Have you had a broken Omega spring in an Axis lock folder?

Have you had a broken Omega spring in an Axis lock? folder?

  • Yes

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • No

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Total voters
    0
  • Poll closed .
I'm curious as to when the springs break. Is it just opening the knife and using it as needed, then on one occasion while closing it you hear a snap....or is it playing with it and in open and close, open and close, open and close while watching a TV show/movie and you notice all of a sudden it doesn't lock up?
 
kreole said:
That makes me wonder. If one breaks, does it put extra stress on the remaining one so as to cause it to break sooner than it would otherwise?
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Well, if there's two springs in there and one breaks then of course the same amount of load that was distributed over two is now put on to one, but I did not notice the last one break any sooner or later. It actually took me a long time to realize that the first one had broke, so there was really no way of keeping track of that.

OrdnanceBubbaUSMC said:
I'm curious as to when the springs break. Is it just opening the knife and using it as needed, then on one occasion while closing it you hear a snap....or is it playing with it and in open and close, open and close, open and close while watching a TV show/movie and you notice all of a sudden it doesn't lock up?
Click to expand...

The first one I noticed was broken when I was playing with it, and I only really noticed it because it had kind of a gritty feel to it, but it never even became a problem in normal use. Didn't notice until I was messing with it.

When the second one broke I was opening it to cut open a package, and when I pulled back on the lock I kind of felt it snap. So then I opened it to see if it would engage the lock fully, and it only pushed the lock-bar up a little bit so I knew it had broke.
 
I have several BM’s, all different models.
I have never broken a spring on any of them.
I do take care of my knives however. All moving parts of any folder are always lubed and dried. I don’t use them around salt water and then leave them to sit for days. Anything can break if neglected or abused.

I will say this, I have one Axis that I used on the North Slope of AK for years. It was subject to extreme cold, down to -70 a few times. The Omega springs never failed under those conditions.
 
It took three years of hard use, but I did manage to break one in my 710. Rather than send it back to Benchmade, I made my own spring out of a guitar string and it's still going strong, though I haven't carried the knife with any regularity in the past two years.
 
KennyB said:
Well, if there's two springs in there and one breaks then of course the same amount of load that was distributed over two is now put on to one, but I did not notice the last one break any sooner or later. It actually took me a long time to realize that the first one had broke, so there was really no way of keeping track of that.
Click to expand...


There really is not a load that the springs have to work against. They just provide resistance to moving the lock bar back. If you pull the lock bar back and grab it on both sides, then if one is broke that means there will be half as much resistance. If you pull the bar back evenly and don't let one side move further than the other side, then I wouldn't think you would stress the spring any more than normal. If the lock bar is loaded unevenly and one side moved more than the other then I can see how weird, uneven loading could add additional stress.
 
I've never had any issues, but I've never used an axis lock knife long enough to find out :o

I do have an 806D2 AFCK that is about a decade old and it has all original parts....the only thing I replaced was actually the lockbar itself and not the springs just because the older lockbar was getting loose (screwed construction). I replaced it with a lockbar from one of my griptilians and it works even better now :)
 
I have quite a few different Axis knives, including a couple that go back to the first year of production more than ten years ago, and a trainer that has been cycled approximately 3 1/2 billion times.

I have never had a broken omega spring, nor any kind of failure with an Axis lock.
 
no, these have been my users over the last decade or so

730
710
530
(2)806D2
770
552
14205
 
I think we need further qualifications so before we can get a better picture of how frequently this happens.

I said "Yes" to this poll. I have three knives with the Axis-lock, and out of those three, I've had two Axis-lock's break: I have actually only had two broken springs, one on each knife. The first was on a 943 which I conservatively estimate I cycled ~3-5 million times over four years. The second was on a 940 that I cycled ~100,000 times in two months.

The omega springs of the Axis-lock fail not because of excessive force, you can't deform them any further than the distance that the Axis-bar can travel, but because of fatigue limits.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatigue_limit

Steel and titanium springs have distinct fatigue limits below which the probability of failure is unlikely. My first broken omega spring was most likely because I actually did reach the theoretical fatigue limit: I obsessively opened/closed the knife while I read for ~6 hours each day, every day. For four years. A few million cycles isn't really that many if you think about how many times you can open/close an Axis-lock knife in 20 minutes (1 cycle per second for 20 minutes = 1,200 cycles).

My second broken omega spring occurred far below this limit. Probably inconsitancies in spring production.
 
Cynic2701 said:
My first broken omega spring was most likely because I actually did reach the theoretical fatigue limit: I obsessively opened/closed the knife while I read for ~6 hours each day, every day. For four years. A few million cycles isn't really that many if you think about how many times you can open/close an Axis-lock knife in 20 minutes (1 cycle per second for 20 minutes = 1,200 cycles).
Click to expand...

Respectfully, this sounds absolutely ridiculous.
 
I have not broken one myself, but an acquaintenance of mine did in his 960. I don't know the circumstances, but I can't imagine him using his knives very hard.
 
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