Dragonfly 2 Salt damage (after 7 years of fidgeting)

[guillem]

TL;DR: the blade pivot screw has a flat side but the FRN hole is round, the pivot rotates and eventually catches the FRN and the action becomes sluggish.

I got the knife in 2017. I've used it a lot around sea water, H1 is great, cutting performance is awesome, the blade is intact. Also, I've fidgeted with it a lot. Way beyond anything reasonable. I've opened and closed it millions of times (I mean a lot, I haven't counted).

Yesterday I noticed that the (usually super smooth) action was dragging. I thought it might be just dirt. Since I couldn't see anything, I decided to take it apart. It was my first time taking this specific knife apart, but I own many Spydercos and every now and then I decide to do it to clean and lube the ones I've used a lot.

Everything is normal (and pretty clean actually). But the blade pivot screw has a flat side, and the hole in the FRN is round. The locking bar has another pivot screw with a flat side but in that case the hole in the FRN also has a flat side so it stays in place and everything works fine.

The problem with my particular knife is that the blade pivot screw with a flat side does rotate inside the round hole in the FRN, and actually the borders of the flat side have eroded the FRN which has created kind of a burr that prevents smooth rotation. I've removed it with a cutter (fine surgery, it was a really tiny amount), lubed and assembled it and now it works pretty good again.

I tried to put the pivot screw with the flat side roughly opposite to the damaged side of the hole, so I hope it lasts 7 more years. Unless the pivot moves around all the time, but the damage seemed to be located in a spot around the flat side, so...

Do you know if new models still have the round hole in the FRN for the blade pivot? Or is it D shaped like the locking bar one?

[guillem]

Uh... I guess another embarrassing possibility is that the hole in the FRN was actually D shaped and it was just destroyed after 7 years of holding the metallic D-shaped pivot screw

[araneae]

Yep, the hole should D-shaped, and usually damaged holes are the result of over aggressive screw turning. There's really no way simple opening and closing can deform that hole.