ZT's customer service is the only thing keeping me from turning completely away from them. None of their knives are really designed to be high performance. Good steels are only really good if the heat treat is just as good and if the blade thickness and grind matches the intended purpose. Caged bearings only stay interesting for so long. 3d machined titanium is the only they do that I can find unique and designed for actual high performance. The rest is basically marketing hype. So customer service and 3d machined handles. Personally, I'm tired of their tactics of introducing a knife 2 years before it's released and then only having a couple hundred available in order to increase the profit margins to ridiculous levels. When I could get one of their top tier mass production knives for about 200 bucks, they were far more interesting. That seems to be a thing of of the past.
I was looking forward so much to the 0180 but after some serious thinking about what they do with steels and how they grind them, they could have used 1095 and accomplished the same thing as the current steel they're using. I mean hell, they put out S110V at 58-59 hrc? WTH? Optimally hardened vanadis 4e is about 63 hrc and can be taken significantly higher and still retain toughness comparable to A2. That's an outstanding combination. I will bet they didn't take it above 59. They might as well have used cpm D2 or something much cheaper.
To me, it's about marketing hype for people who care more about bragging rights than real users who want the highest performance out of a production knife. I've learned that I need to look elsewhere, and I've found what I've been looking for in another company. I still take out my remaining ZT, the 0561, and play with it a little, but I usually end up asking myself why I still have it. It doesn't whittle, doesn't slice, the bearings get jammed up. It's built for "tough use" but I'm afraid to actually use it hard because I'm sure it'll break. The emperor wears no clothes.
