Benchmade  940 Osborne Knife

With Benchmade's issues with quality control over the last few years, I am always hesitant to buy a benchmade knife sight unseen, despite being a huge Benchmade fan. But after going to my local REI and seeing that they did not have this knife in stock, and was reassured returns were easily doable, I bit the bullet and placed my order online. First Impressions: When I got the knife I was indeed impressed. Having held a 940 before, it wasn't new to me, but to have one to call my own to hold and examine was amazing. Although many tout the benefits of the carbon fiber 940-1, I find the forest green aluminum even more beautiful. Combined with the purple titanium backspacer, it is truly beautiful. Design: The 940 was designed by Warren Osborne and as such is absolutely beautiful. The 940 is truly a timeless winner and one of the most perfect EDC knives. But in my mind the only thing taking away from that design here is the pocket clip. It is un-inspiring, boring and unlike many other Benchmade knives, is not "parkerized" (black oxide finished) and as such is simply painted. This is bad, because painted clips always look ugly as they wear, whereas parkerized clips wear very slowly and subtly, looking far better with age. I truly wish they would have gone with their parkerized split arrow clip, like they do on the higher end 940 models, it fits the design much better and will wear far better too. Fit and Finish: As I mentioned earlier, Benchmade has been suffering in the QC department as of late. Often you will find that a brand new knife suffers from both horizontal and even worse, vertical blade play on lockup, which is a big no no. In addition, often centering is far from perfect and there are issues with free-swinging action and with leftover burrs from manufacturing. This is why often buying in store, if possible, is always better. But with the particular knife I received, I am happy to report that there were zero issues with blade play in either direction and although it was not free swinging enough to drop closed, it was close. Blade centering was slightly off; biased to the right. A quick disassembly, cleaning and swapping washers to opposite sides and flipping their smooth side to face the blade tang quickly solved both the centering issue and failure to drop closed. It is now the smoothest swinging Benchmade in my collection, while still having perfect lockup. Blade, edge and sharpness: Now although many of the other aspects of this knife were stellar or pretty close to stellar out of the box, the blade and edge was not one of them. The edge struggled to cut even printer paper and even stropping didn't help. Clearly someone at the factory did not take the time to finish sharpening it. But about 45 minutes on my KME sharpener and I got the blade hair-popping, sharp enough to cleanly slice phone book paper. The blade grind itself however is an aspect that was not perfect and I cannot fix. Though it is far from bad enough to not be able to live with, it still makes me happy that I did not pay full price for this knife. The swedge taken out of the spine at towards the front is uneven and the squared off grind at the end of the swedge is crooked. In addition, the grind of the tip is uneven having more material taken off on one side than the other. This causes fixed angle sharpening to create a much wider bevel on one side of the knife than the other. Functionally, it has no effect, but aesthetically, from a premium knife, this is always a disappointment. Conclusions: This is a great knife from Benchmade, but one that I definitely don't recommend paying full price for. But often to make sure you get a knife that has the aspects of quality you should expect from Benchmade, you really have to go to a store to examine a few to ensure you get a good one. So I really hope that in the future, REI stocks 940s in their stores. But with their stellar return policy, don't hesitate to get one online, just know that you may have to send it back if it isn't perfect. TL;DR: Benchmade has QC issues, They make good knives but very inconsistently, Best to buy in store, But REI has good return policy, so returns are possible for sub-par knives. Good knife, boring clip, but better value with discount (don't pay full price). REI you need to stock these in store!

After owning a mini grip for several years and losing it, I decided to go with the 940. The first 940 I received was a victim of Benchmade's quality control issues. The blade was completely off-center and it had a lot of side play. This is personal preference - but I also did not like the texture of the handle (rough) and although I had seen pictures of it online, I did not like the look of the fuchsia backspacer in person. I returned it and went with the 940-2 which I prefer much more. The G-10 handles are much smoother and in my opinion feel better. I also prefer the look of the barrel spacers over the fuchsia backspacer. The specific knife I received was perfectly centered, but opening it was much tighter than any other benchmade axis lock I've used. I've now had 3 benchmades and all 3 axis mechanisms took completely different levels of force to open and close. The moral of the story is to make sure you handle the specific knife you're buying in person. Google benchmade's Quality Control and you'll see that there's issues in terms of centering, grind, sharpness, etc. For what it's worth, when price is considered, I think it's hard to justify the cost of the 940 over the mini grip. I went with the 940-2 as I'm still holding hope that my mini grip will turn up and don't want to be stuck with two of the same knives.