Posted 7 years ago
Chrischris
(1 item)
I just got this from a friend today for my birthday and knew absolutely nothing about them so just finished like 5 hours of reading everything I could find about it haha now I'm addicted to these knives! It has "laguiole origine garanite" stamped on the blade and also "t12" I'm not sure if it's a high quality one or not because i can't really tell if the bee is connected to the back spring part. But regardless I think it's really cool and it seems like it's an older one. Then again it does need to be cleaned up haha what do you guys think?
Your Laguiole (pronounced la-Yol', like "bowl") is fairly recent relative to the history of the knife which goes back about five generations; your blade-marking goes back about forty years give-or-take. Originally these knives were each hand-crafted by individual masters (Calmels, G. David, etc.) in Laguiole, Franc. More recently there are more mass-produced examples although there is still a lot of hand-work involved. Really crappy ones come from China & Pakistan but they are only "Laguiole-STYLE" knives. :-) Genuine antique examples fetch in the multi-hundreds.
Is that the Antiques Road Show appraisal or a real selling price. I'll start watching for them.
That's the 30+ years of buying, selling, and collecting folding knives price. They are not hard to find but really fine old ones are scarce. I would pay that without hesitation for an excellent "pigeon-wing" example in ivory with a little pique' work. The average horn-handled, mid-to-late 20th century example sells for much less depending on the name and degree of decoration.
Heck yea, thanks for the extra info uncle Rob! I appreciate anything I can find out about them. And yea from everything I've read on them there are certain things to look for to tell whether or not it's an authentic knife or a mass produced version. Is there anything on my specific knife that you can see that would determine if it is a legit laguiole or a low to decent quality knock off? Cause looking at it in person, even if it is not authentic, it looks a lot better quality than a lot of the knock offs I've looked up haha