- Joined
- Jan 5, 2015
- Messages
- 385
Hey guys so first off I am not posting this to bash on Kizer or other Chinese knife companies. The reason i'm posting is so as the new batch of kizer knives hit the shelves you may be aware of possible issues.. or at least an issue i experienced with my Gemini.
So I purchased my kizer gemini mid October the knife worked flawlessly for the first week of use.. flipping action smooth as butter. Lockup about 50% no blade centering perfect.. However, after about a week i noticed that the flipping action on the knife was intermittently felt very rough, grinding almost. and then a couple flips later would again be smooth as butter. I noticed that when the action felt like it was grinding the centering would be off somewhat.. After inspecting it i figured their was something wrong with the pivot.. I emailed kizer the week before halloween asking them if anyone else was experiencing these issues.. after a couple of days of not getting a response I decided to take the knife apart(this proved to be a little more difficult than i anticipated)
So after taking apart multiple times lubing cleaning and applying blue-loctite the problem was still occurring.. I finally discovered that the D shaped pivot they used in my knife was to short with just the very outer edge reaching into the D-shaped pivot hole on show side. No matter how tight I made the pivot when lateral force was applied to the lock bar the d shaped pivot would back out slightly.. centering would become off lock up would shift to ~5% and action was rough from feeling the blade pivot hole running over d-shaped portion of pivot screw.
so about 6 days after initial email plus about 4 subsequent emails kizer customer service finally contacted me.. took about a week of emailing back and forth before kizer finally agreed to send me a pivot screw, plus other external hardware and internal steel washers. November 6th it finally got shipped and kizer said that it would take 15-20 days.. Being impatient as i am i decided to try and fix it while i waited.. granted at this point I had a knife that was non functional for twice as long as i had owned the knife.
So i fixed the issue (i think) by taking out the steel washers that the ceramic ball bearings are riding on and ran them both across an Arkansas wet stone an equal number of times cleaned the knife and put back together using blue loctite. I did this about 2 weeks ago and the knife has worked flawless since then the pivot appears that it is not backing out any longer, centering is still perfect and action is now smooth as butter again.. Lock up is a little earlier than i received it ~20% but it feels very solid. Is this is a permanent fix? i don't know but it appears that it might be.
as of writing this post 11/22 i have not yet received the package from kizer however it should be here any day now..? we will see how that goes.. hope this helps
So I purchased my kizer gemini mid October the knife worked flawlessly for the first week of use.. flipping action smooth as butter. Lockup about 50% no blade centering perfect.. However, after about a week i noticed that the flipping action on the knife was intermittently felt very rough, grinding almost. and then a couple flips later would again be smooth as butter. I noticed that when the action felt like it was grinding the centering would be off somewhat.. After inspecting it i figured their was something wrong with the pivot.. I emailed kizer the week before halloween asking them if anyone else was experiencing these issues.. after a couple of days of not getting a response I decided to take the knife apart(this proved to be a little more difficult than i anticipated)
So after taking apart multiple times lubing cleaning and applying blue-loctite the problem was still occurring.. I finally discovered that the D shaped pivot they used in my knife was to short with just the very outer edge reaching into the D-shaped pivot hole on show side. No matter how tight I made the pivot when lateral force was applied to the lock bar the d shaped pivot would back out slightly.. centering would become off lock up would shift to ~5% and action was rough from feeling the blade pivot hole running over d-shaped portion of pivot screw.
so about 6 days after initial email plus about 4 subsequent emails kizer customer service finally contacted me.. took about a week of emailing back and forth before kizer finally agreed to send me a pivot screw, plus other external hardware and internal steel washers. November 6th it finally got shipped and kizer said that it would take 15-20 days.. Being impatient as i am i decided to try and fix it while i waited.. granted at this point I had a knife that was non functional for twice as long as i had owned the knife.
So i fixed the issue (i think) by taking out the steel washers that the ceramic ball bearings are riding on and ran them both across an Arkansas wet stone an equal number of times cleaned the knife and put back together using blue loctite. I did this about 2 weeks ago and the knife has worked flawless since then the pivot appears that it is not backing out any longer, centering is still perfect and action is now smooth as butter again.. Lock up is a little earlier than i received it ~20% but it feels very solid. Is this is a permanent fix? i don't know but it appears that it might be.
as of writing this post 11/22 i have not yet received the package from kizer however it should be here any day now..? we will see how that goes.. hope this helps
