Spyderco Southard blade failure with pics

Stays Sharp · Jan 10, 2014

That's what you get one the company's owner is a knife nut.

Atakdog · Jan 10, 2014

Sal Glesser said:
Thanx much for the emails alerting me to the thread. I don't often get outside of our own sub forum.

Hi Atakdog,

Sorry for your problem. We'd love to get the knife and analyze the break. We can send you a new one as soon as it gets here. We've not seen this problem and we have thousands of knives out there.

Spyderco
attn: sal or Eric glesser
820 Spyderco way
Golden, CO 80403

Please let customer service know it's coming.

customerservice@spyderco.com

sal

thanks Sal, I'll try to get the knife on the way to you tomorrow and it will certainly happen by Monday. I think it's really cool that you get on the forums and actually talk with the people that use your knives, and as the last dozen posts of this thread indicate, many others agree.

colubrid · Jan 10, 2014

*meanwhile in China, workers lose their job*

TheModernNeanderthal · Jan 10, 2014

colubrid said:
*meanwhile in China, workers lose their job*

*Taiwan

JNewell · Jan 10, 2014

colubrid said:
*meanwhile in China, workers lose their job*

JNewell · Jan 10, 2014

David Lowry said:
I never get tired of seeing Sal take care of things. Dude is awesome.

I wasn't going to reply to these posts, but you said it so well. Cruise over to some of the other manufacturer's forums and see what/who turns up...or doesn't...

:grumpy:

singularity35 · Jan 10, 2014

Now we'll see if the OP will send in his knife.

JNewell · Jan 10, 2014

singularity35 said:
Now we'll see if the OP will send in his knife.

He said he was going to a few posts up. :thumbup:

singularity35 · Jan 10, 2014

JNewell said:
He said he was going to a few posts up. :thumbup:

Ohh, good to hear that.

duncanmclawd · Feb 5, 2014

Any update on this one? I don't doubt Spyderco will take care of this problem. But I'm curious about their findings

Vicarious Reality · Feb 16, 2014

Wow, how very freakin surprising
Reminds me of the old Recon 1 design, lol

jazub · Feb 16, 2014

Very little material there.

watanabe · Feb 16, 2014

not a fan of the internal stop pin and similar designs....for this reason.

Cereal_killer · Feb 16, 2014

duncanmclawd said:
Any update on this one? I don't doubt Spyderco will take care of this problem. But I'm curious about their findings

Sal stated in the spyderco sub-forum thread that in soon as the knife got there a replacement would be sent, not a repair. He requested it be addressed specifically to he or Eric. I'm confident that won't change. We should be asking Sal for an update on his findings, if they learned anything. I'm sure it'll be replaced (unless it turns out to be a fake).

A.P.F. · Feb 16, 2014

Cereal_killer said:
Sal stated in the spyderco sub-forum thread that in soon as the knife got there a replacement would be sent, not a repair. He requested it be addressed specifically to he or Eric. I'm confident that won't change. We should be asking Sal for an update on his findings, if they learned anything. I'm sure it'll be replaced (unless it turns out to be a fake).

If you refer back to the original post, you will see that Eric sent a new knife along with an apology. Kudos to Spyderco!

That said, the knife failed exactly where I would have expected it to fail.

Atheris · Feb 16, 2014

Going to follow this thread. I'm guessing bad heat treatment, but I'll be curious to hear the official findings. A Southard is on my short list too.

RamZar · Feb 16, 2014

The OP did mention that he was taken care of promptly:

Atakdog said:
Update: I sent this knife to Spyderco on January 13th and today (January 22nd) got a package back from Spyderco. Inside was an apology letter from Eric Glesser and a new knife that is just as perfect as my first. A+ for Spyderco on customer service!

Curious to know if this was a material failure or a design flaw.

nccole · Feb 16, 2014

RamZar said:
The OP did mention that he was taken care of promptly:

Curious to know if this was a material failure or a design flaw.

As long as the OP is completely honest, it has to be a material failure. Hopefully not a whole batch, and isolated to this or just a few others. I am sure that Spyderco did proper R&D and witnessed this exact failure under presumably way more force than the OP applied while carving some pine.

RamZar · Feb 16, 2014

nccole said:
As long as the OP is completely honest, it has to be a material failure. Hopefully not a whole batch, and isolated to this or just a few others. I am sure that Spyderco did proper R&D and witnessed this exact failure under presumably way more force than the OP applied while carving some pine.

I wouldn't rule out a design flaw out of hand. Perhaps the area of the breakage needs thicker material.

Remember the Bushcraft had breakage issues and Spyderco redesigned it by simply not drilling the hole in the tang closest to the blade.

Spyderco Bushcraft total failure.(Warning:Knife gore present)

Sal Glesser said:
Hi LightGuy,

While the break shown was the only incident with the model, we did go ahead and remove the first hole from the tang.

sal

Sal Glesser said:
The hole was removed in the tooling before beginning the G-10 run.

Thanx Hiwa for the compliment. Chris Claycomb and associates did an excellent job refining the design and our maker is doing an excellent job in construction. I still plan a full flat S90V version. Just have too much going on right now.

sal

Atakdog · Mar 23, 2014

Sorry I haven't been back on this thread in a while.
Anyways, I now see that the internal stop pin slot does significantly reduce blade strength but I don't think failure like I had (whether caused by heat treat, crack, etc.) is an issue with this knife. Despite the cutout 4mm of a supersteel like cts-204p should be plenty for almost any task I can think of. Eric told me in the letter I got that they had not seen a single other issue like this despite having sold so many Southards, so I doubt there is a bad batch associated with it.