The CobraTec Quick Strike is exactly the kind of thing I would have been all over when I was a lad, just starting out with my knife collecting career. Here we have a tactical folder with a stiletto point profile that makes a sly insinuation along the lines of its Ninja Special Operator status. But, importantly, without yet another goddamned tanto point on it. It's got a pocket clip and injection molded reinforced nylon handles with rubber grip inserts that would have been state of the art... 25 years ago. And you can tell this is a tactical knife because it's all black, see?

With a pair of ambidextrous thumb studs and plain pivot action, the Quick Strike is nevertheless a 50 state legal liner locker.

...

Oh, of course it isn't. If it were, I wouldn't be showing it to you like this.

Surprise, motherfucker.

The Quick Strike is actually another entry in CobraTec's "Hidden Release" lineup. But this one is definitely an oddball, because it's both a normal side opening manual folder (that's not even spring assisted!) and also a side-firing automatic. You can open it the boring way, for instance if you're doing so in front of the normals. But if you're in good company or just by yourself where no one can see, you can let your freak flag fly and use it as a switchblade, too.

The release button is right here, on the side:

What, you can't see it? That's because it's concealed underneath the rubber grip insert on that side. There's no visual indicator as to where it is, or even that it's there at all, and it's actually quite a bit further down the handle than you'd expect.

That means the Quick Strike is something that's sure to make any right minded individual grin: A switchblade that's probably actually very likely to go unnoticed as such, even if the individual prepared to frown upon both it and you heavily -- your boss, a parent, a policeman, whoever -- is given an opportunity to handle it. You'd have to already know what it is or be extremely curious to make the rather obsessive effort at fiddling with it that'd be required to find out. Somebody just groping around on the handle isn't going to set it off.

And it carries within itself the constant, ineffable sense of getting away with something.

(Although of course now that I've spilled the beans everyone and their grandmother will know the secret.)

Stats

The Quick Strike is 7-11/16" long when open with a 3-3/16" long blade that's technically a drop point, I guess, with a spine that's nearly but not quite straight and a point that winds up just a smidge above the centerline. You can bicker amongst yourselves in the comments whether or not this truly counts as a "stiletto" or if it's just an emaciated drop point. Anyway, there's 2-7/8" of usable blade length and the rest of it forms a square ricasso at the base of the edge, which is actually mechanically important. More on that later. I would be remiss, as well, if I didn't mention that it is also available with a tanto point if you're really into that sort of thing.

It's nearly exactly 4-1/2" long when closed and it's not especially broad, only about 1-1/4" to the peak above the thumb stud when it's closed. But it's pretty thick, thanks to its injection molded scales: 0.675" not including the clip, or 0.810" with it. As a consequence of its narrow profile but thick handles, it feels pretty fat in your hand and almost totally round in cross section, even though it mathematically isn't.

It does have full length steel liners but despite this it's still pretty light for its displacement: about 3.8 ounces (107.72 grams), the majority of which seems to be the blade.

There's another point of contention with the specs, wherein CobraTec themselves claim the handles are made of "G-10." I'm quite certain they're not. They look, feel, sound, and taste exactly like reinforced Nylon. They're also quite clearly injection molded, which is something that G-10 isn't. So there's a mystery.

You absolutely could not use this as your Tactical Special Operator's knife if it didn't have a clip, so it does. It's single sided, not reversible, and not deep carry, either. It's held on with one long screw that sinks into the backspacer, and it's also inset into a little pocket so it can't wiggle around.... much. There's no lanyard hole, though, so you'll have to find somewhere else to mount your paracord lanyard with custom solid anodized titanium skull face pace counting challenge beads, or whatever.

I have a bone to pick with the clip, actually, because it's entirely too tight. And matters are made worse because it pinches whatever you clip it to against the absurdly grippy rubber insert on the scale beneath. The net effect of this is that it's damn near impossible to get the Quick Strike to let go of your pants, which really rather defeats the purpose if you ask me. I remedied this somewhat by taking the clip off and bending the shit out of it in a padded vise so that it's less grabby and thus a little more tolerable. Without this, or perhaps adhering some manner of smoother material to the scale where the clip touches it, the Quick Strike's chief contribution to proceedings would just be destroying the hem on the top of the pockets of all of your pants while you give yourself a wedgie. Perish the thought of getting it out in a hurry; without some kind of modification that's a total non-starter.

The blade is 440C, which is probably not too exciting to most people these days. But it's an excellent throwback to that early 2000's era that makes dumbasses like me go all nostalgic, so I guess that's cool. So far its edge retention performance is unknown to me, but it doesn't show any telltale signs of the edge having been burned when it was manufactured so it'll probably be perfectly acceptable. My all black example has a nice etched and stonewashed finish on the blade that seems reasonably durable. You can get this with a green, red, or tan handle if you prefer but all four color variants have the same black blade. CobraTec's viper logo is laser etched there, too, even though cobras still aren't vipers. Has anyone told them?

Should we tell them?

CobraTec is an American company and many of their models are indeed made in the US. Nothing on the packaging nor the blurb for the Quick Strike, though, goes as far as admitting where it's made. So it's certainly possible this is an imported knife, a notion backed up by its lower than average price compared to most of CobraTec's other models. At least for any shortcomings it may or may not have it's cheap: Only $49, which is peanuts for any decently competent automatic these days.

Regardless of where it's made, the Quick Strike is reasonably well put together. Despite being a liner locker the blade centering is nearly perfect. The blade lockup is precise and positive, with no rattle or wiggle. There is blemish on mine down at the tail, where there's a smudge of melted handle scale material left over from when it was shaped at the factory. This leads me to believe that the handles and liners are ground to shape in their final assembled positions, like smoothing the backstrap on a 1911, so there will be no gaps and everything winds up flush fitting. I could foresee someone being bothered about this, but I'm not too worried about it, personally. I may be motivated enough to grind it off later, or maybe I won't bother.

The blade grind is not terrible for a factory job on a budget knife, but it could be better. There's a secondary apex on it past the bulk of the main grind, or perhaps a micro-bevel if we're being all modern and hipster about it, which is decently fine and good enough to chop a Post-It in half without any effort. I gave it a quick once over on my dinkum homebrew strop, which is just a scrap of leather glued to a block of wood fuzzy side up, and doped with some Flitz metal polish (yes, really), and after about ten strokes on each side the factory grind became sharp enough to readily shave my arm hairs off. I call that success, I don't know about you.

The edge grind out to the tip is excellent, which is good because the tip angle is very shallow and the Quick Strike is extremely pointy.

The secondary apex is pretty true but the main grind behind it isn't even close. This will require fixing if you're the type of nut who gets bothered by this. Otherwise you can just sharpen to the angle of the secondary grind and find other things in life to worry about instead.

Night Operations

The Quick Strike is deeply satisfying to set off on its automatic mode, but actually accomplishing that is a lot more of a faff than it ought to be. That's a disappointment, really. I like the bolster sliding mechanism on CobraTec's other knives better, which feels more natural and is a damn sight easier to use. But the tradeoff there is that those can't be opened manually at all.

The fire button is hidden nearly exactly 1-3/4" back from the forwardmost point on the knife and is decidedly difficult to find. You can feel it beneath the rubber insert on the left hand side of the knife if you know approximately where to look, but you can also feel what seems to be a fairly long and very pronounced hollow in front of it. You have to mash the concealed button very hard, and you have to do so accurately in order to get it to do anything. Mushing around in the open space in front of it doesn't produce any result. Moreover, missing the button and mashing the void, then trying to roll your thumb back into the correct location from there also usually doesn't work. You're then left holding the knife probably much further down the handle than you'd like to, especially if your next move was going to be sticking it in the enemy. As a self-defense tool, then, the Quick Strike is actually a bit of a miss.

It has to be said, it's actually less of a hassle most times to just open this normally. It doesn't make you feel nearly as badass, of course, but it's significantly more practical. That relegates the switchblade mode mostly to fidget toy duty, and also baffling and amusing your friends. Bummer.

Its lockup puts me in mind of the CRKT M16, with how it eschews the usual endstop pin and uses the thumb studs crashing into the liners as its travel endstop instead.

The engagement of the liner lock is positive, accurate, and solid. It's not terribly noisy, either, although it does make a distinctive hollow sounding noise probably caused by echoing around inside those injection molded scales. There's a typical ball detent in the liner which is actually perfect. It's not too tough to overcome but neatly keeps the blade from falling open in your pocket.

Of course this thing can't work the way a normal side opener does, which is self-evident because you can open it as if it were a normal folder without having to fight against the spring in the process.

Instead of the usual torsion spring around the pivot, the Quick Strike's automatic component is powered by a leaf spring which is restrained by a little triangular wedge block that's hooked up to the fire button. At rest it's pressed against the inside surface of the backspacer that separates the two handle halves. You can see the wedge peeking out in this picture, and the spring behind it. The fire button slides the wedge out of the way, which allows the leaf spring to pop up and smack the ricasso on the heel of the blade, flinging it open.

Thus the blade's only under spring power for a short part of its travel and inertia does the rest. You can partially close the knife to this point right here after the spring's been triggered, at which point closing it further also takes up the spring and reloads the mechanism.

Of course you can also set off the spring when the knife is already open if you feel like it. No harm is done (I think, anyway) although it makes an ear splitting snapping noise. The mechanism will be reset the same as usual the next time you close the knife even if you do this.

Parts

I'm zero for two with CobraTec knives so far, vis-a-vis being stymied trying to take them apart. It's pretty clear CobraTec don't want you dissembling these, and maybe we should take it as read that you ought not to.

There's a T8 Torx head on the male side of the pivot screw but as you can see here, the other side is smooth and doesn't have anywhere to stick a driver. That'd be fine if there were an anti-rotation flat in the screw and a matching D shaped hole broached into the liners, but there isn't.

You can twiddle the screw all day long and the assembly will just spin in its socket forever, bringing you no closer to getting the stupid thing apart.

This annoys me on pure ideological grounds, of course, so I carefully if not quite accurately cut a slot in the head of the pivot screw on mine, what for to engage with a screwdriver. With this, you can at least get the blade out.

(You can also cheat these types of things by putting two blocks of wood in your vise and clamping the top spine of the blade very firmly down into the handle. The expectation there is that the force of the pivot hole in the blade being smashed into the barrel of the female half screw will bind it in place enough to get the male side out. The wood is to prevent marring the finish on your knife. This often works, but I'll be buggered if I'm ever doing that in the field, so I used my slot cutting method instead.)

The result of this was only marginally ugly, but it worked.

CobraTec claim that their knives carry a lifetime warranty, but I have a hunch that they will not extend this generosity as far as giving you a new set of screws if your break your knife trying to get it apart.

From here we run into another problem, which is that there's no non-destructive way to dismount the scales.

If I'd known this in advance, of course, or if I could have managed to work up the foresight to check for this sort of thing first, I wouldn't have bothered with the main screw.

There are two screws driven through the scales and into the liners which also poke out in order to restrain the leaf spring inside, and the only way to access the heads on these is to rip off the rubber inserts in the scales, which are glued in place. Or I guess note their positions and then extremely accurately lance a hole in the rubber directly over them.

Whatever the inserts are glued down with appears to be some kind of epoxy. This is evidenced by the tiny droplets of it you can see that were squeezed out from under the rubber before it cured. It's hard as nails, and doesn't respond to heat. Any solvent that would break it would surely also eat the scales themselves, and it seems unlikely that you'd be able to pry the inserts out without destroying them utterly.

I considered this for some time, and then concluded that I just couldn't be arsed.

It's self evident that the Quick Strike has nylon pivot washers, which can be seen even without taking it apart. If you can muscle the pivot screw out these could at least be cleaned if necessary, or relubricated. Despite the unglamorous hardware, the blade still doesn't wiggle any even when it's deployed.

Having the pivot screw out also presents the opportunity to find out what happens if you press the button when the blade's not held in with anything. In fact, I can think of no more irresistible pursuit in the universe right now.

What happens is, it makes an extremely amusing "ping!" noise, not unlike a Garand that's just run out of ammo. And the blade goes flying. (Here it is with sound.)

With the blade out we can also get a good look at the leaf spring inside. Here it is in its triggered state.

Looking at it from the end you can see how far it swings out. The spring is curved like a bow, and just the very tip of it engages with the heel of the blade. It's much more stout than you'd think, and having to pull its trigger wedge across the surface against all that spring force probably goes a long way towards explaining why the button is so hard to press. On the bright side, that obviates the need for a safety, the presence of which would be a giveaway of what this knife is. You can rest easy -- or walk, jump, climb, or roll around on the ground as much as you like -- knowing that there's no way you could set this off in your pocket.

The Inevitable Conclusion

It's easy to admonish the Quick Strike as a gimmick. And fair dues where they're owed, that's exactly what it is.

But it's also a rare breed, one wherein its gimmick can be completely ignored if it annoys you, and it still works just fine. You don't see that every day. Usually when some jackass comes down with a case of vision trumping practicality, the end result winds up being something that expects you to suffer for someone else's art.

But the Quick Strike isn't artistic. It's damn well cheeky. And it's not sorry about it, either.

And I love that.