A New Lock, New Steel and Even a New Zero Tolerance Model Highlight Kai’s Early 2023 Product Drop
Kershaw just announced their first OTF auto design, the Livewire 9000, making all of us at NBK bring up Google and say “wait, they didn’t have an OTF already?”
Designed in collaboration with Matt Diskin, the Livewire has a spear point blade in CPM 20CV steel, an aluminum handle, and a deep carry pocket clip that screws into the butt of the knife, making it fully ambidextrous. The Livewire is available now for around $240.
Check out or in-depth review of the Kershaw Livewire to see what we though of it or to just check out more photos of this snappy OTF.
The other shocking announcement was the Zero Tolerance fixed blade, which answered another question we often asked ourselves the previous year: “what the hell is Zero Tolerance doing these days?”
It turns out they were designing the ZT 0006 Fixed Blade, a beast of an outdoor knife inspired by ZT-9 Bayonet. It’s sporting CPM 3V steel in a 6” blade hardened to 59-61 Rc with a bead blast finish and a clear Cerakote finish. It also has a full tang construction with G10 scales and a steel guard. This beautiful monstrosity is coming in heavy a bit over the $300 mark.
The Other Stuff: Magnacut and a New Crossbar Lock
The rest of the Kershaw drop was less surprising. The knives are still cool, but it’s hard to maintain the same level of excitement for a dozen more drop point folders after the spectacle of a new OTF and a 6” survival knife.
Chief among them is the Launch 15 with Magnacut steel, Micarta inlays, and (bizarrely) a Micarta spacer. That’s landing in the sub-$200 range.
The other interesting piece is the introduction of Kershaw’s crossbar lock, the Duralock.
The released four models with this lock: the Heist (a big, tall bladed thing running on bronze washers), the Iridium (a sleeker spear point with smooth aluminum scales and KVT bearings in the action), the Monitor (a flipper with GFN handles and a wrap-around deep carry pocket clip), and the Covalent (another flipper with the same pocket clip but a drop point blade with a high flat grind).
They’re all knives with roughly 3” blades in the $60-70 price range.The rest of their line up consists of simple, but practical liners and frame locks varying between D2 and 8Cr13MoV steel, some are assisted open, all of them have pleasantly neutral shapes. They’re nice, but we don’t feel like going through every single one. You can check those out on your own at Kershaw’s new knives page.
When is the live wire dropplng
A few weeks ago. We updated the article with a link to our review of it, but here’s another one if you want to check the knife out. Otherwise it should be available all over right now.