This topic should continue to be about ?vintage model 14s? and I hope others post pictures and stories. However, on the topic of ?dating Solingen Model-14? knives, here are some considerations.
1. Solingen blades were ordered through a broker in W. Germany. He farmed out the manufacture in the town of Solingen, the cutlery center of Germany. That area has many blade manufacturing companies, but there is no written evidence who the manufacturer(s) were... unless the information is in the original Randall records. The Solingen blades were likely forged in 500 blade batches, per Gaddis.
2. The ?Solingen? part of the logo just indicates a town or region, not a manufacturer. In fact, they may not have all been made by the same manufacturer.
3. It is likely that considerable time elapsed between making a blade in Germany and final polish and assembling that knife at the Randall shop. Therefore, even if each batch of Solingen blades could be traced to time and manufacturer, it might not have any connection to when they were finished and sold.
4. Apparently the etched Randall-Made/Solingen logo was applied at the Randall shop while any cross-ricasso ?stamp? was applied in Germany.
5. There are observable differences in blade grinds. However, Gaddis stated that the shop had to do extensive individual finishing on each blade, so differences may be systemic.
I thought perhaps the different batches of blades might have a discernable variation in main blade grind , maybe the depth of the primary bevel. Examining maybe 50 pictures of Solingen 14s dating from about 1963 to 1971, the clip grinds seem somewhat different but I can't make any firm conclusions. Here are a collage ranging from about 1958-1971 or so.
6. The etched Randall-made/ Solingen logos on 14s has some group differences. This can be seen in the picture below where two of the logos have a smear in the ?E? and an anomaly in the ?N?. But I can?t find a way to use that to define age. One reason is that I have no idea how or when an etched logo is applied to the blade. Also we don't really know the steps that the shop went through to prepare a Solingen blade for delivery. It may be that the shop randomly chose a blade to be finished to fill an order.... So I don?t think differences in logo can be correlated to other minor differences in the blade grind, shape, etc., and thus to time finished and shipped.
7. The 500 original blades delivered in early 1955 are assumed to all have been marked across the ricasso (see example below). However, I?ve only seen pictures of about 6-7 Model 14s that were marked this way, including one in Hunt?s ?Military Models? that had a unique top blade line. Given so few have been exhibited, perhaps that assumption is flawed, or they were used for early 18s, etc. It should be noted that the cross-ricasso stamped blades can be firmly dated from about 1955 throughout late '50s, to at least 1963. These stamps are seen on some of the earliest model 17s and 18s too which were made from re-ground Solingen 14s/15s.
Anyway, I don?t think it is worthwhile to chase Solingen blade shapes or stamps to define age groups.
Postscript - the altered grind "Solingen" blade recently sold on E-bay (see discussion above) has some serious problems beyond just the alteration of the clip ... the primary bevel and other grind characteristics may be questionable, though the oddities may just be photo angle.