Until now, I never realized the different shape of the Cricket's blade -- today it saved my day, and my flashlight when I "carved" a foam donut for it. Peak LED Solution's Matterhorn AAA flashlight does not have a spring at the base, but uses a foam donut for cushioning effect. This is also known as "battery crusher" design.
Now the donut in my Peak was totally worn out, and the battery was rattling for lack of cushion. I am in India, and getting a donut from Peak shipped here is not worth the cost of shipping, so I finally decided to give it a try. This is where Cricket came absolutely handy, and I appreciated its blade curve -- the way it literally carved out the donut, and helped put a nice tiny hole in the center was simply brilliant, and could not have been easily achieved by other blade shapes. I also noticed that the protruding belly of the Cricket helps your fingers from getting too close to the surface and helps in absolute precision cuts.
Here is what I did:
(1) Cut the round shape from the foam using the flashlight rim.
(2) Using Cricket, I reduced the diameter, since the inside tube has thick walls.
(3) Using Cricket's pointy tip, drilled a small hole in the center, and then slowly rotated the foam around the knife to increase the diameter of the hole. Slightly changing the angle of the blade took out the foam rapidly, and maintaining it at right angle to the foam polished it. :-) Cricket did the job very nicely, and I was really impressed.
(4) Put the donut inside the flashlight tube and slotted it in place using a pencil tip (that gave the graphite marks on the otherwise good looking red-donut. Haha!
(5) Using the battery, tested the functionality and the rattle was gone, and the operation was smooth.
What an amazing knife the Cricket is -- I am more impressed by the small blades that Spyderco has, and it corrected my incorrect perception that "bigger is better" for blades.
Thanks Sal, and the Spyderco crew for such a lovely knife.
Photos of the DIY task follow. Hope you enjoy viewing them, as much as I enjoyed carving the donut. :-)
-Amarendra
