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The BladeForums.com 2024 Traditional Knife is ready to order! See this thread for details: https://www.bladeforums.com/threads/bladeforums-2024-traditional-knife.2003187/
Price is$300$250 ea (shipped within CONUS). If you live outside the US, I will contact you after your order for extra shipping charges.
Order here: https://www.bladeforums.com/help/2024-traditional/ - Order as many as you like, we have plenty.
Fox Suru BUYER BEWARE...
- Thread starter rhstranger
- Start date
these are the facts:
- all official surus, i.e. surus released by Fox Knives Italy, come with holes. so imo the holes are the characteristic of a real suru hehe. even the special runs on Drop.com had holes. (EDIT: that's not true anymore, see ©2021 Limited Edition variants)
- Fox manufactured even more special variants for afaik only four other vendors: Wilson Combat (CF-Ti w/o holes), Heinnie (Ti w/ holes and ball detent "lock"), Urban EDC Supply (CF or Ti, with or without holes), KnifeCenter (G10 without holes, alu with holes), and Drop.com
- surus are my one and only EDC knives, i use them daily. i retired my Techno2 for them. i doht seem to get bored with them. the Ti clip is not very practical though. so for very frequent clipping/unclipping everyday, you'd want to pick a suru variant with the wire clip. i was about to pull the trigger on yet another suru just for the wire clip!
In the meantime one could possibly find used copies on the second hand market (fleebay claigslist instaglam flacebook etc) but you wanna have a right/chance to return the unit to the seller, if the build isn't satisfactory (e.g. too early frame lock, chipped CF, wire edge, M390 hrc).
Originally i wanted to have a special material version CRKT Pilar but it really wasn't available anymore. Only by chance did i learn about the existence of surus (without holes). Very similar knife, just with better materials. The without-holes-versions weren't available anymore, so i settled for the official Ti/CF variant with holes and blue Ti hardware, at only 180eur shipped iirc. Gorgeous official suru! I invested 10 bucks in ceramic ball bearings because the original steel balls do rust upon contact with water, fruit juice, mustard.
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Thanks for the info. I'm too late to the party it appears.
one of my surus had the identical super early lockup too, see shot1 (counting 4 from left to right). the lock did engage and worked just fine, but it was imho way too early as you can see, unacceptably so because it failed the spine whack test laughingly with flying colors. btw all(!) frame lock knives (or all early frame lock knives) fail the spine whack test as @neroknives demonstrated but that's not the point of my post haha. I am no modder nor experienced knife maker (actually i am no knife maker at all lol) so fixing the early frame lock was a critical risky undertaking in my hands, if i didn't want to create any blade play. my main idea was to dremel off material from the M390 blade, because its 3D-concave ("spherical") locking/mating surface looked ugly, not beautifully machined, to start with. However, dremel wasn't the way to go, because it's too difficult to control precise material removal with a dremel at high-speed rotation. How about a metal file? Physically impossible to file a 3D-concave surface; game over. Fortunately, the suru has a tiny screwed on steel plate at the titanium frame lock interface. So i chose to mod that part, removing steel with a ceramic file. And … this strategy worked out well (shot2) yay:
If i had messed up the tiny steel plate for this mod, i could have asked Fox Knives for a replacement part; no doubt it is easier/cheaper to replace the steel plate than to replace a dremel-messed-up M390 blade. It was very instructive to mod that part, also using a black Sharpie marker to see by how much the M390 interacts/mates with the steel interface and file off more material accordingly, i.e. change a point contact to a line contact. I could have filed off a bit more steel but i was happy enough with the progress (shot3) and left it thus far. The lock up is solid, with no blade play whatsoever! I also bent the titanium frame lock to increase the lock spring tension; now more force is required to disengage the lock. The knife still fails the spine whack test but .. it takes more time and energy to fail it, similarly to other frame lock knives; saul good. For more security on a particular critical job, i could quick-push the lock 1mm deeper (shot4), no problem.
I love the suru. It is imho much better than the tremendously popular CRKT Pilar 4352!!
the suru looks age better imho than the look of a pilar; I can't stand the pilar look anymore after 1 year of acquaintance ymmv
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Last night i accidentally noticed that there are new ©2021 variants out, Nos. #22-24 are official manufacturer's catalog limited editions with full scales (no more cheesy holes!). I don't think that CPM 20CV is a step-up from M390, what do you think?
Since i already own several surus, i probably won't bite anew. But it is good to see the maker's belief in this model. I still think that it is superior to the much more 8K popular CRKT Pilar.
Ciao Gabriele, Andreas 2021-08-30
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Mister_Punchy
Gold Member
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2020
- Messages
- 470
If I may, Bastinelli is a French knifemaker
[Edit] My mistake, they are italian manufactured, as you stated
- Joined
- Jan 22, 2007
- Messages
- 9,979
Those two steels are nearly identical.
here a recent video, which variant would you like best? apparently they're serialized (limited edition):
us street price seems to be around 320$ lmao , in eu it's "80$ less" (because made in eu), currently with high availability (so not very limited, for now). so for me the price is within reason and I'm still considering the expense.
At this point I'm going to assume that the blade runs on steel balls bearing (not ceramic, no washers), which is fine if the knife is treated as collection item (not as user).
hmm buy or not buy? and which version?
At this point I'm going to assume that the blade runs on steel balls bearing (not ceramic, no washers), which is fine if the knife is treated as collection item (not as user).
hmm buy or not buy? and which version?
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