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Pros: Blade Material, Blade Sharpness, Ease of Opening, Handle Feel, Handle Material, Overall Quality, Pocket Clip, Weight
Cons: Lock Ease of Use, Lock Type
great knife - awkward double-lock gimmick
I will use this as a general all-around daily work/outdoor knife. It's a great looking knife, pseudo-military tactical, but sized more normally useful in real life than those over-the-top wacko-tactical knives. And it's the usual top quality CRKT build. The size fits my medium hand great - not too small, not too big. Feels comfortable. The grip on the scales is excellent and non-slippery without being harsh. The flipper works well, and the corresponding protrusion on the opposite side work together to make one's fingers safe if your grip slides in some high exertion task. The thumb stud is absolutely useless in opening the knife since it is nested tightly into a notch in the scales/liner. You can't get your thumb behind it no matter how hard you try, though the top surface is nicely textured. I noticed after a few minutes with my new knife what looked like light 'scrud' embedded in the textured thumb stud surface. Turns out it was my ground up skin residue from my thumb, after trying to use the thumb stud just a few times. So, yeah, the thumb stud is extraneous. Experience with CRKT's blades shows that the veff serrations are the bee's knees when cutting cordage - better than standard blade serrations. The only drawback of the knife is the silly double locking mechanism. And as it turns out, that's actually kind of fun to us fidgeting knife-guys, but not so fun for practical use. You have to slide and hold the little red lever, and then move the liner lock in the usual way, and then close the knife with your other hand. Awkward. Unnecessary. It is possible to learn to do the first two moves with one hand, but it's not easy because of the flipper tab's position when the knife is open. I'm not able to come up with a scenario where one would say "Whew! I sure needed that double locking feature!" But, overall an awesome, cool, good quality knife.
