Alright, picture and story time. Picked up a lovely Kerhaw OD-1 and a Benchmade Vex in a trade with a gentleman today in Vancouver. He was selling the OD cheap because the mechanism was loose and the knife was intermittently hard to open. After taking the knife apart and giving it a thorough cleaning, I think I've found the source of the problem - I think there's a design flaw in the Kershaw OD-1 that affects both opening and retention.
First, a picture.
On the right is a picture of the OD mechanism - it's essentially a lever that butts up against a metal liner and rides on a small metal pin. It attaches to the blade via a pin that rotates in a preset track in the liner. Something to note is that there is a very small separately angled section at one end of the pin track. On the left is the G10 handle scale in the OD-1, with the cutout section that keeps the mechanism in place.
Perhaps you see the beginning of a problem?
Since the opening mechanism is essentially a moving piece of hardened metal against an expoy/nylon handle scale, the lever has actually abraded the G10 to the point that the overdrive mechanism lever no longer sits flush against the metal liner. In short, the opening mechanism is now off-angle and the leverage required to open the knife is no longer there. The second problem is that the lever actually forms part of the in-handle retention on the blade - the small angled portion of the lever that the pin sits in helps hold the handle in the blade and as the lever has become loose, the in-handle retention has become steadily worse. The knife is essentially unusable - it's either so tight that the knife is nearly impossible to open but the blade stays in the handle, or loose enough to open the knife easily and the blade flies out if I look at it wrong.
Ouch. Sucks, I kinda like the knife, but it's going back to Kershaw in Portland.
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