Ball Bearing Lock: Axis-ish?

[Shmackey]

I got to play with a ball-bearing lock for no more than four seconds today. I didn't really get a chance to see how it works, but it looked like the ball bearing sits on top of a ledge on the back of the blade to keep it open, and you retract the ball to let it swing shut. That's kind of what the bar on the Axis lock does. Is that in fact how it works?

 

[The Deacon]

Definitely similar in princple, the lockbar or ball is moved into a slot in the blade, where it restrains the blade both top and bottom, thus preventing both over-rotation and closing and is restrained from vertical movement by the handles. Both systems work much like the lock on an inexpensive knife I had forty odd years ago that used sliding bar that had to be pushed forward manually to engage and pulled back to disengage. The principle is almost certainly even older than that, just the implementation methods differ.