This is one of my few liner lock, it was originally 75 US$, but I got it at 40 US$ clearance, so not fancy expensive like you talked about. It is still quite pristine, so not well broken in yet.
In locked-in:
The actual liner's bend (I removed the blade and moved it up to make sure that the thickness is correct and I was not just squishing the liners together). As you can see it goes to the other line. I haven't do any bending or modification to this knife.
The slop at the back of the blade is to accommodate to the wear. If it stays put in place, it will wear into the blade and not sideways, which dramatically reduce its lifespan, and therefore weaker locking strength over time.
Though, is the locking-in in the my first picture enough? For thrusting, hell no. For slicing and cutting, it is more than enough. It is a 3 inches blade anyway
For be personally, I find back flipper to be a hazard.
Your liner not bent enough might be because of the low QC, or you misinterpret the design.
Also, you don't have to bring up the "As an engineer", you are not the only engineer here on this forums, here we also have people from different trades that have a common hobby of playing with knives, some use knives daily for a living (no, not cutting cardboard).
Oh, by the way, I don't pry with knives, not even with fixed blade, but then there is things like the Cold Steel Air Lite, with no metal liner at all.
The knife from the video above with the scale removed.
My Air Lite arrived and within few minutes it got the dreaded loose blade. A hard opening fixed it... but the problem still seems to come and go. Lock up is tight, the issue is when closed there is about 1/4" of play where there is no lock bar tension on the blade. Got me the AirLite finally...
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