Case 2023 vault release (small congress)

[FranklinG]

RickHuf , that's definitely a looker! Bummer about the blade play though.

 

[RickHuf]

RickHuf , that's definitely a looker! Bummer about the blade play though.

Thanks! It's a good knife... It just needs a little love that it didn't get at the factory.

I went ahead and tightened up the main blade. Now it's spot on with good action. The bolsters needed to be refinished anyways so I didn't mind tapping it together.

Tomorrow I'll Fix that bone, lightly file the pivot pin back down and get it all looking good again.

 

[FranklinG]

I haven't seen many of these here. For those of you who have one, how does it compare to other common small knives, like the peanut or a Buck 303? It looks like it has the handle size of a Buck Cadet, but the blades appear quite a bit smaller.

I'll go ahead and answer that for everyone watching from home. I stumbled across Pàdruig 's post in this thread about GEC 97's (https://www.bladeforums.com/threads/and-a-large-coke-gec-97-thread.1639874/page-32) and somewhere that rabbit hole ended up with a Case Small Congress falling out of my mailbox this week. I don't make the rules. That's just how it works sometimes.

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The main blade is just about the same size as the Cadet's sheepfoot, and a little smaller than the peanut's clip. Useful comparisons for me. I really love the Cadet and peanut. Blade length doesn't always tell the full story, though. The Congress blade shape is weird to my eye - narrow at the base and wider at the tip. In use the angle of the blade to the handle works really well, however. Looks weird, feels great. I could do without the printing on the blade, but that's just a preference.

The secondary blade is pretty small. My son and I are going to try using it to carve some neck kerchief slides for scouts this summer. We'll see how that goes. We'll carve two if it goes well, and several if it goes poorly. Neither of us whittle much, so we might end up making several.

I love the color and jigging on my sample. It needed a little flushing, but it came with great snap. If I squint really hard I might be able to see some gaps in the backsprings, but it feels flush under my fingernail.