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Showing 1 of 22 conversations about:
Kavik
5531
May 1, 2018
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Damn......."Beastly" barely even covers this thing lol It. Is. Massive.
Out of the box sharpness is quite possibly the sharpest I've ever gotten. Everything about the fit and finish is flawless for what they intended. I've noticed that on every model they bevel all edges on the blades (spine, choil, flipper tab), but it seems they do this before doing the final grind. On this knife that means sharp edges along the whole spine, except the area that's on a flat face, if that makes sense? The part that would be black or stonewashed, depending on your model. 30 seconds with some sandpaper fixes that though.
Blade was centered and action smooth. My biggest complaint though is that the detent was way too weak, blade shook open pretty easily.
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Happy to see we're back to the metal caged bearings on this model.
Liners are skeletonized and every edge inside and out is nicely polished. Tolerances on the stop pin, standoffs and backspacer are all tight. Hardware was hit or miss though. Every screw had locktite except the pivot.
I managed to get 2 screws out of the handle on one side to get it apart. On the other side one soft screw head stripped, while the other one stripped my driver 😡 I was able to fix the weak detent by bending in the lock bar a bit. No longer shakes open, but still deploys nicely and drops shut with a single gentle shake.
Only downside is that it's now too tight to middle finger click with the hole in the blade. I'll try to find a middle ground later, but much prefer too tight to too loose any day. I may have gotten mine at an absolute steal, but the higher price tag on this model is justified when holding it in hand and inspecting all the pieces. Just wish they'd put another $2 into better screws.
May 1, 2018
Hatuletoh
850
Jul 22, 2018
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KavikYou know, I think we griped about stripping screws (and bits) some time ago. So as I read that you stripped a cpl (and a bit), yet still managed to get that XXL jumbo knife disassembled, that means you must have been able to unscrew even the stripped screws.
So may I ask your method for dealing with stripped screws on a knife? I've gotten better than I used to be about not stripping them; in fact, I don't think I've done it for quite a while, knock-on-wood. But I still have most of the carnage left over from my early forays into knife maintenance, from the way back days of January and February, and there are one or two that just kill me to even look at--I cant get them out. The one on the clip of my ZT 0055 is just...infuriating. A bloody ZT for hell sakes, and the screw felt like it was superglued in there. So what's your method?
Jul 22, 2018
Kavik
5531
Jul 22, 2018
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HatuletohOn this particular one I didn't lol If you look at my pic, on the left the scale is still attached to the liner, it just was luck that the troublesome ones were both on the same side so the rest of the knife could come apart.
In other cases though, you can use a soldering iron to heat the screw to break the locktite (but depends on the heat resistance on the handle/scale material). Heat is about the only way if it's got evil red loctite 🤬
In some cases I've gone through and found other bits that wedge in tighter to the mangled head. Of course, this takes a plentiful selection of bits and quite a bit of luck lol
Or on bits that have stripped i have sometimes ground the tips down to get back to where all the points reach the tip again...if the bit has a taper to it then that will end up giving just a slightly larger size (like from a 6 to a 6.25 maybe) that will sometimes fit a sloppily sized head better
Jul 22, 2018
Hatuletoh
850
Jul 31, 2018
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KavikI clearly did not notice you didn't get those screws out...that's quite funny.
Thanks for the info/advice. As with the discussion of sharpeners, I'm happy to see I'm not too far off the mark with what I've been doing; I think my biggest problem has not been considering that many screws will have blue loctite, and some might even have red. I've just been attacking them as if put in place by a person who cared about them and the knife they're in as much as I do.
So after saying it had been months since I stripped a screw I stripped TWO on my beloved ZT 0393. Entirely my fault--I'd taken them off a number of times before but this time I was in a hurry and I really, really wanted to get my new blue-twill carbon fiber scales on before I had to leave my house again for the weekend. And my hands were unsteady from drinking coffee w/o food, and from gripping a steering wheel for hrs earlier that day. But I was pretty excited to see how those scales were going to look, and in my haste didn't properly seat the bit into the very small T5 scale screws, and yeah...stripped both of them. But I got lucky in that they were dead center in the middle of the scales, which were held on at each end only by the pivot and pocket clip/filler tab screws, so once that hardware was off (many hours later), the scales could spin freely around the stripped screws. Took a while, but I using the scales themselves I got enough torque lift the heads up enough to get pliers around them. Then I pirated the identical screws from my 0393 sprint run to finally get the carbon fiber scales installed. And KAI USA is kindly replacing the stripped screws at no cost, so all's well that ends well.
I'm biased of course, but along with the upgrade of the copper pivot screw and filler tab, and the blue titanium pocket clip, I think those scales make this about as fine looking a knife I've ever seen:
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Jul 31, 2018
Kavik
5531
Aug 1, 2018
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HatuletohWow, that was quite the story! Glad you were eventually successfull 👍
And that color combo is gorgeous man, very nice choices!
Aug 1, 2018
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