08/27/2026
Why the Buck 110 Replaced the Hunting Knife on Millions of American Belts — Then Refused to Die.
Two sheaths on the bench, both leather, both gone dark and soft around the belt loop, the way leather does when a man wears it every season for 20 years. One of them carried a fixed blade hunting knife. The other one carries this. For most of American history, the hunting knife had exactly one feature nobody argued about. It did not fold.
Then a small company in San Diego put a locking blade inside a leather sheath and somehow convinced a generation of hunters they weren't giving anything up. That's a stranger thing than it sounds because nobody ever had to be sold on the fixed blade. It worked. It was simple. There was nothing in it to fail. A man with a good sheath knife had already solved his problem.
And people do not generally trade away a solved problem. So, the question underneath this whole story isn't how Buck built the 110. That part's been told plenty of times. The question is how a folding knife talked American hunters into leaving something they already trusted at home. And I think the answer has less to do with the blade than with about 4 in of leather nobody ever looks at twice.
First, let's kill an assumption because the assumption is where most tellings of this story go wrong. Before 1964, American hunters were not all carrying fixed blades. Plenty were, but plenty carried big slip joint folders, and a fair number were already carrying folders that locked. We know that from Buck itself. In Buck's own published company history, the account drawn from Tom Ables's book on the family business.
The board authorized development of a new folding lock blade knife on April the 18th, 1963. And that history is blunt about the market they were stepping into. There were already large folding knives out there with locking systems. None of them had been very successful. So Albuk did the least glamorous and most useful thing a manufacturer can do.
He bought three of the rival knives. The team handled them, used them, took them apart. And his conclusion, in his own words, was that all three had features they liked and some they didn't. and that they didn't like the looks of any of them. Sit with that a second. The complaint was never that a locking folder was impossible.
Somebody had already built one. The complaint was that nobody had built one a hunter wanted to look at. That's not an engineering problem. That's a persuasion problem. The man they handed it to was an engineer named Guy Hooser. Described in Buck's own history as an off-the-wall sort who could do more with bailing wire and secondhand scrap iron than most men could do with a fully equipped shop.
By midsummer, he was back with a model. On August the 8th, 1963, the directors approved the basic design, told him to reconfigure the handle, and suggested he work in a brass liner. And here's the part that ought to be better known. Inside Buck, the folding knife was not the priority. The program getting top billing that year was a new fixed blade fishing knife.
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