Benchmade Adamas realization

Hackenslash said:
Ok, Dude. Just quit. Average weight of all Gerbers = 3 ounces? There are single makers that produce more than Viktorinox?

Stop flailing in the dark and abandon this argument.

I’d like to add that of all the folks who’ve joined in this thread, only the OP has Adamas failure. Just let this fight go and find a vulnerable looking windmill.
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I went on Gerber site and most their knives are around 3-5 ounces, only their more expensive models are heavier and a fair bit of the more numerous, cheaper models are lighter. Feel free to come up with your own estimate by the way, as I made it clear my estimate was super rough.

You also clearly haven’t read this thread because me and multiple other people have brought up issues with an Adamas model, along with atleast one YouTube reviewer. So if you spent more time actually reading what others are saying before dismissing them completely, you might’ve contributed something of substance to this conversation.
 
Enzo’s Woodshop said:
They are the largest knife company in all of Europe. They are a fair bit bigger than any other brand I can think of.
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Fair enough, but this is all besides the point that most knives are not slipjoints. I'm not arguing slipjoints aren't useful, but objectively most knives have some sort of locking mechanism, and I don't think it's just a fad or because people don't know how to use knives.
 
kafolarbear said:
Fair enough, but this is all besides the point that most knives are not slipjoints. I'm not arguing slipjoints aren't useful, but objectively most knives have some sort of locking mechanism, and I don't think it's just a fad or because people don't know how to use knives.
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Yeah I wasn’t a part of the slipjoint debate, I personally don’t have anything to say about it. Just wanted to point out that stuff about the size of Victorinox‘s business. Saw a short documentary about it on Youtube not long ago and it came to mind.
 
kafolarbear said:
And that absolutely pales in comparison to the tens of millions of other mostly locking knives people buy from mostly no name Chinese brands or the likes of Gerber/Kershaw/Boker etc. Sure most folding knife companies have some slip joint offerings but it's not that big a portion of the market share. Especially when you start getting to higher end knives, you start to see fewer and fewer slipjoint options. Anyways, this is all getting away from the original argument. If you disagree that "hard use" should even be a category for folding knives, that's a whole different argument, and one where we might actually finding ourselves agreeing a lot more than you might think. But as long as companies are marketing folding knives to be super tough tanks, people shouldn't be buying these knives and having the locks fail like the OP's did. Everyone wants to rag on him for batonning with the knife which I agree is dumb but ignores it failed on him before that too, that straight up shouldn't have happened and this lock defect is not unique to the OP.
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I'm sorry, what? No. There are more custom slipjoint makers today than ever before. Do you know why that might be? I think you do. In any case, Victorinox sells millions of knives a year in something like over a hundred countries. That alone utterly destroys your argument that slipjoints "aren't popular". So no, their sales don't "pale in comparison" to whatever cheap gas station trash there is out there. I'm actually chuckling that I even had to type this out.

Also, you keep continuing to argue that there's some significant sample size of Adamas crossbar locks failing, when that simply isn't true. Please stop that, it's a bad look.
 
kafolarbear said:
It's an assumption, and a pretty fair one I think. Unless you believe that victorinox has a majority market share of knives. I'd be willing to bet Gerber gets somewhat close, apparently they use something like nearly 700,000 pounds of steel a year in their knives. If you figure the average Gerber weighs about 3 ounces, and lets say maybe 2 of those 3 ounces is blade steel, that's like 5.6 million knives a year for a super rough estimate. Not quite the 10 million a year claimed by victorinox, but that's just one knife manufacturer and afaik, none of their knives are slip joints.
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Thank you. An incorrect one, but at least you admit it. As ever, I am always interested in learning, so if you have information that points to there being some single company who sells more knives a year than Victorinox does, I'd love to see that data.
 
PenguinsRcool2 said:
I have now owned 2 adamas’s and 1 mini adamas. I love what these knives tried to be. But all 3 of them, had lock failure. The first one i noticed while cutting a plastic band on a pallet of brick at work, i cut through it with some force, as they are hard af to cut, amd the adamas cutting profile isnt good. The blade somehow came out of the lock and clipped the corner of my finger. So i locked it back up and lightly tapped the spine, lock failed again. I returned it to benchmade got credit bought another, knowingly i got it, and battoned a piece of wood for my smoker, this wood i could split with a pencil, its stupid dry and some sort of incredibly weak pine about 2” diameter, lock failed. Sent it back they “fixed it” failed again. Sometime later bought a mini adamas used, guy said he never really used it. I honestly thought it wouldnt fail aftwr about a week of use i was using the spine with the knife open to pry open a bin of hydrualic cement with a plastic paint can cap kinda thing… almost no pressure was put on it, it failed…
Morale of the story this knife series is the worst knife series of all time, perhaps the worst folding knife ever made. Every single person i know or have seen on social media used one, it fails. It isnt safe, and its STILL marketed as heavy use… plus personally i have not seen benchmade say a single thing. All they have to do is add a 1/4 inch to the bottom of the blade where the lock sits but they dont care about the safety or needs of their customers. It is just sad
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Sounds like you need the Cold Steel Voyager—the greatest knife ever made.

Kidding aside, I’ve never seen or experienced a Triad lock fail yet.
 
kafolarbear said:
Fair enough, but this is all besides the point that most knives are not slipjoints. I'm not arguing slipjoints aren't useful, but objectively most knives have some sort of locking mechanism, and I don't think it's just a fad or because people don't know how to use knives.
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If slipjoints weren't popular (remember, as you claim), then there wouldn't be so many companies making them, and custom makers making them, and millions of people buying them. As for them being useful, our grandfathers, great, great-great, etc. seemed to do alright with them. My own Grandfather worked for over 50 years as a Railroad man with a slipjoint in his pocket.

I swear, some folks act like there were no good knives before Andrew Demko's Triad lock came about.
 
Quiet said:
If slipjoints weren't popular (remember, as you claim), then there wouldn't be so many companies making them, and custom makers making them, and millions of people buying them. As for them being useful, our grandfathers, great, great-great, etc. seemed to do alright with them. My own Grandfather worked for over 50 years as a Railroad man with a slipjoint in his pocket.

I swear, some folks act like there were no good knives before Andrew Demko's Triad lock came about.
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I never said slipjoints can’t make for good knives, but objectively speaking most knives today are locking knives, even if victorinox makes the most knives out of any company -and they do undoubtedly make a lot of knives- that doesn’t make all the dozens if not hundreds of manufacturers from the unnamed Chinese gas station brands all the way to Spyderco, Benchmade, etc. who primarily, and in some cases exclusively make and sell folding knives with locking mechanisms.

So the question becomes, are locks just a useless fad? Or maybe there’s a reason people like to have locks on their knives, so when a company like Benchmade advertises their knives as “hard use”, it’s kind of disingenuous for the locks of these “hard use knives” to not hold up to “hard use”. This isn’t a debate about whether or not a folder should be used this way, this shouldn’t be a debate about which specific company makes more knives, that all distracts from the real discussion about dishonest marketing and unmet expectations.
 
This is a discussion about “Dishonest marketing”? This is a discussion that has gone off the deep end!
 
kafolarbear said:
I never said slipjoints can’t make for good knives, but objectively speaking most knives today are locking knives, even if victorinox makes the most knives out of any company -and they do undoubtedly make a lot of knives- that doesn’t make all the dozens if not hundreds of manufacturers from the unnamed Chinese gas station brands all the way to Spyderco, Benchmade, etc. who primarily, and in some cases exclusively make and sell folding knives with locking mechanisms.

So the question becomes, are locks just a useless fad? Or maybe there’s a reason people like to have locks on their knives, so when a company like Benchmade advertises their knives as “hard use”, it’s kind of disingenuous for the locks of these “hard use knives” to not hold up to “hard use”. This isn’t a debate about whether or not a folder should be used this way, this shouldn’t be a debate about which specific company makes more knives, that all distracts from the real discussion about dishonest marketing and unmet expectations.
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I don't have the numbers on how many knives are locking versus non-locking, but that's really beside the point. Locks are not a fad, and I'm not sure why you keep asking that (since it's not a claim I ever made). The thing I am responding to was your comment that slipjoints are not popular, when by every metric, they are. Secondly, both Benchmade and Spyderco make nonlocking folders, which kind of reinforces my point that they're a popular style of knife. The Italians sure love them, with virtually every major Italian maker also making a huge number of them.

In any case, the reason why people like locks is because they give people who aren't really good with knives a false confidence that they can abuse the tool and be safe, because the knife won't unlock and injure them. Very few lock mechanisms on the market today can say they've had zero failures. Spyderco, Buck, Benchmade, Zero Tolerance, virtually every American brand has had people come in here claiming Company XYZ's knives suck because their examples failed. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that is statistically insignificant. The Adamas specifically, they've sold tens of thousands of them over the model's lifetime. If it's such a terrible design, why aren't we hearing about massive numbers of them failing? The Adamas specifically has held up to "hard use" by plenty of people who own them, myself included. So now what? Which anecdotal story is true? If the OP says "The Adamas sucks, I had two examples fail on me, and I know some guys who also had theirs fail", a logical person is going to start looking at (man, I dislike having to repeat myself) the common denominator. Plastic zip ties? I've cut plenty of those with mine. So have others here. So, does one guy's experience override all of the other owners of an Adamas who can attest to having used their knives hard without issue?

It boils down to this. The user. When some people hear/read "hard use", they think "That means I can abuse this knife and it'll take it!" "Hard use" to many of us here on this board still means "Using this tool as a knife", not a prybar, a screwdriver, a lever, or anything else. Remember, a folding knife is a handful of disparate pieces bolted together, with several possible points of failure. For those of us who have used the knives hard as knives, interesting then, that we haven't seen the issues OP has seen, no? "But, but, the OP cut some plastic straps!" And? It's entirely possible that they were shoving against the medium those straps were strapped against, and somehow actuated the lockbar forward on the backdraw, unlocking the knife. That would be 100% user error, and could have happened.
 
kafolarbear said:
You're not wrong, too many people taking this way too personally. You'd think you were criticizing their mother's cooking from how they defend Benchmade and invalidate those with a negative experience.
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:rolleyes: I really need to keep some of those "knife forum debate" bingo cards handy for threads like these. Unfortunately, the "their FEEEEELINGS must be hurt" has already been tried, so you'll need to come up with something else.

And actually, I have a question. How many Benchmades do you own?
 
I had a single omega spring break in my minigrip, and it was noticable. I also had other issues with BM, plus I've come to dislike thumbstuds.

However, it would never occur to me to baton with a folding knife. Just seems like abuse, as well as a disaster waiting to happen. A lock, after all, is to hold the knife open, not prevent it from closing due to impact.

I've heard a lot of people having omega springs break over the past 8 years or so. I carried, used, repeatedly flicked my SOG X-ray Vision mini for 14 years without a failure, so I don't think it's necessarily a design issue. I've heard Hogue uses more robust omega springs in their able lock.
 
Quiet said:
I don't have the numbers on how many knives are locking versus non-locking, but that's really beside the point. Locks are not a fad, and I'm not sure why you keep asking that (since it's not a claim I ever made). The thing I am responding to was your comment that slipjoints are not popular, when by every metric, they are. Secondly, both Benchmade and Spyderco make nonlocking folders, which kind of reinforces my point that they're a popular style of knife. The Italians sure love them, with virtually every major Italian maker also making a huge number of them.

In any case, the reason why people like locks is because they give people who aren't really good with knives a false confidence that they can abuse the tool and be safe, because the knife won't unlock and injure them. Very few lock mechanisms on the market today can say they've had zero failures. Spyderco, Buck, Benchmade, Zero Tolerance, virtually every American brand has had people come in here claiming Company XYZ's knives suck because their examples failed. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that is statistically insignificant. The Adamas specifically, they've sold tens of thousands of them over the model's lifetime. If it's such a terrible design, why aren't we hearing about massive numbers of them failing? The Adamas specifically has held up to "hard use" by plenty of people who own them, myself included. So now what? Which anecdotal story is true? If the OP says "The Adamas sucks, I had two examples fail on me, and I know some guys who also had theirs fail", a logical person is going to start looking at (man, I dislike having to repeat myself) the common denominator. Plastic zip ties? I've cut plenty of those with mine. So have others here. So, does one guy's experience override all of the other owners of an Adamas who can attest to having used their knives hard without issue?

It boils down to this. The user. When some people hear/read "hard use", they think "That means I can abuse this knife and it'll take it!" "Hard use" to many of us here on this board still means "Using this tool as a knife", not a prybar, a screwdriver, a lever, or anything else. Remember, a folding knife is a handful of disparate pieces bolted together, with several possible points of failure. For those of us who have used the knives hard as knives, interesting then, that we haven't seen the issues OP has seen, no? "But, but, the OP cut some plastic straps!" And? It's entirely possible that they were shoving against the medium those straps were strapped against, and somehow actuated the lockbar forward on the backdraw, unlocking the knife. That would be 100% user error, and could have happened.
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To answer your other comment, I own two benchmades, a mini adamas and a partially serrated turret. Though I've also worked with, sharpened or otherwise handled and had some time with a Bugout, a full sized Adamas D2, a 940 Osborne, the Nimravus, the Puukko and the Anonimus. And I'd say out of all those, the mini-adamas is my favorite, but just because I like the knife doesn't mean I can't criticize it or it's marketing when it clearly fails at a basic test of lock strength that most folding knives have no problems with. Does that mean it's a bad knife? No. But a hard use knife's lock should not be failing easier than the lock of something like a bugout, especially when they have the same locking mechanism. I think it's perfectly fair for consumers to ask why the supposedly hard use knife's lock is failing where other knives with the same lock aren't and to more importantly, get whatever the design issue or factory defect is fixed. Me and OP are not the only ones who have noticed this, and I'm very happy that you and most people commenting on this thread have nothing but good things to say about the knife. I'm in the same boat as you for the most part, I do like the general design, shape and size of the mini adamas, but you shouldn't discount other's experiences with baseless hypotheticals like "oh maybe he just disengaged the lock" when multiple people, from forum members to online knife reviewers have noticed that the lock on the mini-adamas is weaker than it's other axis lock counterparts.
 
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