Loosening a stiff liner

M

mjolnirman

Joined
Jan 15, 2008
Messages
175
is there any way to do it? I got my SBMF, and the liner lock is very stiff. The knife is otherwise pretty nice - locks up pretty tightly, but the liners just seem very cheaply made with very rough edges, like they just cut them out and stuck them in there.

thanks
 
Clean the liner and the locking area on the blade, then rub some graphit powder (pencil) on it.
 
You can push some valve grinding compound into there and work the lock against the blade to polish it up a bit.

VGC is like liquid abrasive and is available in most auto parts stores.

Make sure to flush it out completely when you are through.
 
I'd imagine that the graphite would act as a sort of dry lubricant between the surfaces. Thanks for the suggestions, but my problem is more so that the liner itself is stiff, and has a lot of spring force pushing it out.
 
Ah, got it; I was addressing the rough edges remark.

You can force a small drill bit down between the lock and the adjacent liner and bend the lock outwards to relieve the tension a bit.

Larger bits will cause more bend so start small and work your way up slowly until you get the tension you want.

Another technique is to grasp the end of the liner lock with a pair of smooth-jawed needlenose pliers and tweak it outward. Also go slow here; although you can fix too much tweak by going the other direction you don't want to overwork the metal.
 
i'm not sure i understand what you mean. it's a liner lock, and the farthest i can bend it to is flush against the scale.
 
Right, but jamming a steel rod (drill bit) down to act as a fulcrum will give you something to bend against.

I'll try to come up with some sort of diagram (I haven't figured out how to attach stuff here, yet :o).
 
I´d be careful tempering with a liner. Doing just a little to much can cause the liner to fail on you...

Better too stiff, than to soft... (no pun intended)

Kevin Wilkins told me the graphite-trick, he lives in Berlin yust like me.
We met on a german knife-forum-meet (messerforum.net).

The graphite is intended to be used on stiff titanium framelocks, but works also on every liner I have come across so far.
 
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