What knives do you find easy to open? No traditional or assisted opening please.

[Kvnlau7]

thats cheating.

 

[NorthernSouthpaw]

My Benchmade 940 jumps out when flicking and unlike liner, frame and compression locks, you can operate the axis with your thumb AND finger.

 

[Ken44]

After I had right thumb surgery a few years ago a Para 2 was the first knife I was able to open and close again with that hand.
Used the lock to open and didn't have to move my thumb.

 

[SoCal_kid]

Benchmade Griptilian or mini Griptilian. Flies open.

 

[dkb45]

Within reach I have my ZT 801, Spyderco Domino, Benchmade Adamas, Cold Steel AK 47, Quartermaster Murdock, Spyderco Endura, Sanrenmu 763, Benchmade HK Conspiracy, and CRKT Apache. All buttery smooth after my tinkering for smoothness (mainly smoothing and adjusting washers, cleaning the entirety of the knives, and adding my own much-better-than-factory oil.

 

[ASBOB]

Rat 2.

 

[steve itm]

All my Spyderco's open easy..!!!! I recently bought a Benchmade 755 mpr and after a week this thing is like butter !!!!! i can't put it down , I can give it the spidey flick which for some reason i try to do with all my knives but anyways its very smooth

 

[jac_solar]

Kershaw OD-2, with the cam opening. Since it's a manual knife, and you only have to move the lever 45 degrees to open the blade 90 degrees, this is probably the easiest of them all.

Within reach I have my ZT 801, Spyderco Domino, Benchmade Adamas, Cold Steel AK 47, Quartermaster Murdock, Spyderco Endura, Sanrenmu 763, Benchmade HK Conspiracy, and CRKT Apache. All buttery smooth after my tinkering for smoothness (mainly smoothing and adjusting washers, cleaning the entirety of the knives, and adding my own much-better-than-factory oil.

What kind of oil is this?

 

[d0nut]

Easiest from my experience

Ontario Rat II
Bencmade Mini Griptilian

 

[BigRob]

Benchmade mini-barrage..

 

[d0nut]

What knives do you find easy to open? No traditional or assisted opening please.

Benchmade mini-barrage..

 

[longun]

I think the Benchmade Axis lock knives are some of the easiest to open and close. And the ZT 0801 flipper is easy to open. But being a framelock, the 0801 is probably harder to close then the Axis lock knives. I've never tried the Benchmade Axis flipper, but that's a thought.

 

[BigRob]

Bahah

 

[JBoone]

Spyderco - spydie hole is da bomb

 

[manowar669]

Spydercos and flippers.

First post nails it.

 

[manowar669]

(Spyder)hole, thumbstud or disk, doesn't matter for me personally. What is important is the opening effort and the radius the hole/thumbstud is travelling at. It's uncomfortable to fully extend your thumb when deploying the blade.

This is very important and often overlooked. For me, this means any knife with a blade over 3" more difficult to open. It varies some, based on the position of the hole/stud in relation to the pivot, but about 3".

 

[sideways]

...looking for knives that are easy to open, modern knives that is.

Yup. Modern knives pretty much covers it. Every single one hand opening knife I have owned has been easy to open. spyderholes, thumbdisks, thumbstuds... it does not matter as long as you can get a good grip on it.

From easiest to hardest:
Flipper
Liner-lock / axis lock
Compression lock / frame lock
Back lock
Triad lock

Ofc that says nothing about have easy they are to close.

 

[CJZ]

Spydercos, Axis Benchmades, flippers, automatics, balisongs

 

[bdmicarta]

Lock type has nothing to do with it for me. The Spyderco models with the larger holes are easiest for me- Para2, Military, Manix2 for instance. The ones with the smaller holes such as Delica and Tenacious are harder.

I have a lot of knives with thumb studs and some of them are easier to open than others. It depends a lot on the geometry- the size and shape of the thumb studs and cutouts in the scales for access to the studs. I have a few knives where your thumb can barely catch the edge of the stud because the stud is blocked by the scales, and the edges of the thumb studs are not sharp enough for traction. I have other knives with cutouts that allow the thumb studs to easily be pushed on.

I have one knife with a flipper and it works well enough but it has a very strong detent and requires a lot of force on the flipper to open which slows it down a little bit.

 

[dkb45]

Kershaw OD-2, with the cam opening. Since it's a manual knife, and you only have to move the lever 45 degrees to open the blade 90 degrees, this is probably the easiest of them all.



What kind of oil is this?

I use White Lightning on bearings, and DuPont Silicone Teflon on washers. White Lightning is available in the bike section of a lot of stores, and works on washers just a little better than mineral oil. The DuPont is available at most hardware stores and is great on washers, decent on bearings.