Improving safety of a liner-lock?

OK, I tried to buy a quality knife but somehow I couldn't do it. I'm rough on them and lose them. I guess. I haven't lost many lately. So what's my excuse? I have some good knives. They sit in drawers. I carry my lightweight cheapies every day.

So I had a couple Smith&Wesson 4' linerlocks. Boy, they seemed to have cheap pivots, like they could snap easily.

So I just bought a $20 Chinese knockoff of a 4' tanto blade with thin textured handle folder. I don't know which knife it's supposed to be like, though. A Benchmade, maybe? It has a round-knob-disk thumb-tab mounted crossways on the back of the blade for a nice ambidextrous opener.

Anyway, it seems to have a strong, solid pivot. Thick blade. Lightish, thinnish knife. I'll give it a try.

The tanto looks kinda cool but darn I naturally just don't like that blade shape for USING. Who needs straight edges? What for?

I did also try out a Spyderco Police (too elegant?) and a

Thanks for the good tip about filing down the release to make it harder to get at. I don't mind a slow close. : )

I appreciate the problem of buying crappy knives. Hard to know which crappy knives are good or bad, though. : )

Offhand, in any kind of DEFENSE use of a knife I'd say there would be a GOOD CHANCE of a twisting action occuring at some point with the knife/blade under some kind of stress, being gripped tightly with full-hand...resulting in release of linerlock and disaster.

That's my concern.

In daily use I don't twist a blade.

...Well, I do occasionally twist the handle when carving/whittling/lifting wood-flakes...but it's never followed by a closing-action on back of blade.

I think one of the best set-ups I have seen to help this problem is the one used on my EDC, Gerber Applegate. There is a small metal toggle on the back side of the knife, right below the top of the handle, which moves a metal plate which is on the same pivot as the blade. When the knife is opened your hand naturally depresses the toggle, which moves the plate under the now raised liner.....making it impossible to close on itself. At first I wasn't sure about the setup, since it does require you to manually engage it, but after a few weeks of carry the knife smoothed out and depressing the toggle didn't require any extra effort, it sits right where your index finger is on the handle. And by the knife smoothing out I mean that when I opened it at work last week the guy next to me asked if it was a switchblade......gotta love when a tiny bump of the thumbstud and a barely noticeable flick of the wrist results in the nice 'click' of a locked in blade.......LoL