There’s a few different sizes and shapes on AliExpress
I seem to remember someone on here (or the other place) had some for sale at reasonable prices.
Strangely enough some counties will not allow the import of tritium, they treat it like it’s wildly radioactive, it is a bit but not wildly.
I decided to do a little tune up of my work Delica today. I'd never diassembled a lockback before, and figured that I'd give it a go. I remember "Nutinfancy" mentioning that he took his Endura apart, and spent a whole afternoon trying to put it back together.
It came apart easily, the mechanism is simple as hell. I cleaned all the parts, and highly polished the washers, blade tang, liners, and lock bar parts with a dremel and jewelers rouge. Everything was nicely lubed with fluorinated grease. Now to reassemble the knife.
Nightmare!
No matter what I did, the heavy wire that acts as a spring for the lockback kept popping out before I could clamp the liner over it. I tried for hours. Finally I assembled the body, without the blade in it so there was no tension on the spring. Holding the lock down, I inserted the blade into the handle, but what about the washers? I had to pry the handle a bit, and try to slide them in between the blade and the liners by poking with a tweezers. Everything kept shifting around, and if my hand slipped off the lock, everything fell apart.
I finally got things aligned, I think, and inserted the pivot. OK! I was setting the screw in place with a tweezers when it went flying into the air. Damn! I crawled around under the table with a flashlight to find the screw when I came accross a highly polished bronze washer which I was sure I had put into the knife. I did find the screw also.
Now I have to pull the pivot again and try to slide the washer into place. This time I used a zip tie to hold the lockbar down. That made it easier. More time spent trying to align the washers and blade...I got the pivot in and screwed down.
OK. Let's see if all that pollishing of parts and fluorinated grease will make any difference on a lockback knife.
I depressed the lock and the newly sharpened blade dropped free fall, like an axis lock, and sliced right accross my finger producing a torrent of blood.
I think I have smoothest lockback knife around, but my suggestion is, "don't ever take apart your Delica or Endura". Now I know why they used rivets on my Caly3.
Been there, sounds remarkably similar to some of my exploits with a SanRenMu 7078 and it’s backspacer. The backspacer seemed to straighten out a bit as soon as it was free of the restraining forces of the screws holding it in place, I ended up overheating the spacer trying to get it to bend, I’ll make one to fit sometime but I’ve bought another 7078 and it’s staying in one piece for now. These are remarkably useful for nudging washers into their place, or a bit of card can come in handy. Something like a centre punch can help locate the washers while the pivot is sliding through the scales and washers.
I only have very few back locks in my knives, it’s just a style I’m not that keen on.
Same for me ! They look absolutely awful. I don’t understand all this rave about them but I recognise they have an special design. Many benchmade models also look terrible.
The thing about Spyderco is that it either just clicks with someone or it doesn’t. There’s not a lot of folks in the middle. As a fanboy, I look at a knife like the Delica and all I see is EDC perfection. It’s extremely light but very robust. It’s compact but has more blade edge surface than you would think by looking at it. The deep carry clip is close to perfect. Smooth deployment and lockup even after thousands of cycles. Good steel with predictable sharpening and nice, grippy texturing on the FRN handle. Great ergonomics. Great usability. The more knives I buy, the more I appreciate the Spydies.
But if Spyderco isn’t your thing, luckily there’s about a million other knives out there