First, don't take this as an attack, I'm just pointing out some things.
In your 22years of life and perhaps 6 years of machine shop and knife making time, I am sure you have gained a lot of experience with magnetic properties and such. Those who have a bit more time on this subject will tend to disagree with you about dust and magnets, though.
Also, I said "I'm with Bart....." , and he said, "I wouldn't like a magnetic knife because...."
Now, for a college level experiment;
Place a rare earth magnet in your pocket every day for a week. Don't clean it off for that whole week. At the end of the week see what is on it. Also, how often did you take out your keys or other object and find the magnet attached?
The pivot on a folder has to be absolutely smooth and clean to keep operating properly. The super fine magnetic particles attracted the the knife would likely make the open/close smoothness go downhill very quickly.
As far as justifying the argument that magnets on folders are a good idea because some commercial maker uses magnetic locks, it could be thus argued that since there are many times more $50-$100 katana made from cheap stainless steel than there are $5000+ katana made by the traditional methods and materials, that the nihonto smiths are wrong when they say, "Stainless steel should not be used on a katana blade."
I did not justify magnets in folders by saying someone did it, I justified it by giving their reason. I agree that just because someone has does it doesn't mean it's a good idea, which is why I didn't argue that. However the point I actually made still stands.
When you said you were with Bart, you neglected to say who Bart was. Regardless, you stated an absolute "magnets don't belong in or on knives." It's the absolute I take issue with.
Now you picked the wrong "experiment" to use as emphasis for your point, which was just bad luck on your part. In my senior year in high school I was into cigars and so I carried a cigar punch on my keychain. I also was into 40k and wanted to make interchangeable parts on some of my figures, so I bought a bunch of neodymium magnets. I thought it might be cool to carry one around and see what uses I could come up with. So what I did was I put a cylindrical magnet in the cigar punch, with the punch extended, which covered the sides of the magnet.
I carried this for years, until the punch's edges chipped away and I lost the magnet somewhere. Not once did any of my electronics get screwed up, nor my credit card or other magnetic cards. Yea it got stuck to some things, but nothing that was aggravating. Plus it was pretty cool being able to hang my keys underneath my car from the magnet if I decided I didn't want to carry my keys with me.
Bear in mind this was before I did any knife or machine stuff (I've only been doing this for a little over 2 years, and that was while taking classes), but I'm not sure that a knifemaker's intended consumer should be other knifemakers.
As for the pivot, the magnet wouldn't need to be near the pivot to keep the blade in place. As a matter of fact, if it was nearer to the pivot then it would impart a lesser moment on the blade and thus make it less effective at keeping the blade in place. If the magnet was pulling dust towards it, do you really think it would get caught in the pivot instead of the magnet itself?
Finally, why did you call out how old I was? I know how old I am, and if you've read my profile you know how old I am. So you must be either trying to point out that I'm younger than you or you're trying to discredit my point in the eyes of others by insinuating that I'm young and thus wrong. Furthermore, if you read my profile you know what college I go to and should know that implying your experiment was college level is an insult at best. In light of that, I'm not sure how I can take your post as anything but an attack.
