Broke Buck / Bonehead Move!

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weaponhead

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OK, I had a brain cramp.....long story short, I put my Buck 102 in the washing machine. Although it was in the sheath the whole time, the blade broke! The sheath came out of it OK...just has more of a "weathered" look now:p

I'll probably contact Buck but will obviously "come clean" :rolleyes: :D about my mistake first.

I've attached photos so you can see the break...
 

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That blade was defective from day one.
Appears to be crystallized from improper heat treatment.

Also appears to have already been cracked beforehand from the spine almost to the edge.
Note the shiny fresh break near the edge, and older discolored part 3/4 all the way down from the top.

No possible way a washing machine can break a knife blade.
Especially one in a sheath.

The knife blade would be more likely to break the washing machine!!!

rc
 
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Thanks rc....I was hoping you'd reply! Just to be clear, it was a laundry washing machine (not dishwasher). Thanks!
 
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I think you left out the other half of the story...

...long story short, I put my Buck 102 in the washing machine, and then the washing machine fell off a cliff and got run over by a locomotive.
Click to expand...

I've washed TONS of stuff. Never seen anything made of steel alloy snap like that.
 
I'm going to assume that the different shade is due to heat treat and not a prior broken edge.

I'm also going to assume that a washing machine should not be able to break any knife still in the sheath.
 
It still had the original edge (I rarely used it...at most I touched it up on a Spyderco Sharpmaker - no grinders!).
I did notice that after a couple hours I can no longer see the different shading in the break as in the picture.
 
Reckon that could have been enough to set up some internal stresses?
Click to expand...
IMO: No.

My openion is the blade was improperly heat treated & tempered at the factory and had a pre-existing crack in the crystallized steel from the get go.

When I used to do the Buck 119 & 120 custom rebuilds years ago, I shattered more then one Buck blade or tang by whacking the handle with a hammer on a vice or anvil to break the plastic handle off the tang.

That simply should NEVER happen!
Again IMO, Any tang should always bend or flex before shattering if the blade is properly tempered.

Those Bucks that are good are very good!
Those Bucks that aren't, aren't very good.

rc
 
Yep

It makes no sense that it would break in the sheath.

It didn't go through the dryer, did it?
 
That wouldn't matter either.

No clothes dryer in the world gets hot enough to crystallize steel and crack it in half.

If they did, they would burn up the clothes and burn your house down.

rc
 
It's not a question of heat. A tub washing machine isn't going to put enough stress on a knife in a sheath to damage it if there isn't a flaw and even then there has to be a heck of a flaw. An dryer drum tumbling the knife would put more stress than the tub of the washer, but still I don't see how any knife without a serious flaw would fail tumbling around while in the sheath.

Gotta be a bad blade. Dunno why it failed. Buck should replace it and ask for the knife to examine so they can figure out what the failure was.
 
different, but it still broke...

Deer hunting friend of mine ended up unknowingly leaving his unsheathed fixed blade Buck knife in his upright freezer someway. :scrutiny:

Some time later while removing some frozen deer burger from the freezer, his Buck fell out and hit his concrete basement floor.

The blade snapped in two pieces and looked much like the one pictured by the OP.

He sent the knife back to Buck along with a written description of what happened. He soon had a free replacement.
 
I caught it before it went into dryer :eek:

I will send it back and let you know how it works out...will enclose the pic where you see the different shading too. I think Buck will make it right....I thought the Bos heat treat was the "be all and end all" process....so this shouldn't have happened.
 
couldve been in the finishing of the blade after heat treat that they ruined the temper, though youd expect that at the very tip or the edge, dunno i mightve expected the tip to get rounded over etc, but not a break. Im sure Bos has the occasional one slip through
Buck has great customer service, id think theyd take care of it, ive carried a Bos treat buck alpha dorado daily for 5 or 6 years now, love the darned thing
Good luck
Gene
 
I'm shocked nobody's commented on the long-term suitability of D2, ATS-34 or AUS-8A for washing machine resistance over Buck's 420HC...........
 
If your washing machine can bust a knife blade (in the sheath no less), what does it do to your clothes?
Do you have children? Any chance that "somebody" broke it and put it back in the sheath kinda sneaky like? Something doesn't add up.
 
It happens, over the years I've had several name brand knifes snap with little or no tension on the blade. One broke while opening a blister pack of sinus capsules. I couldn't believe it and just stood there staring at what was left of my Case canoe. The company's almost always replaced them. The worst knifes I've found for snapping was Gerber's, on their long knifes the steel was so hard it would snap if you dropped it point first on a hard wooden floor ( happened ). Gerber wouldn't replace it, just reground the tip, I don't think they believed it only fell only 2 feet to the floor.
 
Im sure Bos has the occasional one slip through
Click to expand...

Paul Bos has been retired for years and someone else took it over. I am shocked that the HT of that blade is the kind of work they do now. I hope it's just a "few and far between" mistake.
 
Paul's apprentice was trained up to his standard before he left so unless there's something new about this steel, which should not be the case, there's no good explanation for this.

I'm certain that Buck will want it and the pics to determine what went wrong.
 
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