I don't understand how you've had so many consistent faults with the AXIS lock. I can only speak from my own experience, but all the AXIS locks I have never had a problem... It's amazing that within a few days you had so many.
I'm interested in seeing what the failure looks like so I can re-evaluate my own knives.
Well, I can't take a good picture, but when I noticed the failure this time it was because the spring did not push the lock into place. Good thing I noticed before cutting.
Anyway, when I checked it out, there was a very sharp bend in the middle of the spring's curve. it looked kind of like a kinked garden hose, and there was pretty much no force being applied from it. I picked it up and pressed on it with my fingers to check it out, and that's when it snapped off. Explains why on the first one it had snapped in half at that same spot.
I think it's just metal fatigue with the way the break was. There was still some resistance in the spring when it came to pulling the two ends apart, but none whatsoever while pushing the ends toward each other.
I'm not a metalurgist, but the metal the springs are made of didn't seem like very high quality stuff, at least when comparing it to what I'm going to replace it with, i.e. guitar string. I figure guitar string is springy enough and its intended purpose is to be moving around and vibrating, so hopefully it doesn't fatigue as quickly as the metal the springs were made out of.
I open-and-closed it quite a bit, but I don't think it would be hard to compare it to a couple of years use if only opened and shut when used. I can count on my hands the amount of times I have zoned out and did it, but basically it would be about thirty minutes to an hour ( or however long I watched TV, but usually no more than two hours ) of me opening and closing it at about a rate of once or twice a second.
So all I'm saying is that, the springs they have in there, I wouldn't count on to last several years, and spending this much money on a knife, I don't want to worry about if the company is still even going to be there in say 20 years to fix the thing when their springs fail.
No big deal, I'll just replace them with some guitar strings and those will probably last much, much longer. I think BM should probably choose some better material for the springs though, considering my experience of some of the other users. They probably are catering to the lowest common denominator, or in other words they're already satisfying the majority of the market that won't wear out the springs that fast, but I think that if you look at the raw numbers these springs shouldn't have failed with the amount of times I opened and closed the knife--at least I have higher expectations from them when the knife retails at $200.
I mean, it's no real slam on BM or the design, I just had a feeling when buying it that the springs wouldn't survive both my use and my bad habits. Perhaps it's unfair to evaluate the springs along those demands since I usually have liner-locks, but for some reason I had this wild idea that they would be made with super high quality stuff that wasn't going to wear out. Nope, they're just normal springs.
That being said if I see another model of BM with an AXIS lock I might buy it and replace the springs with guitar strings, but other than that I'm staying away.
@marthinus,
