening stones with plenty of water (I usually use a spray-bottle for this), and start from the coarsest grit and work your way up to finest. Exactly how coarse you start depends on how blunt the knife is. In most cases, a medium-to-fine sharpening will do, but for really terrible blades, coarse-medium-fine may have to be used.

Once the stones have been selected and lubricated (you may need to keep lubricating them as you sharpen), it’s time to sharpen the blades.

To stop your stones sliding all over the place – either put them into their bases (if bases they have), or else, put them on top of a small towel or flannel to hold them in place.

Place the knife-blade flat down on the surface, and raise the blade to about 10-15 degrees (or 45 degrees, then half of that, then half of that again), to get the right angle. Start drawing the knife, edge-first, back and forth across the stone at least two dozen times. Repeat for the other side of the blade. Then move up to the next least-coarse stone, and then up to the finest, repeating the two-dozen strokes per-side for each stone as you go along.

Once fully sharpened, cleaned and dried, you should be able to see (and feel) the blade’s sharpness. Hold it up to the light. A freshly sharpened blade will have a very thin, white line along the very edge of the blade (the burr). The burr is the excess metal that’s been ground off the blade during the sharpening process. If you run your finger across the blade, you might even be able to feel the soft prickliness of the tiny flakes of metal scraped off in the sharpening process.

Closing Remarks

Now that your knife has been flushed out, de-grimed, de-rusted, sharpened, and nursed back to health, it should be ready to give you many decades of excellent service.