My $300 custom flipper was a dud, my $40 swap meet knife is the daily carry now

Picked up a custom flipper from a maker in Portland last spring, titanium scales and S35VN blade. It had a gritty action from day one and the clip snapped off after three weeks of light use. Then I grabbed a beat-up vintage Case trapper at a flea market outside Boise for forty bucks. Cleaned the rust off, oiled the joints, and it opens smooth as butter every time. Anyone else had a high-end piece fail while a garage sale find becomes their go-to?

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1 Comment

linda3051mo ago

Wait, did you ever actually take that flipper apart and clean it out before you wrote it off? Because in my experience, a gritty action right out of the box usually means factory grease and metal shavings are stuck in the pivot, not that the knife itself is bad. I've had $400 knives feel like crap until I broke them down, flushed the pivot with oil, and put them back together with just a tiny drop of lube. A snapped clip is a real problem, sure, but that's a warranty fix, not a reason to ditch the whole blade. The Case you found probably has decades of wear that already smoothed out its internals, which is a totally different thing than a new knife needing a break-in. You might have just gotten a dud maker, but I think you're comparing a fresh custom to a broken-in classic and calling it a fair fight.