The Monahan Stinger

Specs:

Blade Length: 4 1/8" Weight: ? oz.

Blade Thickness: ? Sheath: Leather

Overall Length: 8 5/8" Blade Steel: 420 HC?

Rc: ?

    The Monahan Stinger was designed by Paul Monahan who had a special interest in throwing knives. The Knife is based on a knife that Paul designed called the Sea Wolf. The Sea wolf was a one piece cast Titanium knife with saw teeth that were cast into the top of blade. The casting was done by someone by the name of Wolf who had hoped to sell these to the Navy SEAL's. The problem was that the grain pattern of the knife was not all that great because they were cast and as many people know the highest Rockwell hardness you can achieve with Titanium is around RC 47. Which of course means these knives would not hold an edge for very long. Of course when E.O.D. types in our military were looking for a non magnetic dive knife in the 1990's they opted to go with a design by Mission Knives made in Titanium which have a Rockwell of 47. Since Titanium did not prove to be practical at least when the Stinger was brought to market, cast Stainless Steel was used instead. This increased the weight of the knives considerably. The design was not very popular and few were ever made. I don't know what the figure is but my guess is that only one batch of about 500 were actually made.

    Pictured below is an example of the most common variation.  This example does not have the usual BlackJack markings. I believe this is an early pre-production piece.

photo courtesy of  Tom Carey

    Below are two more examples of this model. Both of these examples show the logo and model name. Also as you can see there was in fact at least one variation to this model which I was previously not aware of. It turns out some of these were offered with the gold Titanium Nitride coating. Thank you Bill for providing these nice pictures for the site.