Titillated by Ti

[SwissHeritageCo]

I try to use appropriate liners for the knife.

I typically use two sizes- .040" thick for small, thin gents folders where overall thinness and lightweight is the goal. That's about as thin as you can go and still get good thread engagement for your screws.

Then I use .070" thick for the rest of my folders, which finishes out to about .065".

The problem is anything thicker than about .060" requires some sort of relief cutout so the lock operates properly. The cutout is the reason that frame locks aren't any stronger than liner locks even though a lot of people claim that. The relief cutout still needs to be .045"- .060". So that becomes the equalizer as far as lock bar strength because that's where it will fail if it's going to. And lock contact area has nothing to do with it either.

As far as stabbing goes, most of the load is still on the stop pin not the lockbar unless you really get wild and put a huge stress on the spine.

I've still never seen a stop pin break OR rip out of the scales/liners holding it, even in torture/destruction "tests".

I guess if wild/indiscriminate stabbing (as in defense) might be a possible scenario for your knife, you might want to choose a beefy fixed blade with reinforced point/tip.

As far as normal knife use goes, it would be *almost* impossible to break a stop pin or tear it out of the liners, even with heavy/inappropriate use.

Just double checked, it was you that used the robust liners That's an interesting note about the relief cut in liners. I had always assumed frame locks are stronger but some of them definitely get a bit skinny where the relief cut is so that makes total sense.

Going back to your recent gallery I now see that relief cut you're talking about on those beautifully thick liners. Still looks like you have a nice amount of unrelieved steel left though, still looks strong.

I appreciate you taking the time to post all of this, it has me evaluating my folders in a completely different way. On top of the grind (how thin the tip is, how thin the stock is) in regards to a "snap" failure, I'm guessing the steel composition matters too and needs to be considered. Something like 14c28n would be less likely to snap vs something like D2.