While there's some degree of QC issues, benchmade knives.

I've owned about a dozen over the years, and still have most of them. The ones I don't have I gave to people I know. Every single one is still in great shape. The worst of them is the first I ever had, a model 710, and the only thing wrong with that is the tip being slightly rounded from before I got better at sharpening and had good gear to do so.

I actually have three of that model, one a special edition that's dressed up all fancy, the original one, and a brand spanking new copy of my first one that was dead stock that got sold off just this year.

I've also got other models, though I tend to give those away since I'm so happy with the design of the one I carry (the 710). I only buy them if they're way underpriced because benchmade is usually way more expensive than most brands, even other us made ones. That means I usually buy them with gifting in mind, and just use it as an excuse to play with it a little.

A caveat though. You have to be careful where you buy them. Amazon has had a bad track record of accepting fakes as returns, and eBay is flooded with fakes from the makers as well as resold amazon fakes. So you have to be able to identify a fake to be certain the deal you're seeing is a deal and not a scam.

The original 710 I have was purchased the year they came out, which I think was 99 or 2k, but I can't promise my memory is right on the exact year, though it is around that time.

Even if it had been 2001, that's 23 years of carrying the same knife almost everywhere, and carrying it at least part of every day. I took the thing camping and abused the hell out of it, including batonning with the damn thing. If you don't know what that is, you won't get how stupid it is to do with a folding knife of any type, or how impressive it is that the knife survived, much less did so without anything bragging breaking.

But, that's when you take a knife, and use it to split wood by slamming another piece of wood against the back of the knife. It breaks fixed blade knives sometimes, it's meant to be something you'd only do in an emergency because a knife just isn't the right tool for splitting wood of any kind other than maybe balsa.

It got to the point that even when I carried another knife it was alongside the 710 because I could, and do, trust that damn knife with my life.

I haven't abused other benchmade folders as much, but I have put them to hard use. Never had a single failure, even of the one spring that is commonly a problem that needs replacing.

There's other knives just as reliable. But not that exceed the track record I have, and not that are us made