tom -

you beat me to it. I had a whole intro typed up for Part II and come back to the computer and wa la! You did it for me.

First I want to address what you stated above.

The "tooled" edge on the sheath above does have similarities in appearance to a Heiser although not as distinct in my opinion. Many JRB's have the edge on the sheath above. This comes down to you have to know what you are looking at.

Also, the same applies to the leather. I have handled more sheaths than I can remember and for the vast majority of the time, there is a distinct difference. I will say that as the company changed hands for the third time by 1958 to become HKL, I guess you could make an argument that perhaps the quality might not be what we would expect from items produced earlier, but the basic composition of what they were doing was the same.

Now the snaps. It is on record that Johnson came up with the Baby-Dot snaps after HKL was for all practical purposes out the door as a supplier to RMK. Gaddis states HKL didn't have the capability for the snaps anyway. We'll revisit this later.

So here we have a sheath that for the time being has one trait that ONLY Heiser used according to some folks, and that is keeper snap placement.

I will reiterate so no one is mistaken, that photos cannot tell 100% of the story.

Anyway, I am glad to see someone has an opinion.