I asked about the lock problem I had on the Buck forum :
http://web.archive.org/web/20020117132521/http://www.bladeforums.com/ubb/Forum27/HTML/000790.html
It seems this is not the expected behavior, or at least not a common problem. I will be sending the knife back for them to get a look at, however I have blades that belong to other people I need to get out before then. So it will be a week or two. I'll update this thread whenever I hear from Buck.
One thing that came to mind that now seems fairly obvious is that after the heavy rope and wood cutting I did (say about 250 appliations of 50 - 150 lbs) there was slight play in the blade. This might have have been the reason that the liner tended to move under sideways torque.
In hindsight I should have looked at this NIB, but then again if I damaged the lock shortly after recieving it, it would have significantly reduced the amount of information I could get from it. And in any case the point then would be that the knife was stable NIB but after some use became stable - not overly positive.
I also asked about it in the Strider forum to and see if I can get some information about how the lock behaves from those guys as they are fairly straightforward :
http://web.archive.org/web/20020928040709/http://www.bladeforums.com/ubb/Forum63/HTML/000148.html
For comparision I tried to do the same thing with two Gunting drones that I have on loan from Sal Glesser. No chance. The liners will not move under lateral force at all. I exerted more force that I used on the Buck/Strider and saw no movement in the liner in the compression lock. It seems to me that the reduction in strength caused by lateral torque is going to be very small if anything at all.
I get more impressed with that lock everytime I try something with it. It is smooth to open and easy to close. It wears well, even under high impacts (the kinetic openings). Is very stable in regards to torques and tight grips. And I would assume is very strong, however I have seen no direct statements from Spyderco about this except I assume it is over the 200 in.lbs of torque per inch of blade length. The only thing that I can see that remains to be evaluated is how it handles excessive grime and such around the lock area.
-Cliff