Both of these had jammed quite badly. Soaking them in degreaser, ultrasonic cleaning and scrubbing them with kerosene didn't free them up, so I drilled the rivets and took them apart.
From the tang stamps and tool variants I worked out that both of the knives are from when he was nobody's grandpa. One is a '80-'86 Spartan Eco (no toothpick/tweezers slots), dated by the VSSR stamp. The other is a keyringless '86-'90 Climber, dated by the
VSSR stamp and the old scissors with a screw and no hook.
Here's a few interesting things I've found while taking them apart. First of all, these were stored in a drawer in his desk along with a bunch of magnets, so everything is slightly magnetized. I know this isn't possible with 316 stainless but is with 304, and apparently Victorinox's stainless of choice too. The backsprings are more magnetized than the tools, so they're the only parts that can hold each other up:
The Spartan Eco can opener and the Climber scissors backsprings have this cool ground finish rather than the rounded/polished finish on the others and all the springs in my 2012 Spartan.
The liners of the Spartan Eco have some pretty bad spalling typical of 36-42 year old aluminium, but the liners of the Climber appear to be something strange. They're flaking at the edges like rusty steel plate. It made me think maybe the liners are magnesium, since it corrodes like that. When I looked into it, apparently Victorinox used nickel silver but not in combination with Celidor scales so recently. So I guess the aluminium is laminated or something. Maybe multiple sheets rolled together?
Now for the sad ending. Before taking apart the Climber, I used it to assemble a piece of flat pack furniture from Kmart. The can opener screwdriver tip somehow didn't stand up to driving cheap screws into pre-drilled holes in 6mm MDF! So now I guess I'll use this as the basis for the scalpel blade holder tool I want to make.
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