Pros: Blade Material, Blade Sharpness, Ease of Opening, Handle Feel, Handle Material, Lock Ease of Use, Lock Type, Overall Quality, Sheath, Weight
Cons: Pocket Clip
Perfect integration of design and materials
I have 3 versions of this. Nitro-V/Jade and damacore-core/ivory g-10 that I dyed to purple. It takes a great 2,000 or polished 0.5 micron but is a little softer than the 10Cr14CoMoV/VG-10 core it claims to be (I took mine down to 34° inclusive too), I think Chinese knifemakers generally err on the side of lower hardness cuz a chipped or broken blade hurts all of them much more than a quickly dulling one. I’ve seen posts where one of ‘em was taking their ZDP-189 down to just a hair below 65HRC. Fair enough. All that being said I think the hardness on this and all civivi and We knives S-35VN is, so far, consistent with Kizer knives, I don’t buy Artisan, but just all the other asian S-35VN in general seems to be pretty well done in terms of heat treat compared to our American S-35VN in wear resistance, edge retention and allá that. Maybe S-35VN has been so heavily experimented with that the Yangjiang knifemakers are confident in their HT and willing to push the hardness to where it should be. And it’s 2025 so let’s be for real, there aren’t really any steels that are anything more than incrementally better than S35VN that’s been correctly heat-treated. Except MagnaCut. I’ve had bad S35VN and I’ve done bad, very bad S35VN HT. S45VN’s ”improvements” are non-existent. Larrin’s data confirms my experiences with it and it has slightly worse edge retention than s30V at the same toughness and has marginally better edge retention than S35VN at the expense of reduced toughness. Aside from MagnaCut being tougher but having a lower hardness and hardenability from the reduced chromium content- almost half of what’s in m390 and 20CV, I would argue that at this point we’re only comparing which alloy is more corrosion and maybe scratch resistant and which one sharpens up the best. Vanax and XHP are supposed to be objectively better than s35VN and my experience reflects that. Quiet Carry does a great job with Vanax, and Cold Steel and Spyderco did a great job with the XHP knives I have. Also SPY27, the proprietary spyderco steel made by, Latrobe maybe, not sure, it’s supposed to be consistent with S35VN and I think that’s about right. Really, to beat s35VN at edge retention without giving up something it’s just Vanax and XHP according to Larrin’s data, and I will include Elmax based on my personal experience with it. Elmax is actually the stainless I like the best for anything smaller than 5”, anything bigger is just showing off and can actually be uncomfortable or even painful for some people. S30V is also one of the GOATs. Anyone that disagrees is probably lacking in the bedroom. To beat s30V with it’s excellent toughness that’s only slightly less than s35-35 from this series of crucible steels, the “S” steels you’re at S90V-S10-s125v and I’ve had 90v and 110v chips with pretty mundane tasks, wood and delrin, with knives I thought I could just slice thru D2 knives with like a Hattori Hanzo sword. I would never put these high edge retention steels to hard use- at that point it’s basically just a carbide knife that uses iron instead of cobalt or nickel to hold all the carbides in place. So I can cut annealed d2 with it provided I break a piece off and stick it on the end of a fly cutter and run it low and slow on a mill. I’m seeing these soft handed EDC nerds on YouTube talking about how s30v is obsolete or obsolescent and they’re idiots that aren’t ever gonna have to use their knife for something critical to the preservation of human life anyway. They’re not about that life. Now the vision is a knife would lend itself well to an alloy with extreme edge retention at low toughness, cruwear, vanadis 4 or 8, zdp-189, Rex 121, or maxamet maybe, it is a thin, somewhat light duty knife, but it’s also low maintenance and discrete, so stainless supersteel fits it well. A higher grade of core damascus with a PM core would also fit well, I hope We Knives comes up with a higher end Damascus than the kind they have now, which is 10Cr14CoMoV/chinese vg-10 with basically 440c and 304 cladding, and releases a version of the vision in it. Making this in Damasteel would be too costly, and it’s ‘just’ a cpm-154 equivalent in there anyway. I don’t know maybe RWL-34 really is that good. I don’t own any. On my s35vn vision, I’ve increased the edge and polished it to 0.5 micron and it’s slicey. I like the angle, about 40° inclusive. I like the straight edge, ever since my Snody Benchmade Gravitator almost 10 years I’ve preferred straight edges for some things. I carry a 2nd knife for interpersonal conflicts so this one is mostly for arts and crafts, the blade I use to open my sugar packets and love letters from female inmates. This is about as good a lock as one could design and I’m surprised it took as long as it did to look at spine-locks and triad locks and say, well, what if there was a thing over here? It’s become my favorite actions, up there with the similar ball-bearing lock from spyderco which kinda makes more sense as it is a ‘lockbar’ insert. We are approaching unity here, although I have notes for We knives at the end for what they got wrong. Carbon fiber is one of my favorite handle materials. It’s not too slick, and the holes help with quick extraction from the pockets much like the Benchmade Adamas. Disassembly is easy and you can just wash this in the kitchen sink and allow to dry honestly. It likes lubricación of course. I use Tri-flow oil. Jimping on the fun switch is a little jagged but only if you spend all day playing with it. No sense in polishing it, it needs to be grippy, just wait for your finger to get used to it. It doesn’t create a hotspot in actual use. Here’s what would make this knife better though. Extend the speedlock bar over the stop pin to the edge of the handle’s spine, kinda like how some front flippers do it but not sticking way out all fugly out past the rest of the knife, it would be objectively better and I’m waiting for We Knives to effect that kind of change I wish to see in the world on their next iteration of the Vision, or a Vision-like 3.8 and 3.3 inch knife featuring the Snecx shark… I mean superlock. Snecx did it first, Demko’s is great too. Yeah let’s see that projection about 1cm longer and reshaped so that the jimping starts closer to the ricasso, we knives, you’re doing good by me. If they could engineer a We Knives version with the speedlock actuator further forward, make the locking surfaces out of the same steel as the blade, or perhaps engineer that entire bearing surface to be a replaceable insert, and to add something to stabilize the lock bar so it has more limited freedom of movement, that’d be great. Also the pivot pin could be larger or at least make it look larger by increasing the diameter of the heads. Bigger logo for you guys. Win-win Oh and an insert for the dead space where the pocket clip goes in zirconium or something! And the pocket clip It comes with doesn’t occupy the entire space! That needs to dealt with, maybe it’s for the titanium upgrade clip? I haven’t looked into it. The Vosteed Corgi is an example of a reversible pocket clip done FLAWLESSLY so just do that. A 3.5mm blade width would be nice too, maybe beef up the spring or make the tension adjustable, it’s a little soft. I’m too strong for this knife. I think id prefer some texture on the holes in the handle too, since they’re crucial for quickly extracting this from the pocket. Now all it needs is a wave opener thumb stud like the snaggletooth and a beefed up variable geometry grind for the tip. Make that in Elmax, Cruwear, MagnaCut, and AEB-L/154CM/K110 or any high quality d2-like for the low cost versions, as none of those steel should cost more than Nitro-V that steel needs a 40 Bar nitrogen atmosphere! That’s expensive! AEB-L has less of everything in it and 154CM doesn’t require a high pressure furnace. I’d also love it if civivi and we would start using Raffir Noble. Kizer and spyderco have used it and it’s an absolutely beautiful material. The g-10/rubber material is also great and grippy, and I love the old aluminized glass fiber “silver twill” like on the aforementioned Benchmade gravitator if that’s even still made. For these, also, some of that patterned G-mascus and a solid titanium Ti-mascus would look great.
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