Seven Months of Lockstick, and the Break-In Argument

Buying a knife with a defect and deciding to keep it as an experiment is a specific kind of patience. A r/knifeclub poster did exactly that: seven months ago he bought a Spyderco Military 2 with, in his words, truly untenable lockstick and very stiff action, and chose to keep it to test the claim that the washers would eventually seat with use.

The follow-up report is straightforward. After months of carrying little else, the knife is one of his favourites to use. It is not drop-shut, but a wrist flick swings it closed, there is no blade play, and the lockstick that once nearly caused him to injure a finger to disengage the lock is silent. He says he did not touch the pivot or add lubricant. The conclusion is that the issues worked themselves out with time.

That conclusion is where the thread gets interesting, because it is genuinely contested. The break-in argument holds that lockbars mate with blade tangs over hundreds of cycles, that washers burnish, and that a stiff new knife is normal. The opposing view is that a knife requiring seven months of tolerance is a quality-control failure, that most buyers will not wait, and that anyone who returns it is behaving rationally rather than impatiently. Both positions can be true of the same knife, and the deciding factor is usually how much the owner paid and how easily they could exchange it.

The practical lesson for buyers is not that stiff knives should be kept. It is that lockstick and action are separate problems with different prognoses: a slightly tight pivot often does settle, while a lockbar engaging too early may need correction or warranty service and will not improve on its own. Keep the knife if you can return it later, mark your purchase date, and give it a fixed number of cycles before deciding. Seven months is a long experiment; most reasonable versions of it are two weeks.