>>2837836It's an amazing design honestly. The handle and steel are decent for the price, which is to say they are nothing special. The locking mechanism is a lot more sturdy than you'd imagine, but obviously it won't compete with a full tang or something like that.
It's essentially the answer to an optimization question, where it's decent at almost everything for little money. Go into either extreme away from it and you have to make general sacrifices for a specialty usecase (which can still be worth it for someone, but it's going to be the minority).
The truth is for all the "this knife can be put into a hydraulic press and survives" memery people do, how often does a extremely sturdy construction actually matter?
Most of what I use a knife for when out is preparing fish I caught, cutting line or cordage, maybe cutting some tape to fix something, preparing food etc. For all of these uses, having a thinner blade and a more nimble smaller knife is an advantage. If I do want to baton some wood I still carry a beefier knife sometimes, but I rarely use it anymore.
So to summarize: It's cheap, it's good at almost everything that matters, it looks good while doing it.
My main complaint is that they are a bit of a bitch to clean, so you want to pay attention not to get too much disgusting shit (mostly fish guts in my case) into the mechanism or on the handle. Similarly the mechanism doesn't do too well with sand. Not hard to fix if it gets in there, but still annoying. Neither complaint invalidates what makes it great, just stuff you have to pay attention to. If I hunted or had to kill larger fish the cleaning issue alone might be enough reason to use a easy to clean knife with a plastic handle. For the kind of fish I catch, it's fine.
