Nope, although rare, those are not the ones I failed to describe. On a standard Crosslock, the blade stop is part of the plastic handle. What I mean is that when you open the blade, when it snaps open, the back of the blade comes in contact with the plastic handle.
The metal ones that I am refering to have a metal spacer that acts as that blade stop. I tore this place apart looking for the one example I have but could not locate it. :grumpy:
Grab some coffee, here is the rest of the story...
The original design of the 180 worked fine, but some guys really put a lot of pressure on their knives and over time, they would wear away part of that blade stop. As a result, the blade could fold over backwards like a knee folding the wrong way.
Engineers decided to beef up the knife some and on newer ones you will see that the back of the blade rises over the back of the handle in the open position. This was done to give more contact area between the blade and the blade stop. Still, there were some customers that, over time, could wear it out. There were a few ideas tried to help strengthen that blade stop. One idea was a metal pin. A hole would be drilled through the handle and that metal pin inserted so that it acted as the stop. Samples exist for this but it never went forward.
The other idea was the metal spacer. (It is somewhat like what they did with the 186 Odyssey if your familiar with that model.) Anyway, they made up about 100 of the metal spacered Crosslocks and they were ONLY used in the warranty department for those customers that could break the newly designed 180's. They were all made by hand, and it was a ton of work to do.
As an aside, the one sample that I have here at Buck came back a couple years ago through warranty. The problem was not the blade stop I am happy to report!
