I was showing a buddy if mine my Manix 2 and he told me he had bought one on eBay that he wasn't impressed with the edge retention with. Said it didn't hold an edge as long as his other S30V edges. We did a side-by-side comparison between his and my BBB M2 and there's a lot of tells.
My 15V Manix 2 had a gray patina so it should be easy to tell which is which.
First check out the jimping...
Then if you look at the spider logo, you can see a bit of difference with the pincers.
Another really subtle thing is how the 'Spyderco' tang stamp wraps in contour to the scale on the real one, but is straight on the fake.
There's also a number of differences on the clips.
- The spider logo is in high relief on the real deal, but is etched very shallow on the fake
- The open end of the clip is much more rounded on the real deal
- The screws on the real deal are larger, and have more rounded and pronounced heads
There's also some pretty distinct differences in the tip. The fake is ever so slightly longer and more slender.
Other than that the screws for the scales are also slightly different. The fake uses a T6 and T7 whereas the real deal uses a T7 and T8
He let me open it up to check out the mechanical differences as well, but I didn't get any pics of that. The primary difference is simply that the fake uses nylon washers, and the real deal uses bronze ones. Otherwise the only difference is where the ball bearing engaged the blade is very roughly ground on the fake.
Anyway, he was pretty ticked off because he thought he got a really good deal on it for $100. I figured maybe it would help people here avoid the fakes. These are super subtle differences, so it should go to show how easy it is to get ripped off on eBay. What's really crazy is that the fit and finish really didn't give much away in use, and the only hint he had that something was amiss was the edge retention being so bad.
