A Quartermaster 'Atturo' Surfaces on r/knives and 'Such Fakery This Is' Becomes a Brand Postmortem

Some knife posts ask for an identification; this one asked for a verdict. An r/knives member shared a gallery of a Qrtrmasters Atturo with the caption Such Fakery this is! and invited comments and opinions. What followed was less an authenticity check than a guided tour of one of the knife industry's stranger cautionary tales — because the replies revealed that the knife itself is only half the story.

The research in the thread is remarkably thorough. One commenter dug up that Atturo is best known as a tire brand, and that Atturo Tires partnered with Quartermaster Knives designer Jared West to create knife-blade-inspired tread designs and sidewall graphics — with the knives sold as tie-in merchandise through the tire company's motorsports gear store. That explains the odd specimen on the gallery table: a promotional knife from a cross-industry collaboration that most knife collectors barely remember, made all the stranger by the tire-brand connection printed on it.

The second commenter delivered the postmortem with zero mercy: Quartermaster deserved to go out of business because it scammed customers by lying about where its knives were made — claiming American manufacture while the work was done in China — and by misrepresenting steel quality. He still owns a Dr Jekyll model he uses as a desk knife, which is its own kind of tribute: the designs could be fun, even when the business practices were not. A third owner of a ten-year-old Atturo adds that his example was very dull out of the box and came with no detailed information at all.

For newer collectors, the thread is a compact history lesson in an era when hype and honesty diverged hard. Quartermaster built a loud brand around aggressive designs and tactical marketing, and its collapse left a graveyard of knives whose reputations are now argued over in gallery posts like this one. The community's verdict on the Atturo — fake-looking, poorly finished, from a brand that burned its own credibility — is less important than the pattern it illustrates: when a company lies about origin and steel, the knives carry that debt forever.