Rike Knife Thor 1-CF Integral Frame Lock Folder

I'm extremely happy with my Rike M3, details large and small, to the point that I'm considering this purchase. Titanium integrals are expensive even when they don't have carbon fiber panels. $300-500 is very common. People go 'that's wack, what makes them think they can charge that much? I can get a titanium and M390 flipper, a very good one, for around $200. Why pay more?' A titanium integral knife means three things. First: it ain't gonna be cheap. The second would be that the entire handle must be milled of one seamless piece of material - usually titanium. It can't be bolted, can't be welded. You can't have liners or frames or scales or whatever held together by pins. Someone's got to take a billet of the material and turn it into both sides of the knife handle the way someone might make a canoe from a tree trunk. That's hard, and time consuming, and expensive. Hella harder than just popping frames and liners and blades and bearings together. The third thing is that the design is necessarily constrained in an integral, because you can't just take the knife apart like a sandwich to get at the works. The bearings and bushings have to be fit into the knife from the inside, so to speak. And you need to be able to clean the knife without ever having the luxury of just disassembling it the way you can with a regular folding knife in order to get at the inside corners. So what's this mean? Well, in practice, when you take a knife apart and put it back together you have to kind of tune it -- adjust the pivot and fasteners just so -- if you want it to flip as smoothly as you can. With an integral, again if the design is correct anyway, there's much less that needs 'tuning'. The pivot will line up every time. It will exert equal thrust pressure on the bearings across the entire diameter of the bearing's topology. Not close -- equal, which is the difference between a great flipper and a truly special one. What else does it mean? Well, in theory, your knife will probably survive more damage than it would if it were just held together at its fasteners. I've held off on getting an integral because I kinda like tuning knives and I don't know that the extra money gets me anything I need. It reflects the difficulty of making a knife that way and the expense of the entire titanium block that was milled down to make the handle and the expensive tooling necessary to do that, which is cool, but not necessarily value if you follow me. But yeah, this price isn't necessarily as bad as some of you might be scanning it at first.

So $389 is not super outlandish for an integral. It's still more than I'd pay.

For that type of money, buy a Chris Reeve Sebenza!!! (Its not made in China!!!!)