Extending the Life of a Liner Lock

T

Thirteenth Star

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Apr 1, 2004
Messages
525
After a liner lock is worn down, why not apply a thin coat of some sort of glue on the blade's tang? This will not only fill in the area where the liner and tang engage, but it will give the liner something to wear against that is (I assume) softer than the liner. So, the thin layer of glue will wear down rather than the liner, hence saving the life of the liner (assuming the liner steel isn't particularly soft). Simply reapply some glue and the cycle continues.

Is this a reasonable idea? If so, can somebody suggest what sort of glue should be used for this?
 
Interesting idea, but I don't know if it'd work in practical application. The glue would not have to be incredibly strong itself, but have an incredibly good bond with the steel. Even if you could find something like that, I'd expect it to fail within a few lockings/unlockings.

Welding on some more material however might be an option.
 
I saw a recent post wherein someone put a dab of J.B. Weld on the kick of a folder because the blade edge was making contact with one of the spacers. Sounds like it worked pretty well. Of course it was bumping against metal, not being scraped as it would for the liner lock application. Seems like, as Planterz said, it might fail pretty fast, get scraped off or pop off altogether.
 
A worn liner can be tuned by removing the liner, placing it on a smooth steel surface and gently peening the lock bar just behind the engaging edge. This will push metal forward towards the locking edge making it lock up sooner.

This takes a bit of patience and good hand eye skills.
 
The liner on my LCC had moved all the way over to the right.I sent it to Microtech and it came back left of center (damn does that mean I have a liberal knife?) No glue involed. I hear that another way is to put in a little larger pivot pin. These are fixes the will last. :)
 
Under normal use, a properly executed liner/frame lock knife should last a long, long time. It's my opinion that as long as the lock is providing secure lockup, there should be no worry. This is not to say that there are not a lot of knives out there that have problems with the liner engaging the tang, and cause poor lockup, which I feel is an improperly executed liner lock.
 
I have found that if the face of the liner/lock bar has been hardened, as most custom makers do, as well as Chris Reeve, they will wear in a little bit initially, then pretty much stay put for a looooong time. If however, the face of the liner is not hardened, since Ti is so soft, it will wear, in which case, one solution is to install a slightly larger diameter stop pin.
 
Lone Hunter said:
I hear that another way is to put in a little larger pivot pin. :)
Click to expand...

That's Stop Pin, not pivot. And even that is doubtful. It was talked about for quite some time as a Sebenza fix, but I recall it was debunked.

A larger pivot pin would require increasing the pivot hole in the blade. In any case, the center of rotation would be the same so the lock geometry wouldn't change.

The idea behind the larger stop pin is that the blade would stop slightly sooner in it's arc. While true, the tang would now be at an angle to the lock bar and not a full solid lock up.

Of course, the need for a custom pin with its ends ground to fit the original holes is another non-trivial aspect of this.

Phil
 
On my crkt M16, I put a bit of tape on the area where the thumstuds contact the handle. It worked pretty well and the geometry is probably still correct because it passes really hard spine whack tests.
 
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