UTILITY KNIFE
Because it’s a current, frequently gimmick-laden hand tool, we might not regard the utility knife as ‘traditional’ but the original Stanley – widely treated as a synonym for the species – is older than the Folkboayt, in fact an exact contemporary of the Mylne ketch Thendara having been launched in 1936. Seeing the classic fixed-blade 199 in the hands of our adult children today, those of a certain age will recognise essentially the same knife as used by our grandparents. Its chunky hand-filling grip on a short blade provides such good leverage and control; no other knife comes close for simplicity and usefulness.
This 199 dates from around 1960 and was advertised in the UK as a ‘trimming’ knife, supplied with five trapezoidal double-ended blades stored inside the cast aluminium alloy handle, and cost 6S. Dad used this one for everything from marking out timber to trimming anti-slip deck material. Its tiny triangular blade guard disappeared long ago, but luckily not the machine screw joining the two parts of the handle; it isn’t a captive screw, so may easily be mislaid.
Stanley’s model 99 featuring a retractable blade (labelled the ‘in-out knife’ in UK) arrived in 1963 and Dad bought this example soon after. A sliding three-position carriage for the blade is operated by a button on top. The button broke o only recently, but after half a century of use that cannot be fairly labelled a weak point. At first I operated the slide using a lolly stick (which will also unscrew the handle, should you be stuck) but found a more solid solution using a No 10 gauge rosehead boat nail, filing the shank to fit and then clenching over.
A key strength of Stanley’s utility knives is their range of task-specific blades. Besides the general purpose straight-edged blade, there’s a concave blade, a convex blade, a round-tipped blade and a hooked blade, which is especially useful for cutting fabrics or sheet goods where you don’t want to risk scoring the surface underneath.
For fixed blade knives there’s a clean-cutting wood saw ideal for curves, apertures and work in tight spaces, and a wave-set hacksaw blade for metals and other materials. Since these knives are inexpensive it’s well worth keeping a couple in the boat’s tool kit with di erent blades pre-fitted for frequent applications.