Want to wait until Valentine's day to give this to my Wife, but anxious as she has been using a Spyderco Bug on a keychain at work for years! This is a great little knife and a heck of a fidgeteer! I just grabbed one in OD green for myself.
The build is quite impressive. The centering, ease of opening, closing and fit & finish is on par with any knife anywhere near this price.
I've had a large number of Civivi knives. I still have a bunch in extended rotation. I've taken apart and inspected dozens of them and I've modified a few. Overall, they tend to be very good. Issues are relatively rare and they have warranty support.
Being a fan of budget knives over time, Civivi was something of a game changer. It's not that there weren't other good budget knives coming out of China at the time. It's that to an appreciable extent, Civivi spearheaded a sort of Renaissance in Chinese budget knives. They hit the scene with higher quality for the dollar, raised the bar, sparked competition, and helped to overcome a lot of negative perceptions.
Here is a video of some carefully controlled cut-testing and a discussion of 9Cr18MoV involving a couple of Civivi's debut models from 2018. Both the Civivi Naja and the Real Steel Receptor here are mine. The Receptor is a great design by Ostap Hel and nicely executed. It has awesome ergonomics and a sheath that is still excellent by today's standards. However, the difference in heat treatment is obvious. The 9Cr18MoV on the Receptor is okay, offering reasonable performance both for the money and for the time. Versus the best 8Cr13MoV, it's a solid step up. On the Civivi though, it's another solid step up from there. Civivi's 9Cr18MoV was not only an easy competitor for Spyderco's VG-10, it was catching the heels of super steels with less than stellar heat treatments.
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