I was an avid knife collector for a while until finally, I decided out of the blue to become a 1 knife guy. It was rough, as you may imagine. Out of all my knives, 4 were contending for the pick: my large Inkosi, Slysz Bowie, Boos Blades Smoke, and the Spydiechef. In the end, I decided on the Spydiechef. It really grew on me, so I sold the rest, cried some more, and moved on.
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I decided to test this knife in a number of ways. But the main thing I wanted to find out was how durable is the titanium Reeve integral lock. Everyone always express concerns about titanium on steel. And even though I’ve never heard of a Sabenza having lock problems because of wear, everyone is all crazy in lockbar inserts and over travel stops and such.
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So for the main attraction. For a straight year now, I have been deploying my Spydiechef. I have no measurement of the actual times I’ve done it. But I can tell you, on every drive to work (30 mins round trip) I have been flicking this knife open and close constantly. It’s like my fidget toy while I drive. Imagine that one knife, 5 times a week, 30mins per day. That’s a lot of deployments. And that’s not including playing with it at home. I thumb flicked, I wrist flicked, I spydie flicked, I rolled the blade out, I did it all. Important to note that I disassembled and cleaned the knife at least once a month.
The lock bar face is cabidized or carburized. Not sure which one but spyderco did treat it. I used no graphite or sharpie to prevent lockstick. I can tell you that after the lockstick went away when it was first bought, it never came back.
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As you can see, the lock bar shows significant wear clearly where it interfaces with the blade. However this has not affected the knife in anyway at all from what I can tell. There is zero lock rock, no side to side play, and still perfectly centered. What’s even more surprising is that the position of the lock has not moved at all despite the wear it has taken. The knife came new with 80-90% lock up, and that’s where the lock up still is. And being as thin as this lock bar is, I never pushed it too far over to compromise the tension, and I did not baby the knife.
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So after a year of flicking this knife a gazillion times, you couldn’t even tell. It could be that spyderco did an amazing job engineering this, could be that the titanium on steel RIL is not a problem in terms of the durability of the lock, or could be that 20 years down the line it will wear enough to be compromising.
LC200N steel is an amazing steel. I decided to sharpen my Spydiechef with a 17 degree bevel per side and a 20 degree micro bevel, mirror polished, and this thing sliced like a demon. And the steel can handle that steeper angle very well. I would rank this steel slightly above S35VN in my experience. And with it being rust proof, it can’t be beat.
As you can see here, the stop pin created a mark or groove where it hits the blade both at the back of the tang and also the bottom when it’s closed. None of this has compromised the knife in anyway, at least not yet.
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The stop pin and pivot are actually in really good condition, no surprises there.
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The bronze washers are also look good.
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Now for the detent cut out. Not sure if you can see this well, but at the edge of the hole where the detent ball hops in and out, there is a very shallow ramp that has formed. I’m unsure if overtime, more wear there would affect this knife’s detent, but as of now, I cannot tell if there is any negative impact.
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The knife handle feels much more slippery than when it was new. Probably due to just wear overtime being in contact with my hands constantly causing it to smooth out. I wish this knife got the type of features that the slysz bowie got, like the stonewashed polished blade, contoured scales, crowned blade, ect.
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Something really disappointing, and a disadvantage to having the wire clip is that it creates marks where the clip contacts the scale. The wire clip wiggles, so it has wiggled in these tracks on the scale. Not pleasant sight to be honest.
I’m really impressed by the Spydiechef and I think I made the right choice for choosing it as my one and only knife. From now and onward, I think I will continue to test this knife to see how long it takes to wear out that lockbar. Besides, I’ve done this so long in my commutes that it feels wrong not to have it flicking there in my right hand while I drive.
If you’ve made it to the end of this long post, I really appreciate you taking the time to read it. And if even one person found this interesting and learned anything from this, this it was worth it.
