Scratching Up Ranger Button Locks

[metasyntax]

I noticed last night that quite a few of my 130mm Ranger and RangerGrip knives have scratches on the buttons, deep enough to see and feel. The scratches are crescent shaped, right where your thumbnail hits when you push the button. The thing is, none of these knives have gotten very much use, so the scratches develop really easily. The buttons seem to be made of pretty soft plastic, is it cellidor? I wish they'd use a little tougher material for the button, I imagine quite a lot of people use the tip of their thumb to fully actuate the lock. How about you guys, anybody else have scratched up buttons? I'm going to try using the side of my thumb more than the tip, see if I can keep the problem from getting too much worse.

[Thunderpants]

Funny you should mention it.
I recently purchased a Victoriwenger Ranger from a notorious online vendor who had this one slightly cheaper cos someone had used it and returned it.

There were no signs of use at all - except on the lock button! Very, very annoying. Visible as well as noticeable to the touch.
For a moment I thought of returning it, but what the hell... I got a nice Olive Ranger for 38 bucks... I can live with the imperfection. (Later they had a red Rangergrip 55 for 30 euros...Which I couldn't resist, even though it won't arrive for a few weeks. It will be interesting to see what condition that's in.)

But yes, it is infuriating that they made the button out of window putty!
They could easily make it more durable and there's no reason not to - after all, these knives are not cheap.

[moonweasel]

Never had a button on a ranger difficult enough to press, it needed persuasion from my thumbnail nail.

[metasyntax]

Never had a button on a ranger difficult enough to press, it needed persuasion from my thumbnail nail.

It's not so much that I need to press with my thumbnail, but that I need to press with the tip of my thumb to get the button down far enough to move the liner fully out of the way. And in doing so, my thumbnail digs in. Top-Gear-24 summed it up pretty well in this other thread: http://forum.multitool.org/index.php/topic,54610.msg952017.html#msg952017 My Wengers don't show as many scratches, and they've been used more (but again, none carried more than a half-dozen times), so I think the smaller shield-shape of the Victorinox button makes it a little worse.

There were no signs of use at all - except on the lock button! Very, very annoying. Visible as well as noticeable to the touch.
For a moment I thought of returning it, but what the hell... I got a nice Olive Ranger for 38 bucks... I can live with the imperfection. (Later they had a red Rangergrip 55 for 30 euros...Which I couldn't resist, even though it won't arrive for a few weeks. It will be interesting to see what condition that's in.)

But yes, it is infuriating that they made the button out of window putty!
They could easily make it more durable and there's no reason not to - after all, these knives are not cheap.

Glad to hear I'm not the only one. A lot of my SAKs are for the collection and not for use, so I was perturbed to see that I had scratched them up by opening and closing them just a few times. I hope your new Ranger is in good shape!

[Thunderpants]

I also noticed the Vic Ranger needs a lot more push on the button before the blade unlocks. (At least compared to the 2 proper Wenger Rangers I have in my pile of junk.) This is kind of annoying - I like the easy opening of the old Wengers.