Positive: I love the blade shape and the D2 steel. It feels great in the hand and came fantastically sharp.
Negative: The knife broke in less than a week. It is described as ‘A/O’ ie assisted opening. I can only assume that what Al Mar meant by that is that you need to get somebody else to help you flick the knife open. It was stiff beyond belief!
Now, one might posit that this was just a problem with this individual knife. However, the YouTube reviews I have read since, (there is an interesting Russian one), suggest that it is a common failing.
However, my problems were solved when, within days of having the knife, the internal spring snapped anyway. This vastly improved the knife!
I have since taken the cover off and removed the broken spring. The remains of the broken spring, this morning, was poking through the FRN grip and into my hand.
So now it is a flipper that does not ‘flip.’
Either Al Mar should abandon the A/O idea and just put a thumb stud (as with the original Al Mar SERE 2000) or they should work on the internal mechanism and (a) produce a spring that means that people who are not superhuman can open it and (b) have a spring that will last more than a week.
