Section 02
The tang — the flat, unsharpened base of the blade near the pivot — carries Case's manufacturer stamp. The wording and dot pattern of that stamp changed over time, which is the main way collectors narrow down when a knife was made.
The earliest Case stamps predate the double-X entirely and read out the full company name and town. No dot or number system yet — dating this early relies on the exact wording, blade steel, and handle construction.
The double-X appears for the first time, inside an oval "Case XX Tested" stamp — originally a reference to a tempering/testing process, not a date code.
Several wordings coexisted through this stretch — "Case XX," "Case Tested XX," "Case's Tested XX," and script-style "Case" stamps among them. None carry a date code; narrowing this span means comparing exact wording and stamp shape against a reference.
A plain "Case XX" stamp that held for roughly two and a half decades. "Case XX Stainless" runs alongside it from 1950 on, marking the stainless-steel blade lines specifically.
"U.S.A." joins the stamp for the first time. Still no dots or date code — this is the last purely wording-based window before Case starts marking individual years.
Case starts marking the manufacture year with a row of dots beneath "U.S.A." The count runs backwards through the decade: ten dots for 1970, counting down one dot per year to a single dot for 1979.
Same countdown logic, new position: the dots move to sit between the stylized "CaseXX" logo and "USA." Ten dots opens the decade in 1980, counting down to one dot in 1989. A stainless variant of the same era reads "CaseXX ··SS·· USA."
For four years, Case drops dots entirely and stamps the two-digit year split around "USA" — "19," then "USA," then the last two digits, so a 1992 knife reads "19 USA 92." No counting required for this short window, just reading the digits.
Dots come back beneath a restyled "Case XX USA" mark, again counting down — but this cycle only runs seven years, so it opens at seven dots in 1993 rather than ten.
From 2000 on, Case switched from round dots to small "x" marks flanking the stylized "CaseXX" logo, still stepping down across each decade (a fresh countdown starts in 2000, again in 2010, and again in 2020). The exact mark-count-to-year key for this era is fine enough that it's easy to misread from a photo — cross-check a specific knife against the Case Collectors Club's chart (linked below) rather than relying on a guess.
Source: the era wording and year-by-year dot counts above were checked directly against the Case Collectors Club's tang stamp chart — the most complete public reference for this, covering folding knives, fixed-blade/hunting knives, and Case XX Select separately. This page covers folding-knife patterns only, to match the rest of the archive. The 2000-onward "x" mark system is noted here in general terms only — its exact per-year count is easy to misread from a photo, so cross-check a specific knife against their chart directly rather than this summary. Real photos of each era's stamp will replace the text-only marks shown here as catalog scans and verified examples are added.