She’s THICK! But in all the right ways. Rare to see any folder these days with such a thick blade stock; at 4mm it really feels stout and the 3/4 flat grind provides enough meat behind the blade for those tasks that require an extra bit of a lean in.

It’s got a sort of dull swedge which aids in those piercing tasks like cutting into thick plastic bags etc.

I’ve had it apart already to rinse out the factory grease and the associated grindy gunk it’s already gathered from spending a few days in my pocket during work hours (I work in heavy industry so there’s a bunch of hard particle ingress that it will see over its lifetime) and I gotta say, the way the pivot is designed is a touch of genius; the nut that holds the pivot in has a locking plate that can be indexed around the circumference of the lock nut, so you can customise (to a certain extent) the amount of preload on your bearings to mitigate any play. This is a power move in the pivot world, gone is the need to adjust your pivot in a hurry whilst you wait for some loctite to set.

The build quality on this knife is second to none.

The only thing I would change, and this is completely subjective to me, is that I would substitute the ball bearing setup for a plain phosphor bronze washer. These bearings are large, they have a substantial inner diameter due to the design of the pivot lock and all the real estate that takes up right in the guts of it. For blade play it’s a bit of a godsend, because the play is distributed over a very large surface area at a decent distance from the pivot centre. So this thing can be set up with next to zero blade play. I just prefer a bronze washer for the particular environment/s I am exposed to on a daily basis.

Absolutely epic release from Reate, so much so I ordered another 2 variants I couldn’t get from this website because I was such an instant fan of the design.

fantastic quality and price, very happy.