It's not technically abuse, it's excessive. Who's to say he (or someone else) didn't close it with every cut he made? Maybe he works in a very fast warehouse environment. Improbable sure, but the thing is, if it were the truth then it wouldn't constitute abuse and then how would you excuse the lock then?
If a person cut things with their knife all day and night and sharpened it whenever it got a little dull and wound up killing the blade in a few years, that is not abuse, it's just excess. The problem is that there seems to be varying differences in just how much "excess" the springs in the thing can put up with, and personally I don't really like the answer of, "Oh, well, just don't open it so much." Benchmade knives are premium knives, they should be built to handle excess--and in virtually every other aspect of their design they usually are. The springs seem to be the weakest link though, and who can really blame them: Springs fail.
Does anyone here buy a Benchmade knife so it can be "good enough" for "normal use" or do you buy them beacuse they use premium materials that are meant to last? To me excusing a part prone to failure uner normal operation due to excessive use isn't good enough for how much the knives cost, not when we're talking a bout a length of metal that probably costs them a few cents per foot.
It makes me curious actually, does anyone know what kind of metal they use for their springs? They generally detail what every other part of the knife is, perhaps they're not using "premium" materials for the springs. That's what I suspected after taking a look at them; I'm not a huge steel guy or metalurgist or anything, but I worked in a machine shop for a while and the metal just kind of had a dingy, cheap feel to it compared to a lot of spring material I've seen.
Either way I think the real issue is on the customer service end of things anyway, because there's a lot of gray area and uncertainty. I mean, if you call them up and say, "My spring broke, so I opened the knife and put some guitar string in there so it would work for the time being," would that automatically void your warranty? Then on the other hand, if you called and just said the spring broke, but didn't mention that you took it out ( implying dissasembly), would they realize at the factory that, "Hey, he must have disassembled this, charge him," or would they still honor the warranty? Judging from BM's customer service in the past and from people's comments I would suspect they'd just ovelrook it and honor the warranty, but I wouldn't really want to send it in to find out, especially not when I could spend a dollar on some guitar string and fix it in about half an hour versus the cost of shipping and the wait for turnaround.
Anyway, all in all, the problems with the lock's springs aren't really enough to dissuade me from buying another knife with one, because it's really my choice on whether I be impatient and void my warranty fixing it myself, or send it in for the warranty repair. I just wish that disassembling them didn't void the warranty, but I guess that's just a stance the company has to take.
:thumbup:
