Again? How many times do I have to tell you I ignored you? King of the grand pooh bah of use it or whatever your title was. Funny, I'm USING something no one ever does and I find an obvious problem.

I just bought a Rolex, the $20,000 one, not the $5,000 one and the finish wears off when you touch it... AWESOME, they're taking after Benchmade, making all their more expensive stuff crappier and laughing at the consumers that buy the crap up at times 600% of the price of the base model.

Still no reply from Benchmade, no one there even knows how the things are built, let alone care about fixing something that's wrong.

I love showing people my $600 knife that gets eaten away at by fingerprints, makes me look like a real smart consumer.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: droc217,

Here's my latest e-mail to Benchmade's Customer Neglect team:

I have two Gold Class knives with the bronze colored heat treated hardware that the coatings are coming off after little to no use.

One of the knives, a GC 950-91 Rift, sits in a special knife chest and is for my collection only, so I'd be happy just to have the original bronze heat treat hardware re-finished on it.

The other, a GC 525-81, I use and carry at work and its embarrassing to try and show it off just to let them look at the spots where my fingerprints ate through the color finish... The bronze heat treated hardware and clips cannot be touched without destroying the finish, I find this extremely unsatisfactory for knives of this price.

On the 525-81 I would like to either have the clip and hardware replaced or re-coated with either the black nickle, like on my GC 930-92 Kulgera, or the dlc coated hardware like on my GC 150-01 Marc Lee knife.

If the hardware cannot be replaced with something that has a halfway functional finish, something that can be touched and stay intact, I will be most upset as I feel this is a huge oversight from your R&D to your product testing to quality control and even advertising.

If you are unwilling to repair the knife to my wishes which I believe are completely reasonable, I will find someone to do the DLC coating for me and forever have a bad taste in my mouth about Benchmade Gold Class.