The Founding Blade
60 years ago, Buck’s 110 Folding Hunter put the company on the map of American sportsmen. Dozens of variations later, the blade remains Buck’s top seller.
By Andrew McKean
For most of the last 60 years, one sure sign of backcountry authenticity has been a one-snap black leather sheath carried on a work-worn belt of a hunting guide, a forest ranger, a game warden, or a dust-country rancher. Inside the sheath, a hand-filling lock-back folding knife with brass bolsters and a sweat-stained wood handle. There’s a good chance that blade is a Buck 110 Folding Hunter, which since 1964 has been the first, and often only, tool of rural-route Americans.
If Buck Knives are now synonymous with hard-working, no-nonsense blades, the 110 is the reason. But the story of the blade, and both the knives that came before it and the family whose name is stamped on every model, are windows into a brand whose story parallels the arc of American ingenuity, authenticity, and durability.
From Blacksmith Bellows to the Nuclear Age
Buck Knives is currently led by CJ Buck, the fourth Buck scion who has been at the helm of the firm. The first knife-making Buck was Hoyt, a blacksmith’s apprentice from Leavenworth, Kansas, who learned the magic of metallurgy from contemporaries around the turn of the last century who forged carriage springs, farm implements, and scythe blades from whatever metals they could scrounge.
According to company lore, Hoyt Buck started making his own distinctive blades from discarded files and rasps. As Buck moved west to work at lumber mills, first in the Pacific Northwest and then in Mountain Home, Idaho, he kept a working forge and made blades for friends and for pocket change. But then World War II intruded, and commandants at the Mountain Home Air Base put out a call for edged tools to aid the war effort.
“Hoyt told the base officials that he didn’t have any knives to donate, but he sure knew how to make them,” says Tony Wagner, unofficial Buck Knives historian and himself married to the fifth generation of knife-making Bucks. He and his wife are raising the sixth generation of blade-minded Bucks.
“Hoyt would sell knives to servicemen,” says Wagner, “and he was allowed to rummage the base scrapyard and take Lucite from wrecked airplane canopies and instrument clusters, which he would use to create washers for his knives.”
When the war ended, business dried up and the mills closed. So Hoyt moved to San Diego, where his son Al lived, and soon Hoyt had a knife-making business going in Al’s garage, transforming the huge number of discarded steel files used in the war effort, which he bought for a penny apiece from a salvage man, into working blades. Bolsters were crafted from Lucite scraps left over from bowling ball production.
The business purred along, incorporating as Buck Knives in 1961. This was the golden age of hunting, as big-game populations rebounded with the advent of scientific wildlife management, while hunters repurposed war-surplus equipment—from Willys Jeeps to canvas wall tents and .30/06 Springfields—to recreate in the woods and mountains of the rural West. Buck Knives was doing fine, as Al Buck transitioned it from discarded files to forged steel blanks to working blades for working men.
But in 1964, the same year the Ford Mustang was introduced to American drivers, Al Buck brought out the 110 Folding Hunter, a stout, reliable folding 3¾-inch clip-point blade that could be carried much more easily than a fixed-blade sheath knife. It featured a locking bar that was rigid when deployed, but which released with minimal pressure on the lock.
“It was one of those moments when the market and the manufacturer aligned completely,” says Wagner. “Buck became an icon because of that knife in particular. There were other folding blades on the market, but they were flimsy or they had poor steel. The 110 had fixed-blade strength in its locking mechanism, but it was so compact that it carried easily, its steel held an edge but was easy to sharpen, and its components worked well together from an aesthetic perspective. It was handsome. And Buck’s lifetime warranty added to a perfect storm for the market to accept it.”
The Buck Knife facility in Lemon Grove, California, circa 1964. The site is east of the the city limits of San Diego. In 2004, the company moved to Post Falls, Idaho.
Birth of the 110
The Buck 110 Folding Hunter became the company’s best-selling blade almost overnight. It’s a testament to the design and the versatility of the blade that, some 60 years later, it remains Buck’s best-selling product.
“You have to remember that they had incorporated just three years earlier, so they didn’t have many employees,” says Wagner. “The way the knife was produced was time-consuming, so they had a huge backorder position. Today, we can produce up to 1,400 110s a day, but at that time the bolsters and liners were all hand-crafted, and there were a lot of steps.”
But the “Buck Knife,” or simply “The Buck,” as the 110 came to be shorthanded, was different from the other knives on the market.
“The strength and simplicity of the locking mechanism intrigued a lot of people,” says Wagner. “It was a compact knife that performed as well as a fixed blade, and Al noted in his memoir that the knives of that time that performed well were ugly. The knives that were good-looking were terrible in the field. The 110 brought a nice-looking knife together with performance—and people noticed.”
Add Buck’s lifetime no-questions-asked warranty and its proprietary heat tempering of its steel and the 110 was disruptive to a fairly static market.
“The combination of heat treatment, aesthetics, function, and that lifetime warranty all rolled up together in a perfect storm for the market to accept it,” says company historian Wagner.
What’s surprising, though, is how the 110 has transcended the time of its origin to remain an iconic product. “Its popularity extended to popular culture and to Hollywood,” says Wagner. “Any kid who grew up like I did in the 1970s and 1980s, watching the ‘Dukes of Hazzard,’ saw Bo and Luke Duke with a 110 on their hip. My dad was one of seven brothers, and all of them carried 110s. There was a long period of time that a man in America wasn’t a man if he wasn’t carrying a 110. That’s when the Buck 110 simply became known as the Buck, the same way we define a tissue as a Kleenex or a photocopy as a Xerox.”
The more people gravitated to the 110 Folding Hunter, the more they noticed Buck’s other products, and fixed-blade models like the 119 Special and the 105 Pathfinder became staples of the field.
The 110 had fixed-blade strength in its locking mechanism, but it was so compact that it carried easily.
Common Steel, Uncommon Tempering
What Buck knives had in common was tight craftsmanship and a consistent look, with clean lines, gleaming stainless blades, and bolsters cut from distinctive materials. They also had in common best-in-class heat treatment, thanks both to Hoyt Buck’s original metallurgy and to the contributions of a bladesmith named Paul Bos, who joined Buck in the 1970s.
“Paul Bos Heat Treating Services is a separate business that we run outside of the Buck brand,” says Wagner. “We have other custom knife makers send their blades for us to heat treat. This modern understanding of tempering steel combined with Hoyt’s frontier knowledge combine to create the secret Buck recipe.”
Family lore holds that Hoyt Buck knew a blade was tempered correctly when “he got the steel to look like the color of butter right before it melts,” says Wagner. “He said there was a certain smell that it cast that you needed to be able to smell right before you put that blade in the quench. That was his secret tempering process.”
Al took his father’s craft to the next level, adding a certain salesmanship to its appeal. You can still see the company’s Hammer & Bolt logo on many of its materials. The trademark dates from Al’s penchant for striking a Buck blade with a ball peen hammer and cutting a bolt in two, then showing that the knife held its edge.
The 110 Folding Hunter was a knife with a stout, reliable, folding 3¾-inch clip-point blade that could be carried much more easily than a fixed-blade sheath knife. It featured a locking bar that was rigid when deployed, but which released with minimal pressure on the lock.
“When somebody would order a knife, Al would cut a bolt and send the cut bolt with the knife,” says Wagner. “Years later he revealed the trick. He said you had to hold the knife at a certain angle and strike it at a certain point of the blade in order to avoid damage. But because we had a forever warranty on all the products we had a bunch of customers try to cut bolts and they would then shatter their blades because they didn’t have the trick right, so the company had to stop promoting that sort of thing.”
Buck’s steel is one of its defining elements, but it’s also the source of criticism from users who think the metal is too soft and who request Buck to adopt high-temper “super steels” in its models.
“One reason for our success is that we use the best materials that we know how to use; we get the most out of those materials, and we guarantee them forever,” says Wagner, who notes that Buck Knives moved from San Diego to Post Falls, Idaho, in 2004. “Very few companies can say that this knife that was made 70 years ago is still under warranty.”
Buck’s standard steel recipe is a 420 high-carbon steel that holds up well to most tasks, but can be easily and quickly honed in the field, even with found whetstones like rocks and the rim of an enamel coffee mug.
“It may not hold that edge as long as a harder super steel, but it will get that job done and it will get it done in any situation,” says Wagner. “We get asked all the time when we’re going to put a super steel in our classic designs, and while we’ve made some variations with modern steel, for us it’s a matter of knowing what works in the field, but also what works from our bottom line. If you have a commitment to warranty every product, then you tend to stick with what you know is best and what won’t fail.”
Wagner notes that the Model 110 is the most-copied knife design in the world, and it remains Buck’s top seller. “Everybody wants us to put a super steel in the 110, but we think that’s a little like putting a four-wheel-drive in a Lamborghini,” he says. “You have to ask why? The three pillars of our company are craftsmanship, legacy, and authenticity. Those are the things that put Buck knives on the map, and when you care about that history, you tend to be very careful and considerate of what brought you to this moment.” (buckknives.com)
The Model 110 is the most copied knife design in the world, and it remains Buck’s top seller.