I got an e-mail from Bill indicating that he is having computer problems and couldn't post this himself...
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The photos on the ebay listing are the same ones that are posted above. I didn't post the photos of the bayonet on ebay as it was not included in the auction.
I asked the same question about the existance of a bayonet without the hole in the blade. It turns out that this scabbard was being developed at the same time as the bayonet. The original concept was to use the bayonet and scabbard together as a shear type cutter, similar to the Soviet design. This scabbard was developed as an alternate to using the bayonet blade as part of the wire cutter. The weight of the scabbard turned out to be much greater than that allowed by bid specifications and the scabbards were not submitted. Had they been able to utilize these scabbards, they probably would have eliminated the hole in the blade.
An interesting side note to this; a good friend of mine who owns one of these scabbards asked Barry Brown at Lan-Cay if he would make him a M9 bayonet without the hole in the blade. Barry explained that all of the jigs that Lan-Cay uses for machining the blades utilize the hole in the blade for indexing. Under their current method of manufacturing bayonets, it would not be practical to eliminate the hole.
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