I've got a Leek that I carry every day.
It's been an okay knife for me. It cuts. But there has been some bad.
First, the good. I can sharpen it easily on my Spyderco Sharpmaker. I've cut everything with it, and resharpened it.
Now, the bad. The "AO" workings turned out to be rather fragile, in my experience. Mine won't flick open any more.
First, all the little hex screws on the frame kept coming loose, and I kept retightening them. If you over-tighten the little hex screws, the AO thing won't work very well at all. So you have to find the perfect level of tightness...tight enough to hold everything together, but not so tight as to prevent the "flick" from happening.
Second, my AO parts aren't in my knife any more.
The reason? I pulled my keys out of my pocket once, and the knife came out with them and fell onto a hard tile floor. The fall from my pocket to the hard tile floor broke one of the little fragile springs inside the knife, and thus no more AO flick opening.
I just undid all the little hex screws, took out the broken parts, tightened all the little hex screws as tight as I could after an application of loctite, and now just use the thumb stud to open it.
To be perfectly honest, the AO flick feature was why I bought the knife. But it's been so long since the parts broke, and I'm so used to opening it with the thumb stud that I just don't notice it any more.
Looking back on it, if I had to choose all over again, I'd probably just skip the Leek with its "neato-frito" AO feature, and just get a good Spyderco Delica or something else that's just thumb-opened and that has a thicker blade than the Leek.
Also, I will never ever again buy a compromise blade that's half straight edge, half serrated edge. That is basically a useless marketing feature, I've found out the hard way. Just plain straight edges for me from now on.
hillbilly