what did happen here?

[North Man]

another knockoff type,.
This is a old Gerlach and they got different quality on knives, this must be the worst.  The hardening gone wrong?
ps i can not see that its been used very much, does not look so

[North Man]

two more pictures,

i did break this, hard to explain but there must be something wrong with the construction, the Swiss army Knife got a floating spring(genuine ones). This i can not see would be possible to move the awl when it was intact , same with corkscrew, it may be that it is a wrong construction and the spring did not have the space or flex it needed to function, so if opening the awl or corkscrew one would break the spring...

[AimlessWanderer]

Hard to be certain, but my initial guesses would be either incorrectly tempered or there was a stress raiser which caused a crack to form during quenching

[North Man]

Hard to be certain, but my initial guesses would be either incorrectly tempered or there was a stress raiser which caused a crack to form during quenching

you may be correct!
it does have a floating(kind of) spring inside the rivited, i can move the broken spring sideways, the floating part is inside the spring this may be a design that would work if proper made.
The spring is not polished and i suspect it is the same inside, for this to work i should believe it must be more precision and the surface very mirror or fine,.
I can see the awl backside has dug down, resulting in breakage, this because the "floating" did not work or hardening wrong,
This is the worst knife i have ever seen

[AimlessWanderer]

From a design perspective there does appear there may be another issue too. From what I can tell, the spring is anchored by the one pin that does not act as a pivot, and is pretensioned by the three tools acting on it - no problem so far, as that is commonplace.

The issue for me is how close this anchor point is to the backspring tool pivot. The main tools (openers etc), acting against the furthest point of the pring give enough room for the spring to flex comfortably. The backspring tool however is different. It appears to be very close to what is effectively the fulcrum for the spring, where there is also a change in section (where stresses primarily do their worst). This may cause the spring to me overloaded at this point and generate stress cracking over a shorter period of time, and coupled with a poor surface finish you mentioned - voila - broke!

Shortening the tang of the backspring tools and seperating the two central pins more would reduce stresses acting on the spring, better surface finish and a smooth transition over section changes on the spring would mean that stresses are not focussed on a single point, and yes ... we still can't rule out heat treatment issues

It could be a cumulative effect of the lot. But the bottom line is that you are right ... it really is a bad knife 

[North Man]

yes, i understand
thanks!

[North Man]

sometimes it feel good to destroy
here is two pictures, here you can more easy see the floating, when the spring is in correct position, it will go up and down , so agree not any news here, however  it was rough surface inside(not polished where it should go up and down)

[AimlessWanderer]

That's ugly! Centre pins too close, awl tang too square, plus no confidence in the surface finish ... all kinds of wrong in my book (though I'll be the first to say I'm no expert). At least they got a nice sweeping radius on the transition though 

.... although looking at it again, it seems that slot in the backspring might be there to allow a little extra flex by allowing the spring to rise when the awl is deployed  Still not convinced though 

[North Man]

you are probarbly very correct , impressive.

last picture of the crap 
ps i do not recommend this knife

[ICanFixThat]

Interesting.  It could be someone just tried to fan the tools... seems like this design would not allow that.

[North Man]

yes, could be others have done this and damaged it.