how tough are slip-joints?

[Gadgetaholic]

Years ago, as a Boy Scout, I was cutting wood and the blade got stuck in the wood. As I sought to retract it, the slipjoint failed and the blade came back on three of my fingers. I got a nasty cut and bled like a pig, but I wasn't seriously injured. Still, many of my friends regaled me with similar horror stories.

What you describe does not sound like a slip-joint failure, in fact slipjoints are 100% immune to lock failure (due to having no lock to fail) so it can't have been a lock failure and I can't think of any other type of failure here that could be to blame for your injury. It sounds very much like a user error rather than a knife error and it certainly isn't unusual for a faulty user to blame the tool.

What I would suggest is that locking knives are VERY dangerous when used in a way that would be dangerous with a slip-joint, lock failures happen and only people that treat locking blades like they were slip-joints are likely to never get injured when a lock failure occurs.

I could happily live without locking knives, give me some fixed blades and some slip-joints and I can easily cover all tasks that I need a knife for.