"Back in the early 90's an F117A (Stealth fighter) pilot / friend of mine had one that the the lock failed, the knife ended up closing on his fingers when he was applying a lot of down force. Actually, he mentioned something to me that he was intoxicated and stabbing something, a board, or sheet rock maybe, but playing none the less. Regardless, the result was he nearly lost all 4 fingers, severed all the nerves, he has no feeling in those fingers, and very limited function, and he can never fly again, well at least not for the USAF. Even though the knife was the cause, the military court marshaled him, and he was dishonorably discharged.
I felt really bad for him, and especially so, since I helped him pick that knife out when he bought it. Last I heard he was going to file suit against the manufacturer because the defective lock cost him his career, and so much more.
The moral to the story here is, make sure any knife of the locking blade type is working properly before you use it. Those blades are deadly sharp and can absolutely sever fingers clean off if the lock malfunctions during use. It also happened to me while removing a broad head from a tree stump, but it wasn't a Spyderco knife, and I wasn't intoxicated.
GS"
This is typical of the kind of nonsense that takes place all to often when People fall of rthe hype of the latest wonder folder of the month.
It's not Spyderco's fault a knife fails when used as a stabbing tool, it's the owner who's brain is out to lunch. I've seen two very tragic accidents from folders that had a lock fail when the user would have been much better served with a sheath knife. It's a FOLDER, what is not being understood here?
I worked in a machine shop with a young guy who had total faith i his Buck Knife. One day we were doing some modification on some sheets of delrin, and he was suing his Buck knife to drive into the plastic, and then whacking the back of the blade with a mallet. He was warned by the shop forman t know it off and use a real tool. Just aftr lunch, he was doing it again, when his trusty Buck knife folded over, neatly amputationg his right index finger, and almost taking off the middle finger.
A few years ago I was at a hand clinic to get some surgery for a trigger finger, and was waiting in the lobby for my turn to the outpatient survey. Sitting acrtoss from me was a young man with his mother, the kids hand all bandaged up. My wife asked what happened, and the story came out. The kid was playing with one of those big name tactical folder, and was doing what he called a spine whack test. Well, the lock failed, and he cut right through the tendons and nerves in his right thumb, leaving it dead. They were doing surgery to try to get some use back into it.
No matter what kind of wonder lock you have on your knife, if it folds in the middle, then it's 50 broken already, and it's being held open by a mechanical device. Here's the news, mechanical devices fail with regularity. But this trend of the past decade or two, with the so called tactical knife market aimed at young men with Walter Mitty fantasies of taking out Chinese paratroopers or a horde of the walking dead, has done a dis-service to the younger generation of knife users. They have created a highly hyped articial market of these knives that have very little real world use. With some clever if thoughtless marketing, the regular pocket knife has been transformed into some mall ninja pocket Excaliber. There's plenty of very compact sheath knives that are just as easy to carry as some of these heavy clunky wonder knives, yet far safer and more rugged in any emergency you can think of. The smaller puuko's and such slide into the side pocket of the average pants.
If you need a knife that will absolutely not fold up on you, then carry a knife that is not already broken in the middle. Anything else is just fooling yourself with very bad consequences luring over the horizon.
