I just wanted to update my blog regarding the framelock. Progress has been start and stop due to our heavy breakage of tooling, however my father and I managed to finish a working prototype of the knife last night. The knife is still extremely rough, and we're doing some redesigns from this rendition of the knife to make the finished version of the knife that much better. This is just an iPhone video of the knife working, bear in mind the knife in this video doesn't have the framelock stop that the pivot secures to or washers, likewise the aluminum test blade hasn't been precision surfaced to smooth up the action.
Some of the things that will be redesigned will include the framelock locking bar, which while still being angled for increased surface area, we've found is a little more solid and totally void of play. The curved locking surface I had initially come up with just didn't work out the way I had hoped. Likewise we've made some small changes to the internals of the knife, for example adding thumb relief for the lockbar, an increased finger choil for grip, slightly altered thumb serrations, ect.
Next step is to go ahead and make another frame with the new locking interface and mill some blades out of steel. In the mean time I've gone ahead and started to lay out my different grind patterns to visualize what everything's going to look like.
Stay tuned for more vidoes and pictures as we move into the final stages of prototyping and the beginning of production.
-Will
