folding knife use, triad lock

Axis is good, but not as good. Most BM's aren't really designed to be beat up on in the same way and you can find several reports of people who just play with them in the house still end up having broken omega springs. Remember Ankerson's Griptilian sample having a dented stop pin from the relatively short and polite "hard use" tests last year?
 
I don't carry a fixed blade because I don't like to carry things on my belt for the most part. I can use my folding knife one handed, while I don't trust myself to re-sheath a fixed blade one handed without looking at the sheath. If I'm camping in the woods I will usually carry a fixed blade, but if I'm working on family property or something I just have my folding knife. Also my lawman will do 99.99% of the things I need a knife to do, which is to cut things. I only use it on wood when I don't have other options, and it's nice to know that I can if I need to.
Legally in california I could carry a fixed blade as long as it's not concealed, but I'm moving back to Washington soon and I'm not sure about the laws there. I know that I can't carry a fixed blade in Seattle city limits, unless I'm on my way to an our door activity like hunting, fishing or horse back riding, though I could probably make the argument that the knife is for a tool for work. I know fisherman that carry several Victorinox deck knives and don't seem to ever have any issues. I believe that I can open carry a fixed blade in most of the state with out restrictions.

I remember ankersons test. It's kind of where I got the idea that my lawman might hold up to batoning.
 
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I don't put much validity in those hard use 'tests'. I don't think Benchmade uses pot metal for their stop pins just like I don't think CS uses some magic undentable steel. My American Lawman and Griptilian both have flat blade tangs that contact the stop pin. If one stop pin were dented more its because it was beat on harder. It's a simple problem to fix but not many makers do it, and that is to have a small curved section that contacts stop pin and greatly increases surface area contact.

Also, remember the Cold Steel was a personal knife bought to use and not trash. The Grip and Manix were bought to test until they broke as stated by the tester. I also know I have no idea how hard I did something a week ago, so how can I possibly know how it compares to what I do today. There was absolutely nothing scientific and repeatable about those tests and as such they are absolutely worthless and meaningless. They are good for some entertainment and to validate a company you like or dismiss one you don't.
 
As far as a curved/shoulder section of the blade tang - I thought all Tri-Ad knives have it, it's always been on their diagram :confused: here is one of the $38 Voyagers - lock-up is as perfect as you could ever hope for in a folder at any price.

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If only we could avoid the inevitability of these threads turning into my lock is better/stronger than your lock... :)

Simple mechanics...the less moving parts , the less likely to fail and thus, the stronger it is.

Video tests and Youtube punters aside until something better/stronger comes along the Triad lock is in for the win.

Tostig


p.s. Oh yea... My Buck 110 did the exact same thing last time we went camping , I was busting up some dead manzanita with my 110 and noticed when I closed it that the blade seemed sluggish , the darn thing developed an ugly amount of play doing that.. My bad though , had I grabbed my self pimped Ontario machete instead on my way out , that would not have happened.

Lesson ?
Triad trumps all other locks , period. Fixed blade trumps all locking folders , period. :)

Tostig
 
id have to go with the crowd who will read "batoning with a folder" and be left scratching my head. been seeing a rash of these threads by CS fanboys lately. this isnt something id think necessary to do at all let alone with enough lack of forsight to be left looking for firewood and nothing but full size pieces laying around to hack threw with a pocket knife. no twigs leaves or dry grass or plant material to be had, but what is available must be split. i call bs on all these type threads.
 
My American Lawman also has that small jump on the tang. But it doesn't do anything. Its not even a curved radius it is a jog with straight lines. There is a line on the tang where the paint is worn where it makes contact with the stop pin over just one small area. There is a matching mark on the stop pin and I can look in the knife and the 'tab' sticking out extends over the stop pin and doesn't touch anything. If that jog doesn't increase the contact patch with the stop pin then it doesn't have any benefit. I was talking about an actual half circle that wraps all the way around the stop pin.

I wasn't saying any other lock is 'better' that the Triad. Just that others have features I like better. As an engineer I like to have more reasoning than "just because". If a lock uses a piece of metal to bridge a gap between tang and stop pin that gets compressed and the forces are transferred through it, I don't see how one lock can be significantly stronger than another. They use the same principles just a slightly different way of implementing them. I have yet to read an explanation why the Triad will be significantly stronger than the other locks that are out there. I don't need an explanation because I can see how the different locks work, but if it is so much stronger and better than everything else, then someone who believes that must have a logical explanation why. Sure if one lock uses stronger or thicker materials it will be stronger, but many locks can be over built to make them stronger. Just to be clear, I haven't said anything bad about the Triad lock.

Also, the amount of moving parts has nothing to do with strength. An argument can be made that less moving parts may be more reliable, but there is no relation to how strong it is.

Edit: I grabbed a few knives and measured the stop pin.
American Lawman: 0.203"
950 Rift: 0.186"
Paramilitary 2: 0.200"
Volt: 0.187"
14205: 0.188"
SR1: 0.157"

The Lawman has a fairly normal size stop pin. It is 0.016" (sixteen thousandths of an inch) larger than the average 3/16" stop pin. For a reference, that is about the thickness of 4 sheets of printer paper bigger in diameter.
 
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There is an actual half circle that wraps around the stop pin. For the Axis lock does the stop pin do anything when there is negative pressure or only positive pressure? I think that might be the main difference besides springs and how robust the parts are in general.
 
bada61265 said:
id have to go with the crowd who will read "batoning with a folder" and be left scratching my head. been seeing a rash of these threads by CS fanboys lately. this isnt something id think necessary to do at all let alone with enough lack of forsight to be left looking for firewood and nothing but full size pieces laying around to hack threw with a pocket knife. no twigs leaves or dry grass or plant material to be had, but what is available must be split. i call bs on all these type threads.
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That's kind of rude. How I choose to use my tools is my business. But to call my thread BS isn't very nice.

I'm most definitely not a "fan boy" But I do like the triad lock. If another company made them then you'd be calling me a spyderco fan boy or a kershaw fan boy.
The fact that I didn't have enough 'foresight' to bring a bigger tool, is because I was camping at an RV park. I didn't even know if they were going to have a fire pit. The place was just sand, gravel and black top. They didn't even have grass there. The only plants were cacti and they were in nice little well manicured areas. I wasn't in a life or death struggle with nature. I was staying at a resort. I wanted a fire, I used my only tool to make a fire. The tool worked. What's your problem?

I don't know about you, but I like to know what my tools are capable of. So that if I ever am in an unforeseen situation where I really need to use them I know what they can do.

Anyway, please stop crapping on my thread. Thanks :D
-Chris
 
Just to throw in two cents... here in the East, water falls from the sky. A lot, lately. Some seasons it never seems to quit. That's why you sometimes baton through wood, because the only dry wood available for many miles around to start a fire with is inside of wet wood.

Also, in some states they do really come down harder on carrying fixed blades than they do folders. The state I'm living in is one of those. Folders are explicitly exempt from most carry restrictions, there's no size limit in the law itself (as always, that doesn't guarantee what gets enforced). In fact, according to the legal forum, people have ended up in court (if quickly back out again) for very small fixed-blades.

Since your EDC is by far the knife you're most likely to have when thing unexpectedly get really interesting, there's some incentive to have a legal EDC that can handle the unexpectedly interesting. As I mentioned elsewhere, my most recent incentive to upgrade the folder I carry came when the shaking stopped and I was outside of my office building, 35 miles from home, looking at the multi-level concrete parking structure my vehicle was in, and envisioning what would have happened if it had been a 6.8 or 7.8 instead of a 5.8. Seemed like a good idea at the time.
 
FlaMtnBkr said:
My American Lawman also has that small jump on the tang. But it doesn't do anything. Its not even a curved radius it is a jog with straight lines. There is a line on the tang where the paint is worn where it makes contact with the stop pin over just one small area. There is a matching mark on the stop pin and I can look in the knife and the 'tab' sticking out extends over the stop pin and doesn't touch anything. If that jog doesn't increase the contact patch with the stop pin then it doesn't have any benefit. I was talking about an actual half circle that wraps all the way around the stop pin.

I wasn't saying any other lock is 'better' that the Triad. Just that others have features I like better. As an engineer I like to have more reasoning than "just because". If a lock uses a piece of metal to bridge a gap between tang and stop pin that gets compressed and the forces are transferred through it, I don't see how one lock can be significantly stronger than another. They use the same principles just a slightly different way of implementing them. I have yet to read an explanation why the Triad will be significantly stronger than the other locks that are out there. I don't need an explanation because I can see how the different locks work, but if it is so much stronger and better than everything else, then someone who believes that must have a logical explanation why. Sure if one lock uses stronger or thicker materials it will be stronger, but many locks can be over built to make them stronger. Just to be clear, I haven't said anything bad about the Triad lock.

Also, the amount of moving parts has nothing to do with strength. An argument can be made that less moving parts may be more reliable, but there is no relation to how strong it is.
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I see what you are saying. I took a good look at my lawman, and I can see where the coating is missing inside the radius in the tang where the stop pin contacts it. Just to be clear, there is nearly a full half circle what wraps around the stop pin on my lawman's tang.

Also, I don't think that any one can argue that a fixed blade is not stronger than a folding knife.
 
OrdnanceBubbaUSMC said:
There is an actual half circle that wraps around the stop pin. For the Axis lock does the stop pin do anything when there is negative pressure or only positive pressure? I think that might be the main difference besides springs and how robust the parts are in general.
Click to expand...

Well the Lawman definitely does not have that. The picture you posted looks just like the Lawman from what is visible so I assumed it was the same. The AXIS isn't the only lock I am talking about, but no the stop pin does not handle negative pressure. That is left to the lockbar that slides and engages the blade tang. It is essentially a sliding stop pin and it transfers forces to the liners, just like a stop pin does.

In addition to knowing how the locks work, and as I mentioned before, Sal Glesser (the owner of Spyderco) has a machine to test and break locks to gather various data including ultimate strength. He has stated on the forums that most high end locks can handle similar loads. I have no reason to not believe him and no reason to assume he is a liar.

For whatever reason, there are a lot of emotions involved when discussing the different locks and the companies that make them. Trying to talk about the locks is usually somewhat pointless when those emotions get involved and logic takes second place. I make my decisions based on what I have experienced and what has worked. I'm not a lover, hater, or fanboy, I just like what works well and has features I like.

Edit: Here is a (somewhat lousy phone) pic of the tang. No radius, just a tab that jogs out and is more straight lines than curves.

999fcaef.jpg


Here is where the tang contacts the stop pin and has knocked paint off. Just a narrow line from the small contact patch about one half of a mm wide. It is the line about halfway between the thumbstud and where the handle starts.

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Tried to get some pics to show it better

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Main difference then is with negative pressure the Tri-Ad basically has another large pin that needs to be defeated, thanks to the lockbar, and it's another pin that is stuck in place. Initial pressure is distributed in more than one location on the handle/liners. From an engineering perspective it should be considered better even if viewed as overboard for some people's taste - it's definitely not redundant and doesn't have a ridiculous mark-up like trying to get the latest, greatest blade steel.
 
Actually the only way the other pin would come into play is if the stop pin was defeated. The lockbar pivot 'hole' is elongated so the lockbar can slide back and forth. Forces only go to the stop pin based on the pic in the other thread going about the Triad lock. When locked open there is still space between the pivot pin and the lockbar.

And your pic definitely shows there is a pretty big difference in the two knives. That definitely should help with putting a flat spot on the stop pin. However, my main EDC BM Rift which has been in my pocket every single day since I got it (not an exaggeration, I carry 2 or 3 knives at once and that is always with me) has a flat spot on the stop pin probably from repeatedly flicking it thousands of times. The lock has adjusted for the very slight amount the blade opens further and is as solid as the day I got it. Not a problem in my case.
 
FlaMntBkr,

Do you know if stop pins are generally heat treated? Do you know what type of steel they are?
I have no idea.
I would assume that harder steel would do better than softer steel. But if it's too hard that would be a bad thing too. I'd rather have a pin deform and deal with the blade play than have one break and have to deal with a broken lock.
 
There are at least three different generations of the American Lawman and two of the Mini Lawman that I know of and what this means is simply that after the knife model was created changes were made. Cold Steel came out with the first gen. Lawman with liners of stainless steel and the tang shaped as more flat than rounded to form fit around the stop pin as shown in one pic. Later, not long after it came out to the public those of us that ordered our first Lawman folders learned when the second one arrived that CS had changed things and did away with the liners among other things. On the Mini Lawman they changed the clip so the first gen of the mini has a different clip than the later models and there may be other changes.

I've owned some of each and regardless of the changes the knives were all flawless. I love folding knives. Personally I've never seen a better lock for a folder than the Triad. I liked it so much that I ordered and bought a custom version of the American Lawman from Andrew. Its the best custom knife I've ever ordered from anyone and the best lock I've seen in my time on the planet. Until someone comes up with one that can take the same abuses with ease nothing else rates about the Triad in my book. I rate it tops for reliability and strength both at this writing. The Axis is a good lock too but the multiple smaller moving parts are worrisome to me for true longevity over time. However, with that said it may be a moot point as they seem to hold up quite well for most with few reports of issue.

Batoning a folder is something we all do now and then, usually in testing to see what a knife can do. Most times anyone doing this knows going in that this is a good way to ruin a good knife. Its abuse plain and simple and beyond the abilities of most lock types. The locks failing or weakening from this have no choice. Nothing is wrong with one of them when they fail after this. What is wrong is that the user expected too much from the design. While I'm as impressed with the Triad as anyone that it can often times take this abuse it doesn't mean I do it every time I need to split wood and I doubt anyone else does either. It is nice to know if you needed to that you have a knife on you that can take it though.

I bought a Mini AK 47 for myself some months back. Almost a year ago or so now I guess but anyway, I've found that I rather like the size and feel of the knife and I'm completely in love with the way it just takes all you dish out to it never giving you any problems or concerns. Call me what you like but I find its in my pocket more and more fitting the bill for the beater upper we all have to have at least one of in our collections.

STR
 
I keep my Recon 1 in the garage as my beater knife. :D

All I have to do is touch it up every once in awhile on a ceramic rod, just takes a few seconds.
 
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