Hey, if Strider's game, I'd take them up on the offer of the knife, maybe reaching an agreement with them first that you'll first test a knife you buy yourself from some independent retail source. You'll videotape that test. Then, kind of in the spirit of cooperation, you'll send them both a copy of the complete videotape, plus whatever's left of the knife when you get done with it.
End result:
For Strider: Strider has a video, and a knife (or remnants thereof) that either they can use in their promotions ("Strider Knives: so tough, that one user even did this to one. As you can see in our promotional video, this guy whaled away at it until it broke. It took him 23 minutes, and the tip didn't chip until he unloaded two chains of M60 ammo at it; Lynn Thompson, eat our dust!") Or, they have a video and knife they can autopsy and use to improve their next batch. I think that, if I were you, I would arrange to send both the post-test knife and a copy of the video to them, together with a letter giving them the rights to use it in promotions, etc.; it's a win/win situation for them if you do, because if the knife fails too easily, they know what to fix, and if it takes massive abuse before failing, they can use that in their advertising. My brother used to work in a Sears tool department, where they advertised Craftsman tools by saying that if you brought one back in, no matter what the condition, they would replace it, free. When a guy brought in some tool that had had the Hell beaten out of it, and it had then been left out in the weather to rust for a few years, my brother gladly took it back--and then prominently displayed the tool as evidence to customers that Sears really meant it when they said they'd take back any tool that broke. It was great advertising.
For you: You end up in the same place you were before the test: you've got a Strider knife. You're out the cost of one knife, but not two. Kind of the same situation as if you had bought one, beaten the Hell out of it and sent it in, and gotten a warranty replacement--but this way you've done it with full disclosure, you've leveled with the company, and nobody's even arguably been cheated. Only you're also ahead because you have a better idea of just where that point is at which the thing is going to fail. If it does well, you're going to have a lot of confidence in that knife. And you're probably going to tell your friends.
For us: We (who can't afford to trash our knives) get a better idea of where the line is between what these knives can and cannot take. Unless someone tests a knife to where it breaks, you really don't know where that line was. And though obviously there are going to be some samples that behave differently from others, it gives you at least a vague, anecdotal, rough idea about the knives. Everybody here, I imagine, has been influenced by knife companies' publication of the ridiculous abuse their knives can take. Back when I was a kid, I remember people speaking with great respect about those Buck brand knives that supposedly could be hammered through an iron bolt. Nobody I knew ever actually used their knives that way, but we had high confidence in the blades, based on the likelihood (not certainty, I recognize) that these things could put up with incredible abuse, in whatever form luck happened to throw our way. Having seen this guy's videotaped abuse of his Ka-Bar 1277, I'm a whole lot more likely to reach for that knife than I might have been otherwise if I think I need something that can put up with a lot of abuse. Even though the task at hand may be chopping through a log, instead of hammering on it with a sledgehammer.
And, by the way, there is value to the humorously-extreme in this. If I were a Ka-Bar marketing rep, I'd be thinking about buying the rights to still shots of you pounding on the knife in a vise and burning the handle. Just for the added advertisement value of saying something like, "At Ka-Bar, we recognize that our customers will subject our products to all kinds of abuse . . . ."
Hell, it's his knife. And it's kind of entertaining. I'd just recommend that he and the company level with each other about what he's done to it before he sends it back in.
