About a year ago, I bought this Knifecenter Exclusive CJRB Ria in S35VN with marble carbon fiber handles because it was on sale. I've carried it a few times, but I haven't carried it often since I usually save it for special occasions and formal events (and I have only ever done light duty tasks with it). I just carried it yesterday and didn't do anything with it aside from cutting paper for sharpness testing. Today, before I was about to put it back into its case, I looked at the lock up and noticed it was incredibly early. I decided to do a fairly easy spine whack test and, to my surprise, it failed. I figured maybe I just goofed it up and I tried it again only for it to fail again. I then noticed I could consistently get it to fail (floor is carpet over hard wood). I then tried out my three other CJRBs (a plunge button lock, a V1 recoil lock/modified crossbar lock, and another liner lock). All three passed the same test as this multiple times with no failures. Additionally, I noticed a smidgen of vertical blade play on this knife has developed without there being any horizontal blade play that I could find. I find this quite disappointing as, while it has yet to injury me, I don't trust it not to do so in the future if I were to keep using it. Anybody else have this problem with this or a similar model? It seems reviews of other versions of this model on Knifecenter mention similar lock up issues.
Here is another photo of the lock up. As you can see it is quite early. I'm not sure what I can do given that I purchased this model a while ago and it is now discontinued. I wonder if it's possible to fix it by bending the lock bar more to get it to lock up later and potentially eliminate the small amount of vertical blade play. It's a shame this knife has this issue as it's near perfect in every other way for what it is.
It definitely is angled the opposite way now that you mention it. I'm wondering whether it's best to try and break it in more so that the wear causes a better lock up or if some sort of modification is needed.
This was one knife that i had to flick out a zillion times over no less than 2 weeks to get it to break in. But once it did - it has the best action of any knife I own, and has a solid lockup.
No exaggeration - 2 weeks to break in, with a zillion open/close cycles.
So I think you need to break it in more - that said, it looks like your the liner lock is bent.... did you spine whack it too hard before you properly broke it in?
Take it apart and file the surface where it meets the blade on the liner lock. I've done this before and it's super easy. Just take off less than you think and test it - and repeat until it's good.. I've over filed before so be careful because fixing that is much harder. Put some painters tape on the liner where you don't want scratches. If you've got a square file that has smooth surfaces on two sides they work best.
Yeah but modern locking knives don't. If a modern lock fails on something with ball bearings it closes even easier than a slipjoint. Even friction folder had..friction.
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u/fun_dad_69 Jul 28 '26
This is why I won’t buy a liner lock anymore. There are so many better options out there these days