Iron and steel

Funny how things can pan out. A few weeks back, my wife found this knife in the street. It had clearly been lying there for a while and with no houses or shops nearby, she brought it home and I cleaned it up. It seems it was a promotional freebie, originally in a leather pouch and probably from the 1950s. I've seen others online stamped with Bayer and also made by Walter Kayser in Solingen, Germany, a town with a long history of blade making, the Sheffield of the Rhineland.

And this is Adolf Weil, a son of Solingen and known as the Iron Man thanks to his long career in motocross, most of which was spent as a Maico works rider, in fact the AW400 he's riding here in 1976 bears his initials. He won 14 national championships and three times came third in the 500cc world championships. At the age of 34 he won the Trans-AMA title. Adolf died in 2011, but the bike shop he set up in his home town when he retired from racing in 1977 is still run by his sons Frank and Jürgen. MP