Rick Hinderer sent Cease and Desist to Youtuber for saying the steel was soft in his knife?

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nattynarwhal said:
I'm glad your benchmark for knife performance is how many times it can be beaten to death. Not every maker has that objective in mind though, and they should have the right to speak freely about how they define performance. Now that may cost him, but he'll always have consumers who fill up his books because they agree.
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What would you suggest should be a benchmark instead? Run a knife that has a thick blade (clearly designed for hard use) at some super high Rockwell so it's ultra chippy, but hey, it'll cut better?

Also, the fact that TK still has customers is irrelevant. Will Moon had customers for years and years after his idiotic implosion, and Survive Knives is still parting fools from their money with vaporware to this day. So?
 
Quiet said:
What would you suggest should be a benchmark instead? Run a knife that has a thick blade (clearly designed for hard use) at some super high Rockwell so it's ultra chippy, but hey, it'll cut better?

Also, the fact that TK still has customers is irrelevant. Will Moon had customers for years and years after his idiotic implosion, and Survive Knives is still parting fools from their money with vaporware to this day. So?
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How well a knife cuts? That is the main purpose of the knives I use 😂

Thick knives don't cut well and neither do knives run soft? I would argue that 20CV is certainly not a steel well suited to thin edges that cut well. It may be easier to sharpen with cheap abrasives I guess so that's something it has going for it.
 
nattynarwhal said:
His main issue was not that the knife was slightly out of spec, but that the 59-61 spec is in itself sub optimal for a steel like cpm 20CV. He did put that rather harshly though, calling the product garbage, which I would not have done myself. But to me that sounds like an opinion on the steel and heat treat and not defamation or anti competitiveness.
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An opinion that, when stated as a fact, becomes a fact to the uninformed, as evidenced by a lot of the comments his followers were making.
 
nattynarwhal said:
He said that the 59-61 range on hinderers heat treat was a "garbage spec". While I personally would not have used those words myself, I definitely would consider it less than optimal. Legally speaking, is that not an opinion though? Are we not allowed to speak about the opinions we have pertaining to certain manufacturers anymore?
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If he, as the letter suggests, did say that it was below the basic industry standard then he almost certainly went from opinion to factual claim.
 
nattynarwhal said:
How well a knife cuts? That is the main purpose of the knives I use 😂

Thick knives don't cut well and neither do knives run soft? I would argue that 20CV is certainly not a steel well suited to thin edges that cut well. It may be easier to sharpen with cheap abrasives I guess so that's something it has going for it.
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You missed my point, so I'll clarify. If I design something to do a certain thing*, and then some nobody who pays his bills doing reblades comes in and starts calling decisions I've made when designing my product to do what it can do "suboptimal", I'd be irate as well. That's the issue. RHK doesn't design his knives to be super slicey cutters. That they aren't slicey cutters is a surprise to literally no one. They're heavy, thick-bladed folding knives designed to be abused. Running a blade with a thinner edge and at a higher rockwell would ABSOLUTELY make it less durable against abuse, which would be counter to what I'd designed it to do.

Soooooo......?



* In this case, it's the Hinderer XM-18, which was designed to be a hard use knife that had to stand up to being used to do things you'd not normally do with a knife, done by guys like cops and firefighters.
 
I'm not a lawyer so forgive my ignorance on the topic; how can an opinion be stated as fact? Opinions are opinions and facts are facts. If TK had stated that RH ran his knives at 50HRC, that would be a wrongful fact. If TK states that the HRC range used by RH is sub optimal that seems clearly an opinion?
 
nattynarwhal said:
I'm not a lawyer so forgive my ignorance on the topic; how can an opinion be stated as fact? Opinions are opinions and facts are facts. If TK had stated that RH ran his knives at 50HRC, that would be a wrongful fact. If TK states that the HRC range used by RH is sub optimal that seems clearly an opinion?
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I'm not a lawyer either, but TK's statements made it seem objectively correct that RHK was running their steel at a "suboptimal" heat treat. Suboptimal according to who? What objective rational is there for making this claim?

RHK responded the way they did because TK turned this into a big thing on IG. No more, no less.
 
nattynarwhal said:
I'm not a lawyer so forgive my ignorance on the topic; how can an opinion be stated as fact? Opinions are opinions and facts are facts. If TK had stated that RH ran his knives at 50HRC, that would be a wrongful fact. If TK states that the HRC range used by RH is sub optimal that seems clearly an opinion?
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Keep in mind, all that's happened so far is a C&D, which can be sent for any reason, even utterly ridiculous ones, and is a far cry from 'going nuclear' as some have called it. I've had our lawyer shoot off a C&D that he didn't bother to charge me for, because it was so basic. This one seems a lot more intensive than that, but it's still, honestly, a very small, simple response so far and gives TK a pretty easy out.
 
The demands of the letter seem to make it impossible to resolve amicably.

I predict Hinderer will regret sending this letter.

He should have engaged TK professionally and gently pointed out the analytical flaws, like a confident professional.

Now Hinderer looks like a bully and a jerk with thin skin.

I have never heard of TK before this thread, and I do not own any Hinderer knives.
 
I will continue not knowing who this random person is or what their opinions are. :)

I generally don't bother with Youtube; Facebook is to contact people I don't have phone numbers for, and I never did bother to learn what an Instagram is or why I should care about it. ;)

I will continue to carry and use the one Hinderer knife that I own, because I can see the use of it. :cool:
 
Elgatodeacero said:
The demands of the letter seem to make it impossible to resolve amicably.

I predict Hinderer will regret sending this letter.

He should have engaged TK professionally and gently pointed out the analytical flaws, like a confident professional.

Now Hinderer looks like a bully and a jerk with thin skin.

I have never heard of TK before this thread, and I do not own any Hinderer knives.
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Yeah Rick should probably apologize, buy the kid some birthday presents and send him on a trip to recover from the trauma.

All those clown shoes social media experts who use questionable and unrealistic "tests" to throw shade at people have a day of reckoning in their future.

The last batch we had on here; the "How hard is my knife mafia" did real damage to an unwavering site supporter in the name of likes and follows for themselves.

Rick Hinderer should have done exactly what he did and stand behind his work.
 
Youtube has become a circus, thats the problem. Look at those Joe x videos, that penis wears a gas mask to hide his identity while he abuses and bashes knives to such an extreme degree that they break; .04 below the minimum hardness in normal use that means nothing .These boob tubers have become armchair experts in everything.....
 
Seems to me if joe blow youtuber just said he thinks Hinderer knife steel is garbage, then that's an opinion- whatever.

The guy reads 0.4 units less than the spec on his hardness test and says it's out of spec? Now it's a claim against the integrity of Hinderer.

There's a reason hardness ranges are given in whole integers, and I'm guessing it's because 0.4 rounds down to zero and it means absolutely nothing.

If I was Hinderer, I'd absolutely slap that guy with a cease and desist.
 
Quiet said:
Wait, then how can Benchmade mass produce them?
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It's a good question, but I'm not sure that they do mass produce them exactly the same, since they have many different scales, steels, and finishes. Brian found that he couldn't just use the same pattern and guarantee perfect action/lockup.
Quiet said:
Transparent knives is just a guy doing reblades in his parents' garage.
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Well no, he also makes custom knives, or has in the past. FWIW, Ray Laconico is just a guy making custom knives in his garage. And if you want to play that game, Rick Hinderer is just a water jet guy who outsources his heat treats and grinds.
Quiet said:
He tested one Hinderer blade on his HRC tester, and it was .4 lower than spec. Hinderer asked him to send in the blade so they could test it, but as far as I know, Transparent knives never sent it in to them or Peters for testing. Since then he hasn't stopped talking about Hinderer based on that one test.
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He actually tested a dozen Hinderer knives and this was the only one below spec. Why Rick Hinderer is so bent out of shape about it is beyond me.
Quiet said:
Is this an overreaction from Hinderer? Maybe, but it seems that they have asked this guy to cooperate with them, provide the defective blade to them, and come up with a solution, but this guy hasn't done that. I'm sure this letter isn't the first time someone at Hinderer has asked him to cool it off.

Edit: grammar
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I'm sure he would have been much more cooperative if Hinderer's reaction hadn't been to sh*t-talked him and claim he didn't know what he was talking about. I wouldn't have sent him the blade either!
 
nattynarwhal said:
His main issue was not that the knife was slightly out of spec, but that the 59-61 spec is in itself sub optimal for a steel like cpm 20CV. He did put that rather harshly though, calling the product garbage, which I would not have done myself. But to me that sounds like an opinion on the steel and heat treat and not defamation or anti competitiveness.
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Exacty, and he's made the same complaint about WE, ZT, Benchmade, and other large manufacturers ... none of whom have attacked him personally for his opinions. He discusses his thoughts on heat treat starting at around the 8 minute mark:

 
3D Anvil said:
Well no, he also makes custom knives, or has in the past. FWIW, Ray Laconico is just a guy making custom knives in his garage. And if you want to play that game, Rick Hinderer is just a water jet guy who outsources his heat treats and grinds.
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He got few projects, I’m not sue if he ever completed those. He got his own blades that he puts mostly on Benchmades. Not all of them turns good, you’ll know it if you follow his IG stream. He is a knife modder, nowhere near close to knife maker as Laconico, your comparing is just un-realistic.
3D Anvil said:
He actually tested a dozen Hinderer knives and this was the only one below spec. Why Rick Hinderer is so bent out of shape about it is beyond me.
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I’m not sure if you structure your statement this way intentionally, but he engaged his followers to trash Hinderer knives long before Hinderer sent him S&D letter.
 
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